Experiment · September 2026 · a 200-second film
13.8 billion years in 200 seconds: the universe, life and the whole human adventure, without a second's rest.
Real flights through nebulae, 110 archive films, nearly 300 artworks, photographs and documents from every continent, real voices and an original score that moves through every style. Before it, twelve drafts in three days, by two artificial intelligence agents.
Adults only: real images of war, of the dead and the wounded, atomic bombings, and an explicit sex scene drawn from public-domain erotic art.
A single breath of images, without a second's rest.
Matter, life, then the whole human adventure, from the painted hand of El Castillo to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, from the Moon to the Wall, up to the possible futures. Real voices: Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Reagan. Re-encoded in 720p for the site.
Adults only: wars, atomic bombs and an explicit sex scene drawn from public-domain erotic art.Twelve drafts in three days before this film, by two artificial intelligence agents I gave the same brief, each on its own: Claude, by Anthropic, and GPT-6 Astra, by OpenAI. After each draft, my feedback; the next one answers it. These are working versions, re-encoded in 720p, for adults only as well.
The first version: images generated locally, brought to life in relief by camera moves, with text and figures on screen, every statement sourced.
Everything animated by code on the graphics card, locked to a 126 BPM track: letter-by-letter kinetic type, shadow-puppet silhouettes, maps, NASA's Earth, a counter dating every moment.
About 190 shots on a 128 BPM grid: each era has its own music, image style and typeface, six breaks halt the race, the same valley crosses the ages, with real archives and time distortions.
A single shot with no cut, inside an endless sketchbook: chalk for the cosmos, then paper, a red line that never lifts the pen, and music that speeds up from 128 to 182 BPM.
Vector animation computed frame by frame, with no photograph or archive: a point of light is the thread, energy, star, cell, gaze, fire, signal.
A complete restart: real film and photographic archives, NASA observations and microscopy, engravings, paintings, manuscripts and early cinema, never fading to black between eras.
On the plan-sequence grid, drawings move while they are drawn, grass, waves, galaxies, wings; from one drawing to the next the ink flows and redraws itself, and Muybridge's real motions enter the sketchbook.
Continuity through animation, metamorphoses and matching materials, between generated scenes and real archives.
Cosmic matter, drawing that draws itself, paper cut-outs, engraving, textile, manga, typographic design, photoreal images and real archives, in alternation.
Drawings that carry on in 3D: a quill draws an object, then the drawing rises and moves, the Venus of Willendorf, Gutenberg's press, the Santa Maria; 38 archive films, and no more text on screen.
A plan-sequence of collage and motion design where each moment is born from the previous one, styles mixed in the same frame, on an original score and a tempo map from 60 to 152 BPM.
Images melt into the composition, their edges redrawn in nine styles; a flight through the Webb telescope's nebulae, the Chicxulub impact after Don Davis, objects escaping their images.