Mechanica-Surrealism
(From Post-Scarcity Cinema: Essays in AI Film Theory, Volume 2 of the New Machine Cinema)
Where Hooroo Jackson uncovers the emergence of a new AI avant-garde he calls, Mechanica-Surrealism, unveiling his new film: Machine Mind
Surrealism and its dreamlike visions have exerted an almost gravitational pull on cinema for a century—think of Dalí’s melting clocks or Buñuel’s razor-blade moon. In my essay Speed of the Mind, I explored fast cinema as the natural first expression of post-scarcity cinema.
The logic went like this: AI can output imagery at lightning pace, so the natural synergy was to match that speed onscreen. More content in less time means abundance. But I was missing something: the first iteration of machine cinema language was not fast cinema. It was machine surrealism.
Artists were taming, sculpting, molding the excesses and spillover of machine output, finding surreal outcomes through the machine “flaws.”
No, AI cinema’s earliest aesthetic wasn’t about speed so much as embracing the messy, bizarre, sometimes disturbing hallucinations of the machine.
These “mistakes,” far from being correctable bugs, became the raw material of a new filmic logic. This, of course was a matter of necessity. Because it could be nothing else, it must be weird.
Much like how the classic surrealists channeled dream states and Freudian free association, AI filmmakers found themselves tapping into an entirely new layer of “machine unconscious.”
At the time, my immediate contrarian impulse was to reject mechanica-surrealism, by creating works of narrative coherence with full stories and believable performances. True enough, it’s devilishly hard to make the machine sustain coherent characters and plots. But it was a thrill, like taming a swirling chaos into structured drama.
I sought to treat AI cinema as a serious artform out the gate, not as a carnival sideshow of machine subconscious. It wasn’t until the tools improved that I fully grasped the machine surrealism, through its absence. To understand this, we must understand the full spectrum of the history of surrealism in the cinema art.
The History of Surrealism in Film
The earliest avant-garde explorations came with Ballet Mécanique (1924) by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy. This non-narrative piece deployed mechanical rhythms, fragmented imagery, and an industrial edge that foreshadowed later surrealist tendencies in cinema. They had unknowningly laid the groundwork for an avant-garde cinema.
This was followed in the late 1920s, when Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel birthed surreal cinema—Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’Âge d’Or (1930). These films famously discarded rational storytelling in favor of shock cuts and illogical juxtapositions. A razor slicing through an eyeball, a priest dragging stone tablets behind him: such images reveled in the irrational and demanded viewers engage with the raw subconscious. This embrace of dream logic remains a defining quality of what we now term cinematic surrealism.
In parallel, film theorists and directors not explicitly aligned with surrealism directly shaped its future.
Dziga Vertov introduced the concept of Kino-Eye, positing that cameras and editing could surpass human perception by reordering reality. Similarly, Sergei Eisenstein refined montage into a poetic system of collisions and associations—images were no longer mere pictures but rhetorical units that gained new meaning in juxtaposition.
Both Vertov’s “reassembled reality” and Eisenstein’s “montage of attractions” would become, less so useful for narrative film that followed which championed the invisible cut, but vital ingredients for avant-garde experimentation.
Poetic Surrealism and Post-War Abstraction
By the 1940s, Maya Deren broke surrealism into a more lyrical realm with Meshes of the Afternoon. Dreamlike loops, symbolic objects, and shifting identities put her film at the forefront of personal, poetic cinema.
Her writings on filmic trance, ritual, and the subconscious established an enduring foundation for experimental film theory.
Following World War II, a new wave of filmmakers pushed abstraction further. Artists such as Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow, and Peter Kubelka (noted for flicker films) severed cinema from narrative altogether, while Paul Sharits famously used slicing rhythms in works like Razor Blade.
These films pursued pure visual expression—flickers of light, color, and stroboscopic motion that often verged on hypnotic or disorienting. Though not all were explicitly “surreal,” they carried forward the fascination with bypassing logic to tap something more elemental in the viewer’s mind.
Fusion of Narrative and Experimentation
By the latter half of the 20th century, avant-garde cinema splintered in many directions, including fresh hybrids of story and surreal expression, such as the films (or non-films) of Andy Warhol or the experimental works of Kenneth Anger.
Alejandro Jodorowsky emerged as an heir to Buñuel and Dalí, his films brimming with mystical and grotesque imagery and epic narratives. Most prominent, which I voted as the greatest film ever made, Fellini Satyricon (1969), a Picasso painting come to life; Satyricon seethes with swirling color, fractured sets, and carnival excess, forging a delirious new kind of epic.
Godfrey Reggio’s Qatsi Trilogy (beginning with Koyaanisqatsi in 1982) embraced non-narrative structure to cast modern life itself as a surreal spectacle of motion and technology, while Peter Greenaway cultivated an elaborate, often grotesque visual style that fused baroque imagery with cinematic experimentation.
Of course, David Lynch with Eraserhead (1977) and Inland Empire (2006)—became the foremost surrealist in America cinema, infusing the broader culture with his own brand of uncanny dreamscapes and ominous humor.
I believe all the aforementioned artists would have loved the AI toolset. Because most filmmakers who work in avant-garde cinema, historically struggled with funding. Regardless of their breakout works, you will hear the same story of their struggles for years and years to finance their films.
No such limitation exists with AI cinema. Avant-garde, experimental, surreal filmmakers can now have it all.
The machine inherits an unbroken tradition of conjuring inner worlds through irrational edits, shocking juxtapositions, and visual anarchy—yet now pushes these surreal instincts into a domain of infinite, algorithmic possibility.
Early CGI as Arthouse Surrealism
The marriage of avant-garde principles with emerging computer technology dates back to pioneers like John Whitney, whose 1960s experiments with analog computers created mesmerizing abstract visuals—forebears of today’s digital illusions. Though Whitney himself did not identify as a surrealist or even an artist at all, his work inevitably intersected with those realms; for instance, he was commissioned by Alfred Hitchcock to craft the original title effects for Vertigo (1958), a film steeped in psychological disorientation.
By the early 1990s, Steven Churchill’s Mind’s Eye series took CGI into thoroughly uncharted territory. These 50–60-minute productions blended pulsing electronic soundscapes with pure digital animation, largely devoid of narrative. The result was a kind of free-flowing, computer-generated ballet that, despite its experimental leanings, found surprising commercial success on VHS and laserdisc. Before that, underground video-art figures like Nam June Paik—often called the “father of video art”—were crafting punk-inflected visual collages on analog equipment, foreshadowing the DIY ethos that early AI filmmakers would echo decades later.
For me, personally, the existence of the early CGI avant-garde actually deterred my immediate plunge into machine surrealism. To enter in the avant-garde would mean my work landed at Whitney or Churchill, early experiments in a new artform existing to overlook; as opposed to my narrative commercial cinema, Window Seat, DreadClub or A Very Long Carriage Ride.
Further, I rejected visual indulgence as a principle, after my trad film debut Aimy in a Cage (2015) where I immediately ran into petit thinking; people who use aesthetic as an excuse to avoid deeper engagements in the arts. “It looked gorgeous,” was all I would hear about my film, with nothing more. Eventually, I detested visual aesthetic as the laziest possible reading of a film. If a review remarked on cinematography at all, I knew they have nothing to tell us.
So I came into AI cinema with an eye toward narrative—rejecting that digital abstractions and glitch aesthetics would lead to the sort of serious engagement I sought with my art. That is, until the AI technology got better. Where visual exploration was no longer a necessity but a choice.
A Natural Haven for Surrealism
One of the hallmarks of the original surrealists was liberation from the rational.
In fact the impulse of surrealism was a subversion of the bourgeoisie, begging a deeper question—in post-scarcity, with no bourgeoisie, we surpass the political implications of the surreal and embrace it as a fringe of pure non-reality expression. The very first wave of AI filmmakers found the primal truth: AI’s “errors” or “hallucinations” gave rise to inherently surreal, dreamlike imagery. One can see why I resisted this: it was for memetic enjoyment alone–sensory, textural pleasure.
While making my own narrative AI films, I noticed, sometimes the ghosts of celebrities faces would pop up on a character’s face, making me wonder:
What is underneath the hood?
Mechanica-surrealism taps an alien subconscious: the “machine mind” that arises from AI’s training on vast data sets. It’s as though we’ve given a camera to a million references—human imagery, text, culture, and half-baked internet memes—what fragments will pop up from its subconscious?
To find the art in that is to find the art in dreams.
Flaws become features. If the AI spontaneously generated demonic figures or random color bursts, I turned that into part of the art, I didn’t correct it.
In post-scarcity and the new machine surrealism, generating imagery can cost a few pennies and a moment’s time, we’re free to conjure entire surreal universes at will. This leaps beyond the 20th century’s resource constraints. Imagine how Buñuel or Brakhage would have reveled in an engine that spits out visual delirium on command.
We’re essentially witnessing “super surrealism”: film artists can literally travel into a Hieronymus Bosch painting in motion, and then seamlessly pivot into a 3D labyrinth akin to a Fellini Satyricon set piece, all guided by ephemeral text prompts.
In post-scarcity, even the avant-garde can have the scale of $200 million blockbusters. Imagine what lay ahead.
Surrealism 2.0
After two decades of resisting abstract avant-garde art, one night, the urge to let the machine off its leash resurged. Machine Mind was born.
Scenes of dancing demons, labyrinthine factory-floors, peacock gods, and a child sliding under the watchful eyes of giraffes evoking a Toys ‘R’ Us commercial alongside a Terminator-like terror. Some of these images were meticulously prompted, others emerged from the AI’s own process. It was a collaboration between my conscious direction and the machine’s uncanny leaps of free association—a sort of ping-pong match with the machine subconscious.
Machine Mind ended up being my first wholly experimental, abstract film in decades. Like many directors, I began in the visual arts, but for aforementioned reasons abandoned drawing, painting, and abstraction. Existing in pure form came to represents a frightening unconscious world I no longer cared to live in. I wanted to live directly in the journey that could be verbalized, understood.
So once I finished the film, I immediately dismissed it. “That was a fun detour.” I expected to put it up and move on to other things.
But my mind would let me forget what just happened.
The more I watched, the more it haunted me—“What exactly is this?” It was some kind of techno symphony of nothingness, with movements parts, and frightful feeling.
A new voice rose up: this could be bigger than me.
Nostalgia in Real Time
It’s not just about letting AI produce random weirdness. There’s an important distinction between passive surrealism (where you just dump raw AI outputs onto a timeline) and active surrealism (where the director curates, re-sequences, and sculpts those illusions into a more potent statement). That’s precisely what the early surrealists did with chance and dream images. They didn’t simply film random events; they arranged them with care.
The most beautiful thing about Machine Mind in my view is where its seams are visible. They’re our millisecond glimpses of the raw machine mind, before it achieved perfection in post-scarcity. Much like early film grain in silent movies now seems imbued with a dreamy magic, the bizarre flaws of AI cinema are triumphant moments of a new artform meeting human evolution itself.
AI cinema is cinema, AI evolution is evolution.
With Dalí’s and Buñuel’s surrealism as a political act, to today’s surrealism as an act of aesthetic pleasure, one must wonder, how does bourgeoisie subversion function with no bourgeoisie to subvert? In post-scarcity, there is no more money, primitive human biology, no more war, competition, factory farming. No more bias against innate human traits, no more disease, obesity, injustice, envy, greed.
What conflict will remain? The one I can foresee, which everyone who works in AI is painfully aware: the post-human vs. the human. Where better is somehow worse. Where backward is forward. Opponents to post-scarcity immediately posit that abundance is inhuman, as well, that to take from abundance withdraws authorship entirely.
As written in my article, The Automated Film, opponents to AI cinema mistake the farthest reach of post-scarcity automation for AI cinema in the present minute. Further if they hold AI artists to the implications of the furthest automation, we must hold them in return to the furthest regression: no digital tools at all, hand-cranked cameras, and cuts with scissors and tape.
The Tower of Babel for Cinema
As the technology refines, cinema is unifying. We will have things like instant AI dubbing where all films appear in our host language with one click of a button. We will have many different iterations of a single film. But we will also have an entirely new avant-garde. In the entire spectrum of what will come, we can begin by planting as many flags in existing viable forms; by looking into the past, we can approximate the future.
In short, it’s the Tower of Babel of the Arts: a single framework that unites the illusions of every movement, from silent-era impressionism to the digital cathedrals of CGI. AI can orchestrate it all, letting the director or artist pivot on a dime. Form itself will be kitsch, a pair of clothes to wear.
But Babel fell, where AI won’t, for it will help us reach the better of our myths.
Mechanica-surrealism—a cinema that communes with the machine unconscious—led me back to the avant-garde, the place I feared most, and there I found it welcomed me.
Machine Mind:
