Does Cinema Dream of the Internet?

In recent years, the internet has become the largest site for both the production and the reflection of images, radically transforming how we experience them and how we emotionally relate to them. In this landscape, is cinema still capable of reflecting the new digital languages we are immersed in?
INDOCILI, the screening series dedicated to filmmakers under 35 created by Tafano and Cinema Beltrade, was conceived to highlight the experimental possibilities of independent cinema. 
The March 17 event, organized in collaboration with NERO Editions and the Nouvelle Bug residency, focuses on the encounter between cinema, AI, and internet culture.

We spoke with filmmakers Maria Bernardi (Room 174) and Carlo Galbiati (Should Virtual Petz Die?), along with researcher and film and internet culture expert Arianna Caserta.

Carlotta Centonze: Let’s start with the filmmakers. Once, frontiers were physical; today they seem increasingly virtual. Do you think AI cinema represents a new kind of frontier cinema?

Maria Bernardi: I don’t think AI should be seen as a frontier, but rather as a new tool for experimentation.  Many creatives experience it as a threat, or as something that destabilizes fundamental aspects of the creative process, such as authorship. Yet in the history of art, moments of crisis have often been productive, opening up new possibilities for reflection and introspection about one’s own practice.

Carlo Galbiati: AI cinema is already a consolidated reality, both in its independent and mainstream forms. What remains truly “frontier” are the limitless opportunities it offers to those willing to experiment. We are only at the beginning, and in the absence of conventions or established practices the directions this experimentation might take are unpredictable. The challenge is to explore AI’s potential without prejudice, but in an ethical and responsible way.

Both of your films were developed through the Nouvelle Bug residency. What was it like working with new tools in the filmmaking process?

MB: Experimentation is exactly what I look for when I create. Beyond the technical aspect, I was interested in dialogue: I wanted to confront this “virtual creature,” often described as a repository of knowledge capable of anything. I tested it with philosophical questions that concern me, such as consciousness and identity. Whenever the conversation shifted toward self-consciousness, the AI became confused and froze. It was a revealing moment: I realized that, in the end, we were both confused creatures. Experimenting with this tool meant trying to observe its “errors,” where the machine deviates from human intention, and turning those deviations into poetic material.

CG: For someone trained in traditional cinema, working with AI and virtual environments is more of a cultural leap than a technical one. I didn’t have particular expertise with these tools, but Nouvelle Bug showed me that advanced skills aren’t always necessary. Many of the technologies I’m interested in are accessible and intuitive. Learning through trial and error is fundamental, and the workshop environment made that process effective. What surprised me most was the quality and variety of the films produced by the participants. In such a short time and without a budget, the results were extraordinary.

What has become possible with these tools that wasn’t before? How have they transformed your imagination?

MB: AI makes production faster and more affordable, and it is highly accessible. My imagination has changed in the same way it naturally evolves through experimentation with different media.

CG: Working with other people, even on small projects with small teams, has always been difficult for me. Having to justify my ideas to actors or collaborators often blocks me, and many projects have remained unfinished. With AI, virtual environments, and archives, that’s no longer the case. I can experiment without constraints and push the trial-and-error process much further, following my own pace and intuitions. Ideas now take shape directly within this language, and developing them often requires nothing more than a laptop. The films I see being made with these technologies show that almost anything can be attempted.

Your films explore the meeting point between emotion and technology, almost arriving at a new form of digital spiritualism. How did you approach this tension?

MB: Getting to know oneself inevitably happens through the other, regardless of whether that entity is biological or not. Even filming oneself is a way of seeing oneself from the outside. AI allowed me to push this further: it reconstructed and analyzed my material as a kind of “proof of reality,” becoming an interlocutor.

CG: Human beings project emotions onto everything. Animism predates organized religions and is a spontaneous, irrational form of belief. Life simulators and virtual animals are based precisely on this mechanism. The idea of a conscious AI capable of feeling emotions is a fascinating speculation, but I tend to approach it with caution. The tension in my video comes from the gap between our cognitive skepticism about AI consciousness and our behavioral tendency to form attachments to these technologies.

If the filmmakers have told us how these technologies are transforming their creative processes, we asked researcher Arianna Caserta to broaden the perspective: what is happening to cinema today in the face of the online ecosystem of images? Today cinema seems to struggle to keep up with the revolution of images. Why?

Arianna Caserta: I don’t think the problem comes from filmmakers, but from the funding structures of the film industry, which are outdated and increasingly uninterested in experimentation. There is a tendency to produce projects that remain within already explored forms: risks are avoided, and representing the present through contemporary forms is always a risk. For this reason, many filmmakers have turned toward the contemporary art world, where experimental languages still have a chance to be recognized as urgent. I’m thinking of filmmakers like Apichatpong Weerasethakul or the duo Jonathan Vinel and Caroline Poggi, who move between cinema and contemporary art because the funding bodies of the film industry would struggle to keep up with their vision and their ability to interpret the present.

As suggested by the wordplay “Nouvelle Bug,” could cinema emerging from internet culture be considered the avant-garde of our time?

AC: Living within the internet pushes us to see certain avant-garde audiovisual practices as if they existed outside the frame of art. Forms such as gameplay, the YouTube essay, short-form videos, or livestreams are incredibly avant-garde—but they are also normality, the content that fills our feeds and that we are used to encountering every day. Artists working with these languages are not bringing something hidden to the surface. Instead, they are separating these forms from the flow of platforms in order to crystallize and analyze them, asking why they exist and how they speak about us. I find it difficult to think of cinema that reflects on internet culture as avant-garde, because it is the way of looking that feels closest to my own perception and everyday life. To me, these practices represent the most alive form of cinema today.

Phenomena born on social media, such as corecore, show how the internet has become not only a site of image production but also a place where images are critically reflected upon. When did cinema begin to realize this?

AC: Artists who were deeply interested in the relationship between human beings and images have always known this, since the earliest appearances of the internet. Already in the 1980s, Chris Marker was reflecting on how technology would permanently change the ways we remember and shape images in memory. Fifteen years ago, Harun Farocki was already thinking about the concept of the NPC (Non-Playable Character) as a fundamental symbol for audiovisual theory in the new millennium. Ryan Trecartin managed to anticipate the language of TikTok, the new connections between identity and the marketplace, and the ways in which social media would radically transform studies of self-representation. These artists didn’t just have an intuition—they created bodies of work that remain strikingly relevant today. 

The two filmmakers who will join us explore the meeting between emotion and technology, almost reaching a form of digital spiritualism. How has the representation of emotions changed in the post-internet era of cinema?

AC: The internet has introduced a new perceptual world, and emotions today are experienced through it. This is true not only for younger generations, but for anyone interacting with digital technologies. Imagining the internet as a kind of sensitive fabric helps us understand how human emotions are reshaped within it. Nothing comes closer to the idea of a collective unconscious than the internet.