Does AI Film Need an Avant-Garde?
A New Look at "The New Sensibility"
Literary men, feeling that the status of humanity itself was being challenged by the new science and the new technology...are inevitably on the defensive. They know that the scientific culture, the coming of the machine, cannot be stopped.
— Susan Sontag, 1965
At first glance, this quote might seem drawn from a recent discussion on the impact of generative media on the arts. But it is in fact from Susan Sontag’s essay One Culture and the New Sensibility, written nearly sixty years ago.
In this essay, Sontag rejects the pessimism of these "literary men" and instead calls for a new sensibility that merges science and art—a sensibility that she saw as capturing the essence of modernity. Her opinions, transgressive at the time, celebrated New York's avant-garde art scene, which blurred distinctions between "form and content, the frivolous and the serious...and 'high' and 'low' culture" (Sontag, 1965).
I first encountered this essay in 2022, just after DALL-E 2 was released and a wave of strikingly "real" AI imagery flooded the scene. Like Sontag’s "literary men," I couldn't help but feel that “the status of humanity itself was being challenged.” Yet, inspired by Sontag’s infectious excitement for the creative potential of technology, I began to consider how her call for a new sensibility might apply to our current technological moment. I wondered: Does AI art need an avant-garde?
In 1967, Robert Rauschenberg launched Experiments in Art & Technology with avant-garde artists like Andy Warhol alongside scientists from IBM and MIT. These partnerships were representative of Sontag's "new sensibility".
Coincidentally, around the same time, I heard a talk from Dr. Joanna Zylinska, a media theorist I deeply respect, who suggested we leave the historical concept of the “avant-garde” in the past. When I later asked her what she meant, she suggested that an idea so deeply rooted in the bourgeois culture of the past might not serve us as we move into the future. In many ways, she is right: the avant-gardism we associate with the 20th century, and which Sontag celebrated, is a product of its time, carrying with it the political, cultural, and social baggage of that era. Ironically, the term “avant-garde” has now come to signify institutional respectability, revealing itself as a backward-facing concept, largely depleted of its once-revolutionary force.
And yet, I can’t shake the sense that the avant-garde tradition remains relevant, especially in the context of contemporary filmmaking and generative AI.
Illusions of Realism: An Old Problem Returns
To explore why, we can look to A History of Experimental Film and Video, where A.L. Rees charts the history of avant-garde filmmaking, from the early spectacles of Georges Méliès in the 1900s to the digital video experiments of the 1990s. Rees explains that these filmmakers were not only engaging with broader avant-garde art movements, like surrealism and futurism, but also responding to the rapid commercialization of cinema and the spectacular “illusions of realism” that dominated the 20th century. This friction between mainstream narrative realism and experimental film practice, Rees argues, defined the avant-garde as much as its relationship to larger art trends.
A still from Sora AI’s promotional film, highlighting the realism enabled by generative technology.
The persistent question of realism and representation returns to us in a new form with generative media. Today, AI video technologies like Sora (OpenAI, 2024) promise to bring forth a new kind of hyper-realism—one so advanced it is marketed as "a world simulator." This new realism, however, raises complex concerns, from inherent biases to its potential misuse. In one extreme case, the U.S. government even fears the potential weaponization of such technology, viewing it as a national security threat (House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, 2024). Ironically, these anxieties imply that the boundary between reality and illusion has, until recently, remained relatively clear. As Rees and many avant-garde filmmakers have sought to reveal, the artificial representations of cinema have long blurred this boundary, carrying real social, ethical, and political consequences.
In light of these generative pipelines that promise to consume our attention, the call for an experimental film movement feels as necessary as ever. Such a movement, rooted in the traditions of avant-garde cinema, could aim to subvert or reveal the mechanics of these AI-generated illusions. This responsibility fits within Rees's definition of experimental film as a challenge to mainstream cinema through its critical stance toward “drama, visuality, identification, and non-linear thought.” Considering the impact digital innovation will have on film in the early 2000s, he extrapolates this stance into the future:
It might even be said that the role of media artists in this environment is, at last, to be an avant-garde.
— A. L. Rees (1999)
Film still from Ballet Mécanique (1924) an experimental Dadaist film by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy. In contrast to narrative studio films at the time, the work presents a radically different expression of being human in an industrial world.
A Newer Sensibility Beyond the Avant-Garde
This brings us back to our central question: does AI film need an avant-garde? While the revolutionary call for an avant-garde can be intoxicating, the story is not so simple. For starters, the avant-garde spirit might be fundamentally incompatible with the commercial interests that drive much of AI development, as profit motives often prioritize accessibility and market appeal over true experimentation. Furthermore, the dichotomy between the mainstream and avant-garde is itself overly simplistic, ignoring the feedback loop between mass culture and those on the fringes. Such a binary fails to capture the complexity of networked media environments extending from big technology corporations.
The avant-garde once implied a radical rupture—a rebellion against ossified traditions in a landscape that, for all its cultural dominance, was comparatively centralized. But in today’s sprawling media ecosystem, where Hollywood's formulaic genre films coexist with TikTok’s algorithmic micro-trends and YouTube's influencer vlogs, what "guard" is there to advance beyond anyway? The very idea of an avant-garde feels increasingly ill-suited to a world where cultural production is fragmented, fluid, and shaped by the pervasive logic of data-driven attention platforms.
Maybe these are some of the pitfalls Zylinska was hinting at when suggesting we move past the heroic myths of the avant-garde. In fact, Sontag herself, writing nearly thirty years after her initial essay, recognized the misplaced optimism of her youth. In hindsight, she admitted that many of the cultural changes she valued at the time would "reinforce frivolous, merely consumerist transgressions.” Perhaps our question is misdirected, giving too much weight to a term burdened by history and nostalgia.
But this is not to say the past has nothing to teach us. Rather, what we might gain from thinkers like Sontag, Rees, and Zylinska is not a reverence for the avant-garde as historical artifact, but an openness to the possibility of new sensibilities: one that recognizes which existing modes no longer fit with evolving ideas of culture and what it means to be human. In contrast to traditional avant-gardism, such an orientation does not prioritize breaking from the past but rather responds to the intricate demands of the present, emphasizing adaptation over opposition. The search for a new sensibility encourages bold experimentation, creative appropriation, unusual partnerships, and even potential missteps. It seeks new forms, sensations, and intuitions necessary to construct ourselves pleasurably in an increasingly unstable media landscape.
Film still from The Zizi Show, a “deepfake drag cabaret”. The work explores limitations and possibilities for queer identity in AI models.
The challenge, then, lies in cultivating this sensibility within the context of AI cinema: a domain of infinite mutability, targetted personalization, and often insidious persuasive power. The structures of its emergence—its means of production, distribution, and consumption—are unlikely to mirror the collective avant-garde movements of the 20th century. But this departure may itself be an opportunity. I am encouraged by the artists and filmmakers already engaging critically with AI, whether through playful disruptions of generative realism or works that expose the constructed, uncanny seams of synthetic images. Despite my anxieties about AI media—or maybe even because of it—I sense this moment holds a rare and urgent potential.
If, like Sontag, I cynically look back on this optimism in thirty years, so be it! I’ll be in the good company of those experimental film enthusiasts who searched for a new sensibility.
References
House Committee On Oversight and Accountability (2024) Mace: Deepfake Technology Can Be Weaponized to Cause Harm. Available at: https://oversight.house.gov/release/mace-deepfakes-pose-real-dangers/ (Accessed: 30 October 2024).
OpenAI (2024) Sora (Blogpost). Available at: https://openai.com/index/sora/ (Accessed: 7 September 2024).
OpenAI (2024) ‘Video generation models as world simulators | OpenAI’. Available at: [https://openai.com/index/video-generation-models-as-world-simulators/](https://openai.com/index/video-generation-models-as-world-simulators/) (Accessed: 14 November 2024).
Rees, A.L. (2011) A History of Experimental Film and Video: From the Canonical Avant-garde to Contemporary British Practice. Palgrave Macmillan.
Sontag, S. (1965) ‘One Culture and the New Sensibility’, in Against Interpretation and Other Essays. Reprint, 2001, New York: Picador, pp. 293-304.
Sontag, S. (1996) ‘Thirty Years Later...’, in Against Interpretation and Other Essays. Reprint, 2001, New York: Picador, pp. 293-304.
Zylinska, J. (2024) Nonhuman Photography. MIT Press.