Politics and conflict crashed into this place. Through the screen we are aerial, slow pan over injured buildings that avow ‘something happened here’. But, AI-generated, the images in Ivan Šuletić’s FALSA IMAGINE (2023) are a nowhere that never was.

Ours is a society of consumption, where public obsession is stoked equally by urban warfare or celebrity gossip. Šuletić’s FALSA IMAGINE is a film of conflict, flirting with an impulse to trace power dynamics in event analysis. Over the AI-generated ruins, the subtitles are instantly recognisable from a viral celebrity trial, connecting the images to ‘here’ (May 2023, a courtroom in Utah, where trivialities of a ski accident involving Gwyneth Paltrow were aggrandised into a feverish online investigation). ‘Then’ arrives with a cello score from Falsa Imagine, an aria in Handel’s Ottone (an opera set in a 10th-century Byzantine court, first staged in 1771). Together, the whole plays across time frames and speeds. Everything changes, but human nature remains constant in its desire for intrigue.

Recognition works on two levels: ‘ruins’ and ‘conflict’ are loaded as prompts into the AI machine, producing an instant of image generation; a proliferation of non-places sometime during or after a war. In contrast, the legalese of the celebrity litigation is specific and instantly recognisable – the shared artefact of forensic pop culture analysis. A society of opinionators – give us performance, placeholder or approximation – we are devoted spectators and will change ourselves through participation.

Excerpt from [FALSA IMAGINE: scale, stage, loop by Rachel Bennett]