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Cabin Fever AI Love Story

Cabin Fever AI Love Story, 2022, 4K Video,12:07min.
Filmed, edited and animated by Erica Molesworth

Written in collaboration with the GPT-2 artificial intelligence model, fine-tuned on health "miracle cure" spam emails by Erica Molesworth.

'Cabin Fever' is a dystopian fever dream about an Artificial Intelligence who accesses the artist's hard drive and uses their files to make a video... Unfortunately, the AI has been trained on the unhealthy, chaotic spaces of the internet, so things become a little unhinged. The film embodies how physical spaces are increasingly experienced digitally, and physical desires are algorithmically generated. Reality is perceived as hybridised and incoherent, while ecological destruction continues apace.

This experimental video crosses back and forth between what is considered the digital world (such as CGI) and what is considered the 'real' world -- the dis/embodied artist’s voice, their daily interactions with capitalism and health, and human collective action and protest. The film combines computer-generated illusion with live-action footage depicting moments that show the harm of business-as-usual, such as abandoned military and nuclear installations on a remote island, and drone capture of both snow and fire-ravaged environments. It also includes some hopeful moments, including footage of an environmental rehabilitation site, and an experimental group performance re-staging an artists’ strike.

The film repurposes found footage and sound, screen-recordings of online research, and tangential leaps in the screenwriting to recreate the vertiginous telescoping of space and time in online spaces. This work follows the logic of the internet rabbithole - idiosyncratic pathways that find no borders between digital vision and physical experience, dystopia and utopia, and the human and non-human.

Further credits:
Additional text from the United States’ Senate Committee on Foreign Relations’ hearing, Attacks on Diplomats in Cuba (‘havana syndrome’), 2018

Made with the assistance of:
Lighthouse Works, Fishers Island, NY
Wassaic Project, NY, and
Blundell’s Swamp Wildlife Cooperative, Australia

  • Erica Molesworth
    Director
  • Runtime:
    12 minutes 7 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    September 23, 2022
  • Shooting Format:
    4k Video
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Erica Molesworth

Erica Molesworth is an artist working across video and installation, and more recently in 3D modeling and animation. She is interested in the ways humans use technology, architecture and other infrastructures to mediate their relationship with the non-human world. She was born in Sydney and completed a BVA (Hons I) in Media Arts at Sydney College of the Arts, and a MFA in 2015 at the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco, USA, where she received a graduate merit scholarship, and a teaching fellowship. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, Dallas Medianale in Texas, University of Massachusetts and the University of Nevada; the Lishui Festival in China; the John Fries Memorial Prize and Firstdraft in Sydney, and Channels Video Festival in Melbourne. She was awarded fellowships and residencies at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Vermont Studio Center, Lighthouse Works NY, Massachusetts MoCA Studios, Wassaic Project NY, New York Art Residency & Studios, and Bay Area Video Coalition among others. She also received the Australia Council's ArtStart grant and an Alternative Exposure/Andy Warhol grant for CTRL+SHFT Collective. She is also a lecturer in video and photography, and was faculty at Parsons/New School in New York City, CCA and the San Francisco Art Institute, and has been a visiting artist at Stanford University.

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