AI NEW YORK AWARDS

There is a painting by Dalí where a clock has gone soft in the afternoon. It does not stop telling time. It simply tells it the way a memory does. That painting is more or less the temperature we are aiming for on the night of July 31.

We are calling it the AI New York Awards because it is, in the most literal sense, an awards show. It is also a small, slow, slightly strange evening in a working space on West 29th Street called Cre8ive NYC. Only a small number of people will be in the room. We have done this deliberately. The whole event is built on the conviction that the films we are showing this year deserve to be watched somewhere quieter than a festival hall and stranger than a screening room.

The films themselves do not belong to a single genre, and we are not going to pretend they do. Some of them feel like a half-remembered dream you had three Christmases ago. Some of them are small, sharp, almost domestic. One is about a man slowly turning into a window. One is about a city of horses. There is a piece in the program that we still cannot describe to each other and we have stopped trying.

If we were forced to put a thesis on the night, it would be this: a great deal of cinema made with AI right now is being mistaken for the medium itself. People look at the surface and confuse it with the work. We are interested in the films where there is a person underneath. A point of view. A reason for the cut. A handwriting that emerges across the runtime, even when the hand was assisted by a machine. The Dalí reference is not decorative. It is the point. The clock is soft, but it is still a clock, and someone still made it.

This year we are particularly hungry for music videos and commercials. We say this loudly because most festivals say it quietly or not at all, and the short-form work being made right now in those two formats is, in our opinion, where the most invention is actually happening. A ninety-second spec ad with a real idea inside it can sit beside a twenty-minute narrative in this program and earn the same screen and the same room. We have programmed the night accordingly. If you have made a music video that actually moves with the song, or a commercial for a product that should not exist, please send it. It will be looked at carefully and probably twice.

As for how the work was made, we do not have a preferred toolchain and we are not interested in pretending we do. Generative platforms come and go. The ones that matter on July 31 will not be the ones that mattered when we wrote this sentence. So we will simply say that we accept work made on any current model or stack, including the ones that did not exist last quarter, and we are equally happy to receive films made entirely in a generative pipeline and films made by combining generation with traditional cinematography, animation, editing, and sound design. What we will not accept, and want to be honest about, is a sequence of generated images set to a needle drop and submitted as a film. That is not the form. That is a mood board with a soundtrack. Send us a film.

The night will be hosted at Cre8ive NYC because it is a room that has not forgotten what work feels like. Concrete walls. High ceilings. A light that turns slightly purple after nine.
Doors will open at six. Films will play in waves throughout the evening, with the awards landing toward the back end of the program. There will be no panel. There will be no moderator with a clipboard. There will be a few short conversations with filmmakers in between blocks, conducted by us, badly, and on purpose. The point is the room, not the choreography.

You will leave with images that stay with you for a few days. You may also leave with a quiet sense that something is shifting in a medium you thought you understood. We cannot promise this part. But several people left last year saying some version of it, so we are at least going to repeat the rumor.