Cabinet of Cognition

AI-generated short film

2025

Cabinet of Cognition is an AI-generated short film tracing the evolution of cognitive labor from the 18th-century Mechanical Turk, which enclosed a mental laborer inside an analog chess-playing machine, to the contemporary digital economy that fragments and distributes intellectual labor across networks, commodifying it through platforms. By using technology designed to replicate and automate cognitive labor, the film explores how technology mediates human labor, blurs the line between what is real and unreal, and reconfigures what it means to think in an era when human thought is both a commodity and a system of hidden labor.

The film’s narrative was co-written with an LLM conditioned on the parables of Jorge Luis Borges to evoke the liminal space between fiction and reality that is characteristic of Borges’ writing. The voice-over, generated via AI reconstruction of Borges’ likeness and zero-shot voice cloning invites viewers to question what is real and what is constructed. The cinematic visuals were produced using open-source latent diffusion image and video models to generate a probabilistic interpretation of reality––one that is the fusion of invisible labor and algorithmic illusion. The background music underscoring the tension between organic and algorithmic rhythms was generated using an audio diffusion model.

Cabinet of Cognition was created for the Umbra Chromatica pavilion at The Wrong Biennale in 2025, with the support of curators Maria Pia Napolitano de Majo and Adriano Tenore. Special thanks to Dejan Grba for providing inspiration. This project is a collaboration with Derek Curry.