Motionographer® Khyati Trehan | Phantom Frameworks

‘Phantom Frameworks’ is showing at Serendipity Arts Festival from 15th to 22nd December 2024 at Kala Academy, Goa, as a part of the exhibit ‘Art x Machine’ curated by Mathieu Wothke.

Best practices for GenAI prompting ask to be clear and descriptive: detailing the lighting, the subject, the camera angles, the whole nine yards. By flipping the script and deliberately being unhelpful with single-word prompts like ‘pillar,’ ‘window’, ‘unfold’, ‘tear’, ‘glitch’, ‘horizontal’, ‘room,’ or ‘escalator’, Phantom Frameworks explores the creative potential and interpretive powers of a generative AI video model, inviting it to breathe figurative motion patterns into still, modular vector art compositions.

The question at the heart of the experiment is simple: What does the model see in my work’s abstraction that I don’t? Surprise me. The result is an 8 part series of motion pieces, 20s longs each (any favourites?) that exist in a liminal space—partly orchestrated by me using traditional design tools through the ‘starter’ images and partly shaped by the AI’s loosely prompted imagination in the way these images animate.