William Quail’s Pyramid (2023)

While our systems are full of faults, Artificial Intelligence has become exponentially better at imitating our language—becoming more articulate and ‘natural’. AI's capacity to effortlessly create original content has been met with awe, as an emissary for an intelligence beyond ours. In the multi-channel video William Quail's Pyramid, Constant Dullaart and Piotr Winiewicz reverse this process and regress language, looking for the glitch and error in language processing. In William Quail’s Pyramid you witness an uncanny séance, birthing the film About a Hero entirely created by an AI that was trained to emulate the mind of documentary filmmaker Werner Herzog. Herzog famously declared that no computer could rival his filmmaking. What is it telling us?