Written by Merritt Mecham and Ashley Jian Thomson
When you come to this film event, you won’t be seated in a theater. There won’t be trailers, or popcorn ads, or a mass exit once the credits roll.
Instead, attendees will be invited to walk through a gallery-style exhibition, engaging with the work on their terms. In some rooms and on some walls, films will be playing in a loop. In others, performers will interact with technology, creating a thrilling live media experience.
“Experiencing new media art doesn’t have to be a formal seated affair,” said Assistant Professor Kenneth Collins. Collins, who teaches in the Department of Film & Media Arts, founded and directs both the Deepfake Festival and Live/Wired Event, which will happen this year as a joint event.
The event, he said, “[aims] to be more social and accommodating.”
Image by Director Aimee Watson AI Film "Doll Sequence"
“In an environment where art and community intersect, visitors can move freely through the space, engage in conversations with the artists and other attendees, and experience the work at their own pace. It creates an atmosphere that's welcoming and accessible, where curiosity and discovery are encouraged, and where building community around emerging art forms is just as important as showcasing the work itself.”
This year, the Deepfake Festival and Live/Wired are happening on the same night, creating a particularly unique confluence of new media for attendees to explore. Both festivals correspond with new media courses Collins teaches in the Department of Film & Media Arts: AI Filmmaking (Deepfake Festival) and Performance Cinema & Livestreaming (Live/Wired).
Collins’ AI Filmmaking course was the first course at a major university dedicated entirely to AI filmmaking, and Deepfake Festival was founded as a way to showcase student projects.
“I thought it was important to share this work because AI filmmaking is a field so new that it represents not just a set of tools, but an entirely new medium,” said Collins. “AI filmmaking means creating a movie from start to finish using artificial intelligence: script development, previsualization, characters, acting, locations, action… everything. Creating a film entirely with AI serves as an intensive crash course in generative artificial intelligence, making it an ideal way to learn creative AI applications, even for students who don't aspire to be filmmakers.”
Image by Nandhini Ramanathan
“Universities like ours, I think, have a major worldwide role to play in exploring, investigating, and analyzing how AI is going to work, to play out,” said Department of Film & Media Arts chair, Professor Tim Palmer. “Talk of AI skews towards a really rigid binary — either AI is absolutely terrible, or it's an amazing opportunity. I hope our guests and participants can get us off that reductive good/bad default. We need a nuanced informed debate, to think about AI more fluently. It's here to stay, come what may, so we need opportunities to contemplate what an ethical, intentional, communal AI usage might look like.”
AI, as a tool, inspires difficult conversations, and these conversations happen in the AI Filmmaking course. “Students are introduced to the history and complexity of US copyright law, including fair use, parody, and sampling/remix culture,” says Collins. “By understanding how courts have grappled with these issues for decades (long before AI emerged) students gain crucial context for evaluating contemporary debates about generative AI and intellectual property.”
But the conversations don’t stop there, Collins explains. “We also look at the history of appropriation art and the work of artists such as Andy Warhol, Sherrie Levine, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Richard Prince. These artists have all faced similar accusations that AI creators face today… by examining how these controversies played out, through legal battles, critical discourse, and eventual cultural acceptance, students can think more critically about whether AI represents something genuinely unprecedented or whether it's the latest iteration of longstanding tensions between innovation and tradition.”
Image by Director Aimee Watson
And, ultimately, the course focuses on using AI as a tool, rather than a replacement for creativity. “We examine how filmmakers can develop distinctive artistic voices through their choices: what to generate, what to keep, what to discard, how to edit, and how to combine AI-generated elements. Ultimately, I emphasize the ways in which AI filmmaking involves aesthetic decisions that reveal the artist's sensibility and intent.”
The results are student films that are each incredibly unique, and which hopefully will give the festival attendees a new perspective on AI.
Student Aimee Watson (Film & Media Arts ‘26) says that for most people, the AI that is visible to them is not a great representation of the tool. “Social media is full of AI memes and 'slop' videos, and because of this, AI videos generally get a bad rap, and aren't taken seriously as a potential form of art. I hope that this event might change people's minds and showcase how AI can be a powerful tool to help filmmakers create artistic pieces and tell coherent and interesting narratives.”
Student Nandhini Ramanathan (Computer Science ’27 & Film & Media Arts ’27) plans to present an in-progress film that was created in Collins' AI Filmmaking class with AI tools including Midjourney, Kling, Gemini, and Claude.
Image by Nandhini Ramanathan
Ramanthan sees AI as a tool to push creative boundaries and is interested in taking “glitchy, uncanny” experimental generated images and adding life to them through AI animation. “AI does not replace my vision, rather it challenges my assumptions and blind spots in my thinking. That curiosity and unpredictability drive me to edit, remix, and reinterpret, turning algorithmic chaos into something crafted and intentional.”
The gallery setting of the event allows attendees to interact more physically and intentionally with the AI work, challenging them in a way that Ramanthan feels AI challenges himself.
And because the event pushes the audience to interact more intentionally, the fact that it is happening in tandem with Live/Wired is especially serendipitous. Live/Wired was established to showcase student multimedia performance work created in the Performance Cinema and Livestreaming Course. Where the artistic nature of AI as a tool is harder to easily see from the outside, multimedia performance is the opposite – it puts the human element front and center. The program will include a fashion show, live music, multimedia puppetry, and expanded cinema.
For example: Watson, in addition to exhibiting her AI Film, “Sleep Subscription,” is participating in a group performance cinema piece titled “Between the Walls” alongside five other students. Watson says the piece “combines video, live music, and live dialogue to create a somber experimental ambiance.”
from DEEPression, choreographed and directed by Aneta Parpouli., projections by Ryan Ross
While course scheduling will keep the events in separate semesters for the future, this special night of combined Deepfake and Live/Wired will, Collins strongly believes, “offer the Salt Lake City Community opportunity a chance to experience work being created by our students at the absolute forefront of these emerging fields.”
“I hope audiences/participants leave with a more open and curious relationship to AI as a creative tool, not just as something that produces slick, polished content, but as something that can be unpredictable, messy, and genuinely experimental,” said Ramanathan. “I hope this event sparks questions from audiences and leaves [them] thinking critically but also excitedly about these tools by seeing them not as replacements for artists, but as strange collaborators that make us work differently.”
The combined Deepfake and Live/Wired festivals invite the audience to become “strange collaborators” as well. Collins reiterates how “the festivals have become as much about building community around emerging art forms as it is about showcasing the work itself.”
“By making the festival social and flexible,” Collins says, “we're inviting the community to be part of an ongoing conversation about the future of moving image art, rather than simply presenting finished products for passive consumption… This approach reflects a broader philosophy: that innovation in art-making should be matched by innovation in how we share that art with the world.”
U Department of Film & Media Arts presents
Deepfake & LIVE/WIRED Festivals
Friday, December 5th 8–10pm
Film & Media Arts Building (FMAB / Building 36)
375 S 1530 E
Open to the public and free to attend. First 100 participants can receive a free Arts Pass shirt. First come first served, while supplies last.