"A Fly In The Server" is a short speculative documentary about the ways A.I is represented, thought about, and used as both a tool and a threat in the arts, computing, and sciences. In our accelerating epoch of informational revolution, the documentary aims to hold up a small piece of a fractured mirror to our hopes and fears of machines that might have told us something of who we were, and might yet define everything that we will be.

This is a speculative, interdisciplinary project exploring how Artificial Intelligence is variably represented—as both tool and threat—across contemporary politics, economics, culture, and ecology. These works interrogate the pervasive (mis)understandings of AI, shaped by a mix of fear, fascination, desire, and denial. Through themes like creation, control, dualism, and obsolescence, the project examines AI as a reflection of human aspirations and anxieties, particularly our long-standing entanglement with technology as both liberator and destabiliser.

The rapid acceleration of AI has reignited old questions: Can it improve humanity ethically and safely? Or will it disrupt or even destroy our future? As digital late capitalism reshapes the world through cybernetic assemblages, these works urge a critical reckoning with what it means to live in a potentially fleshless future—one where embodiment, identity, and agency are fundamentally redefined.

By engaging artists, scientists, ethicists, technologists, and philosophers, the project seeks to map a holistic, cross-sectoral picture of AI’s role in our world. It surfaces the contradictions, utopias, and dystopias embedded in how AI is imagined and implemented, calling attention to its capacity to both reflect and distort our sense of humanity. Ultimately, this work invites viewers and participants to confront the messy, overlapping truths behind our technological moment—and to ask not only what AI is becoming, but what we are becoming with it.

The Focus

This project offers a holistic, interdisciplinary analysis of how AI has been represented over the past decade, focusing on the emotional and cultural intensities it provokes—particularly anger and despair. Drawing on fields such as media studies, software engineering, eco-criticism, philosophy, and medical humanities, it explores how AI both reflects and reshapes humanity’s self-understanding as a technological, or "cyberspecial," species. The analysis centres on three conceptual lenses—Old Flesh (metabolic), New Flesh (economic), and No Flesh (algorithmic)—to map the shifting relationships between human bodies, economies, and machine intelligence. Framed within the Four Commons of digital late capitalism—Politics, Economics, Culture, and Ecology—the project investigates how AI intensifies longstanding existential debates. It engages thinkers from Descartes to Haraway, Shelley to the Black Quantum Futurists, reinterpreting their insights in light of recent AI developments. Ultimately, the project seeks to reframe how we view our techno-cultural pasts and imagine our algorithmic futures.