Prelude’s visual narrative revolves around images that either belong to public domain archives, like a plate full of fruits that ends as a distorted vision of an empty plate, or images that are produced by an artificial intelligence app, like the ghostly appearances of theatrical and devilish red figures. [1] In the background we can hear “Anjo Solidão” (“Loneliness Angel”), by Gabriel Ferrandini. Small spots of light shine through the depths of the Universe, the boundless shared space which embraces in doubt the natural and artificial life. A snake, the cockroach, “La mort” [2] written by hand: all orbiting in the intricate edges of the notions of beginning and end. In opposition, the AI caricatures that follow defy the idea of life beyond the human, increasing the speculative paranormal environment.
The entire film is shot on 16mm Bolex giving back to the images the grainy look that digital once stole. The grain that returns brings them closer to reality, but now the only reality is that of uncertainty. The atmosphere moves towards the vagueness of what is yet to come, l'avenir.
The image of an AI devilish little creature rises in the same moment as we hear words like “It’s easier to forget than to feel” or “Tomorrow I won't remember the things I've learned” (sung by Maria Reis). The film continues to run, overcoming this creature that blurs until it fades into the 16mm abstract landscape, which is after all the perfect undefined space that allows us to start all over again. Prelude occurs as a preliminary place of wondering towards the concealed unknown. (the artist)

[1] These red figures are the result of multiple failed requests to the AI app to give me images of the Spotted Lanternfly - an insect now considered a plague in the US.
[2] A scene from Jean-Luc Godard's film “Pierrot le Fou” (1965)

«(...) “La mort” – death – only anticipates what is yet to come. The gesture of the hand-written “La mort” (the moving images result from Bilbao’s manipulation of a scene from Jean-Luc Godard’s film "Pierrot le Fou" where “la rt” is transformed into “la mort” [03'42''-03'52'']) reveals an energy and mobility otherwise absent in the work’s puppet-like figures, if not for the camera’s own movement over the images themselves. The puppets’ uncanny anthropomorphism signals something that resembles, yet does not reproduce, a human or animal figure. Standing in, however, for their indexes, these symbols evoke a life unlike the one we know. In his canonical work "Camera Lucida", Roland Barthes reminds us how cinema, unlike photography, which fastens down figures “like [preserved] butterflies,” enables beings to continue living (56–57). The cinematographic present is alive, carrying its referent without being tied to it. Bilbao’s diabolic lanternflies, or lanternfly devils, dance in stop motion, refusing to be pinned down like a dried, dead butterfly. In their motionless movement, Bilbao’s lanternfly flutters, confronting the humanity of the anthropomorphic yet inert clown-like puppet. AnaMary Bilbao’s oeuvre continuously questions notions of origin and conclusion. “All my processes revolve around the beginning and the end of images,” explains the artist in conversation. (…) Here, for the first time, Bilbao is not in direct touch with the image’s materiality; rather, she engages with virtual representations of artificially engineered images. As the artist explains, “DALL·E never ends; it always offers more and more variations of the same image. The image, then, is never ready; it never finds its conclusion. It is transformed by new information while simultaneously producing new data. The algorithm has no end in sight.” (...)» (excerpt from the essay "Snapshots of an Artist at Work: AnaMary Bilbao's Prelude" written by Alejandra Rosenberg; find the full essay here)