Miss AL Simpson’s “La Tour en porcelaine” is a hypnotic AI film in which the Eiffel Tower is cast anew in blue-and-white porcelain. The film runs for five minutes and forty-six seconds, cut beat for beat to a track she wrote in French, the lyrics of which the film follows line by line: a phone box at dawn, a dove released from a man’s shoulder, the tower asleep in the fog, and the Porcelain Androids, a cast come from a future Paris, who wake it, glaze its iron piece by piece, and climb. “We are not the visitors, we are the programme,” the song says: porcelain is their material because it carries their code.
The imagery is drawn from Simpson’s own stills and compositions, brought to motion by AI and assembled through a vocabulary of glitch: datamosh melts the air where the lyric says it should, the tower shatters into porcelain shards and mends, figures stutter and double as if the signal itself were failing. Women in riveted porcelain athletics run with ropes at the tower’s base, a couple leap from its edge beneath parachutes of painted faïence, a woman slides down a rope of pearls into the Seine. At the height of the song the tower bursts into ten thousand doves and is whole again by morning.
The film then turns to the dove. Window after window it watches the lives of the city, a girl at her mirror, another at her keyboard, a king on a roof, a man underwater in his living room, until it finds a woman on a dead telephone line. She looks up. She opens the window. The line connects.
Carried by its haunting French soundtrack, “La Tour en porcelaine” turns the fragility of porcelain inside out. The tower cracks, shatters and is whole again by dawn, not because it is delicate but because what it is made of cannot be lost: the pattern survives the break, and the Androids rebuild from it, 1889 to 2089, as if nothing had happened. Simpson’s method, her own hand and eye directing machine image-making at every stage, produces a work that is at once a music film, a fable of a future Paris and a portrait of a landmark remade in a material that only looks breakable.
