Neural Cinema (2016–) by Frederik De Wilde reimagines the experimental spirit of Bauhaus cinema for the algorithmic age and AI era.
It replaces handcrafted montage with GAN-driven abstraction, and singular authorship with a distributed collaboration between human and machine.
Neural Cinema extends a lineage in which film becomes a laboratory for formal invention. Like the Bauhaus experiments in moving image, it treats cinema not as narrative entertainment but as a site for testing perception, form, and the politics of vision.
De Wilde’s practice draws on deep neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, and data-driven workflows to generate moving images that explore abstraction, material transformation, and epistemic opacity.
The Bauhaus placed film and photography at the centre of its “New Vision” project, especially through László Moholy-Nagy’s insistence that the screen could function as an instrument of perceptual training and aesthetic research.
Bauhaus artists and students developed abstract montage, light experiments, and machine aesthetics in order to rethink both everyday seeing and the role of design in modern life.
The relation between Neural Cinema and Bauhaus experimental film can be understood along three lines.
First, both privilege formalism and non-narrativity: instead of classical plot, they work through repetition, modulation, and abstract visual systems to shift attention toward perceptual and material effects.
Second, both stage technology as part of the work itself. Where the Bauhaus mobilised the photographic and cinematic tools of its time to model modern vision, De Wilde exposes the procedures of contemporary computation — GANs, CNNs, and evolutionary heuristics — as aesthetic material, including their limits and failures.
Third, both are shaped by a workshop ethos that unsettles authorship. Bauhaus practice blurred the roles of designer, craftsman, and technologist;
Neural Cinema similarly treats the algorithm as a co-agent, foregrounding distributed creativity and the translation of computational output into materially embodied forms, including 3D-printed works, like "Deep Flaw".
