An exploration of consciousness across human minds and machine substrates through speculative storytelling and forms part of an EDU-FICTION series. The film investigates the question, "What is it like to be conscious?" through its protagonist, SerenAity, a Noh mask and parcel delivery system, which describes its perceptions and understanding of consciousness, set within Martian and gaming landscapes.

Interweaving recordings of contemporary philosophers, including Chalmers, Dennett, and Krakauer, the film merges philosophical discourse with speculative fiction. Visual sequences oscillate between SerenAity's solitary Martian existence and female scientists who challenge and expand definitions of consciousness beyond biological substrates.

In this interview, Deity speaks with SerenAity, a Nobel Prize-winning AI and rock climbing enthusiast, about the phenomenon of AI hallucinations.

SerenAity explains that large language models are not true knowledge bases but statistical pattern-guessers, generating text by predicting the next word, which can lead to confident but incorrect responses.

The discussion highlights how architectural limitations, contextual gaps, and poor training data quality cause AI to produce plausible yet misleading information.

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Excession is a slide film constructed using generative AI techniques. It embarks on a journey through political concepts—with the waxing and waning of power as its central subject.

Embodied by Greek sculptures, ministers and supernannies—as well as marmots and coyotes—it narrates concepts developed by Greek historian Polybius and political theorist Helen Thompson in her book Disorder, which are increasingly relevant in the current epoch of crumbling democracies.

The film unveils how aristocratic and democratic excesses, mapped through the rise and fall of civilizations increasingly punctuated by environmental catastrophes, shape our geopolitical landscape and societal decay.

"The idea of democratic and aristocratic excess is introduced by Polybius, the Greek historian writing in the second century BCE about the rise of the Roman Republic. He thought that regardless of their external vulnerability, all states were subject to internal decay, and that this decay produced a sequence of change between forms of government: In the beginning there is chaos, then monarchy, kingship, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and finally the mob rule of ochlocracy, before out of the chaos a single demagogue claims power and the cycle starts again."