With Direct Transmissions, the duo Scinema explores the potential of computer vision as a filmmaking practice. Through the analysis of optical infrastructures, hands-on experimentation with self-built cameras, and autonomous editing systems, they uncover and amplify alternative modes of seeing embedded in automated perception.

Computation actively shapes the very spaces that it is observing by perpetually framing, panning, tracking, and zooming. Machine vision reroutes supply chains in real-time. Computational flood models redraw the edges of coastal regions. Remote sensing imagery reinforces geopolitical claims. Unlike cinema, these images are not made to be experienced, they are made to manage.

Machine-generated moving images feed AI systems that structure civic life and its underlying infrastructures. However, while cognitive automation promises problem-solving across scales, its operations are governed by calculability. As Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi writes, programmes possess intelligence but not thought. Computation cannot comprehend affective or embodied experiences.

In the face of intersecting planetary crises, computational rationalism is not only insufficient – it reproduces asymmetries of power, extractivism, and systemic instability. By moving beyond the logics of these systems, Scinema’s Direct Transmissions speculate on forms of cognitive automation rooted in irrational, ephemeral, and poetic moving images to explore alternative spatial imaginaries.

Developed during a 2025 Summer Sessions residency at V2_.