Coding reality: implications of AI for documentary media

ABSTRACT This article analyses the frameworks of co-creation between artists and AI in the context of documentary studies. As a result of emerging AI-focused experiments in documentary and transdisciplinary arts practice, we examine the nature and scope of AI as a collaborator with a focus of documentary projects exhibited and showcased at international documentary festivals. An introduction to emergent creative possibilities is made in light of non-humanism and new materialism while presenting the implications for emerging documentary forms and formats. The AI-as-medium approach allows reflection on documentary genres through the limitations and possibilities of algorithms. With the experiential turn in arts, coding has become a means of producing novel experiences. This has led to the emergence of documentary projects at the intersection of human and machine collaboration. The article addresses how operating within AI has wider consequences for collective intelligence by going beyond the visible and locating itself in the ontological. Scholarship concerns are outlined when exploring algorithms in terms of agency and autonomy and consideration of how they have come to affect our socio-cultural fabric. Coding Reality: Implications of AI for Documentary Media further discusses documentaries which were created in close collaboration with AI.