Mark Amerika's latest artwork, DREAM FACTORY, is a long-form AI cinema artwork that transforms the screen into a stage for artificial intelligence's first starring roles. The project was created in collaboration with the Posthuman Cinema Collective, comprised of Amerika, Will Luers and Chad Mossholder.

Following international exhibitions of their breakout collaboration Posthuman Cinema at venues including the International Biennale of Digital Art in Montreal, the Noise Art Fair with Kate Vass Galerie in Istanbul, Noorderlicht in Groningen, the Bergen International Film Festival, and Gallery 120710 in Berkeley, the collective expands its improvisational practice by reimagining Andy Warhol’s Factory as a digital séance-fiction, replacing the 16mm camera with the algorithmic gaze of generative systems.

The process unfolds as a live, improvisational performance—a call-and-response in which language is used to coax forth figures from the latent space, producing a new kind of “Screen Test” for subjects that never existed. Each tableau deliberately blurs the line between artifice and reality, updating Warhol’s exploration of persona for a networked, dislocated age.

DREAM FACTORY unfolds across five movements, beginning with the literal making of AI models as they imagine themselves into embodied existence and culminating in these entities becoming jaded Superstars speaking directly to viewers. Throughout, BAFTA-nominated sound designer Chad Mossholder's evolving ambient soundtrack runs parallel to the images, voiceover, and artificial voices, creating a layered sonic landscape.

The work traces a complete evolution: from foundational "apparitions" constructing their own sense of form, through hallucinatory acts of social embodiment and initial attempts at speech that emerge as Dada-esque sound poetry, finally reaching articulate self-reflection.

DREAM FACTORY distinguishes itself by avoiding tired tropes about machine consciousness or human replacement anxiety. Instead, the trio creates a unique narrative context that explores how artists and machines might improvise together—composing atmospheres, voices, and bodies that neither could make alone. The result is speculative and sensorial, at once fiction, documentary, expanded cinema, and prescient work of contemporary art.

The artwork is on view at the EXTRA/PHENOMENALITIES exhibition at the Stanford Art Gallery between January 22 and March 13, 2026. The show is curated by Shane Denson, Brett Amory and Karin Denson.

More information, including trailers and Press Kit, can be found at the DREAM FACTORY website.