Adam Cole | Infinite Jest

The promise of personalized AI is the promise of pleasure: to see, hear, feel, and become anything you desire. But while generative video technologies enable hyper-individualized media, they also reproduce normative narratives deeply embedded within their computational frameworks. This project asks: What are the consequences of consuming these images? What desires are aroused, shaped, and ultimately controlled?

“Infinite Jest,” an immersive multi-channel video installation, critically examines how these encoded cinematic myths shape and commodify our desires. Harnessing advanced real-time AI, the project provocatively inserts audiences into iconic cinematic tropes of visual pleasure. Merging queer cinema theory, performative installation art, and cutting-edge AI, the work interrogates the seductive—yet troubling—power of algorithmic personalization.

Inside the multi-screen installation, viewers witness their own likenesses seamlessly integrated into familiar yet uncanny cinematic scenes. This real-time interaction provokes an intimate confrontation with the latent biases and subtle coercions of algorithmic narrative. Over time, these scenes intensify, blurring the line between conventional visual pleasure and computationally shaped desire.

Through appropriation and playful subversion, “Infinite Jest” disrupts the spectacle of AI-driven personalization. By juxtaposing self-recognition with exaggerated cinematic artifice, the installation invites viewers to question how identity, intimacy, and longing are transformed into commodities promised by, yet governed through, invisible computational structures.

We may train the machine, but in turn, the machine trains us.