A western taking place in the uncanny valley.

I was taking screenshots from John Ford’s THE SEARCHERS (1956) – images as empty and obscure as possible, a wild west imaginary depopulated of any characters and narration. Using that as basis for yet another imagination, an artificial imaginary, I tried to create an atmosphere like in those long, cruelly explicit yet curiously abstract descriptions from Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 novel „Blood Meridian“ or like in the visions of the end of times in the paintings of Chesley Bonestell. The result is a walk through the uncanny valley of AI, populated with movie memories, literary imaginations, apocalyptic visions, and algorithmic probabilities.

Some of the screenshots from THE SEARCHERS I was working with: