Neural Cinema (2016–) by Frederik De Wilde reconfigures #Bauhaus experimental cinema for the algorithmic age — swapping handcrafted montage for GAN-driven abstraction and singular authorship for distributed machine–human collaboration.
De Wilde’s Neural Cinema (2016–) can be read as a contemporary re-articulation of the Bauhaus experimental film legacy: both bodies of work reposition cinematic form as a laboratory for formal invention, foreground non-narrative perception, and mobilize the dominant technologies of their eras to probe the politics and poetics of image-making. De Wilde’s practice explicitly harnesses deep neural architectures, evolutionary algorithms and data-driven pipelines to generate moving images and sculptural objects that explore abstraction, material translation and epistemic opacity.
Historically, the Bauhaus situated film and photography within a program of “New Vision” (Neues Sehen) and pedagogical experimentation—László Moholy-Nagy’s writings and advocacy exemplify a claim that the screen could be redesigned as an instrument of perceptual training and formal research rather than mere narrative entertainment. Bauhaus teachers and students explored abstract, geometric montage, light experiments, and machine aesthetics as a means to reconfigure everyday perception and design pedagogy.
The correlation between Neural Cinema and Bauhaus experimental films is best proposed across three vectors. First, formalism and non-narrativity: both practices privilege patterned, process-driven image sequences over classical plot, using repetition, modulation and abstract sign-systems to redirect spectatorship toward material and perceptual effects. Second, technological mise-en-scène: Bauhaus practitioners deployed newly available photographic and filmic technologies to stage modern vision; De Wilde similarly stages algorithmic procedures (GANs, CNNs, evolutionary heuristics) so that the medium’s affordances and failures become part of the work’s semantic field.
Third, a workshop ethos and the question of authorship: Bauhaus advocated for collective, interdisciplinary production—blurring designer, craftsman and technologist—while Neural Cinema implicates the algorithm as a co-agent, complicating human authorship and calling attention to distributed creativity and material resultants (for example, De Wilde’s translation of computational outputs into 3D printed or materially indexed works). This continuity is not imitation but rather a structural inheritance: a modernist impulse to make technique, pedagogy and process visible as aesthetic subjects.
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