latent.video

“Latent” registers something already there, but long-awaited for its maturation, liberation, or exoneration. A becoming that happens from within and without. In AI systems, this condition is literal. Images form first in a latent space, a hidden substrate of probabilities where they exist as compressed potentials before they appear on screen.

Grounded in the experimental, historical, and critical approaches of Media Arts and Design and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago, this event invites creators to work hands-on with contemporary AI video tools while focusing on what is often invisible: the structures, assumptions, and patterns that shape moving images before they appear on screen.