Artist Cao Shu explores the boundary where spirit photography and AI-generated imagery intersect. He begins with a 1946 incident at Bikini Atoll, where a radiated pufferfish left its anatomical image on photographic film. This raises questions about the origins and persistence of images, connecting them to the "diffusion models" of today's AI. Using the strange visuality of early AI as a starting point, the film expands to use these images as a medium for reflecting on the visual unconscious, automated imagination, and the concept of 'automatic surrealism.'

 In his latest project, Chinese visual artist Cao Shu delves into the AI “diffusion model.” This technique introduces random noise that spreads across an image—like ink bleeding into paper—and then reverses the process to generate new images. Cao applies this model to a historical exploration of the relationship between photography and death.

Drawing on the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests, anatomical studies of irradiated creatures, and records of survivors, he constructs a virtual environment haunted by spectral, mutant figures. Within this space, a photographer wanders an endless corridor, meeting uncanny residents that appear like afterimages of historical trauma. The work becomes a vivid, unsettling allegory of the ghosts of history that operate—often invisibly—within the machinery of generative AI.

 This work reimagines two 20th-century energy transmission technologies—nuclear power and photography. Early photography’s ability to capture fading images led it to be seen as a medium to communicate with the dead, called “soul capturing.” In 1946, radiation inspector David Bradley placed a nuclear-contaminated pufferfish’s fatty tissue on a photographic plate, unintentionally recording uranium rays and imprinting the fish’s image. Existence depends on light or radiation, which both sustains and destroys life. The Nagasaki bomb and radioactive pufferfish are “proto-photographers.”

• ProducerCAO Shu
• Screenplay CAO Shu
• Cinematography CAO Shu
• Edit V Shu , NIU Wenqi , ZHOU Wenhui
• Sound KUDO Jumpei

Parallax Films

short@parallaxchina.com​​