What’s next?

While the soundscape soothingly lulls the brain, What's Next? begins in a paradisical visual state. Soft images full of sweetness. Figures luxuriate in kitsch landscapes with psychedelic dancing vegetables – until the AI-generated images begin to show their teeth. They drift into dark dystopias, filled with male demons. In her montage of clichés, director Cao Yiwen allows whatever’s being addressed – whether gender, the environment or capitalism – to run hot in critical terms. The film confronts the audience with congealed visual statistics of its own visual expectations and takes them to their logical consequence. Dark depths don’t just yawn forth in the glitches in how the AI-images are displayed. The hideous face of evil hallucinated by machines and the pseudo realism of human suffering make the limits of our imagination visible while the human-machine loop circulates ever quicker. An opulent ride through hell that carries us from the world we inhabit together towards images of the world we collectively have produced. There’s no overlooking the need to escape this flow in order to grapple with the question the title has raised: what’s next?