Push Button: A History of Idleness and Ignorance (2004) by Gibbs Chapman

Wednesday, September 9, 2026, 7:00 pm

Push Buttons and AI

Alternative Visions — Program 1

BERKELEY ART MUSEUM AND PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE

2155 Center Street

Berkeley, CA 94720

Presented in association with Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Admission: $18 General / $12 Cinematheque Members
Event tickets here

Alternative Visions
September 9–November 18, 2026

This fall BAMPFA’s long-running annual series of historical and contemporary experimental film includes the work of dozens of artists across ten programs, beginning with a program of cinematic investigations into automation and AI with Gibbs Chapman in person. The series continues into November with a program of films made by members of the Oakland-based Black Hole Collective Film Lab. Brydie O’Connor is in person with her archival portrait of queer experimental film pioneer Barbara Hammer. The late Marjorie Keller’s intimate 16mm films have a rare screening to mark the publication of a new book about her work. Artist Naeem Mohaiemen presents and discusses A Missing Can of Film (2025) in conjunction with BAM’s exhibition Private Frontiers. A selection of works made by COUSIN collective artists, including Sky Hopinka’s 2017 consideration of the Dakota Access Pipeline protest and Lindsay McIntyre’s film about caribou and lichen—made using those materials in the photographic process—screen with Lebanese artist Christophe Katrib’s This Dissonance (2024). Harun Farocki’s influential 2003 essay film War at a Distance and Gazan artist Mahmoud Alhaj’s recent videos examine how perception can be limited in the context of war and/or conflict. (Kate MacKay, Film Curator)

Alternative Visions
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Alternative Visions, program 1: Push Buttons and AI
In Conversation: Gibbs Chapman, Antonio Somaini, Hannes Bajohr and Sonja Thiel 

In conjunction with the exhibition Hidden Layers: AI Infrastructures and Hallucinations at UC Berkeley’s Worth Ryder Gallery, Antonio Somaini, Hannes Bajohr and Sonja Thiel present a program of works about AI and its social and technical infrastructures. Gibbs Chapman’s Push Button is a dryly funny exposé of the effects of automation on twenty-first-century humans, while Inès Sieulle’s The Oasis I Deserve documents affective interactions with the chatbot Replika. Nicolas Gourault reveals the numbing human labor that feeds AI with Their Eyes, while the studio Taller Estampa uses classic film clips to demonstrate how the object recognition software YOLO9000 sees and classifies. AI eats itself and ends in “model collapse” in Egor Kraft’s One & Infinite Chairs (1&∞⑁). (Kate MacKay, Antonio Somaini)

SCREENING: Push Button: A History of Idleness and Ignorance (2004) by Gibbs Chapman (US); DCP, color, 17 minutes. Their Eyes (2025) by Nicolas Gourault (France); DCP, color, English and Spanish with English subtitles, 23 minutes. What do you see, YOLO9000? (2019) by Taller Estampa (Spain); digital, color, English, Spanish and French with English subtitles, 14 minutes. One & Infinite Chairs (1&∞⑁) (2024) by Egor George Kraft (Austria/Japan); digital, color, 7 minutes. The Oasis I Deserve (2024) by Inès Sieulle (France); DCP, color, 22 minutes.
TRT: 83 minutes