Hidden Layer

With AI systems playing an ever-growing role in our daily decision making, creative studio FIELD highlights a timely and important topic. Harnessing the insight that human and artificial intelligence will soon blend into an ‘augmented self’, FIELD weaves together fashion, live action, and CG for its experimental short film, ‘Hidden Layer’. Hidden Layer imagines how the future of AI will affect our sense of identity and humanness – and what happens when these systems inevitably malfunction. In an artificial neural network, the Hidden Layer is where the main computation is performed, but it has no direct connection with the outside world. The film explores how, to a certain extent, deep learning algorithms are simultaneously autonomous, unpredictable, and inscrutable in their decision-making.