Stories of Celluloid is an essay film in four chapters that explores the evolving relationship between media history, technology, and the natural world in the age of AI image generation. Two chapters will be shown during the media/environment film program.

Fox Movietone News once shot an unreleased newsreel depicting Taiwan’s camphor industry. The journey begins as the camera lands at Keelung Harbor, follows rail carts deep into mountain valleys, and ends with a phantom ride shot along a suspended bridge. Yet the voyage does not conclude there. The gaze ultimately originates from a fortress perched atop the hills, where the rifle slits reveal more than camphor forests—they frame a layered, time-folded colonial frontier.

Camphor, once essential to the base of celluloid film, now lingers only in a few surviving camphor distillation sheds and within fragments of colonial era fiction. Entering these fractured memory spaces, the histories of forest clearing and resource extraction transform into fertile ground for today’s AI training datasets. Figures of camphor trees and camphor bureau workers splinter and recombine under the heat of distillation, generating new historical phantoms—an unclaimed, ever-rewritten territory of data.

Dead Zones is a documentary about oxygen-deprived zones in the ocean and Dutch water quality. Human-made dead zones are areas in coastal waters where microalgae blooms are fed by fertilizers from agriculture and other waste streams. When these blooms decompose, all oxygen is used by bacteria, and nothing is left for other life forms. In the Baltic Sea, an area of 60.000 square meters is a dead zone. In the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi feeds a seasonal dead zone of about 23.000 square kilometers, as big as half of the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, dead zones exist, among others, in Grevelingenmeer.

In the last 50 years, because of human impact and use of fertilizers for agriculture, the nutrient concentration has increased enormously, resulting in dead zones in coastal areas around the world. It has been calculated that around 500 coastal dead zones exist globally – while only about 50 were recognized in the 1950s.

Agrilogistics looks at recent technological transformations in contemporary industrial agriculture. Tulip bulbs, chrysanthemum stems and vine tomatoes are processed through cameras, feeding datasets that regulate their own growth. During the day, the greenhouse is a cinematic device, an automated film set optimized for the mass production of fruits and flowers. At night, the factory stops: without an inside or an outside, the greenhouse becomes an oneiric chamber where plants, animals and machines form new entanglements.

Bliss Point plunges us into the ever-accelerating rhythm of food supply and the emergence of new techno-capitalist processes. The film guides us from dark kitchens and food advertising sets to AI-managed warehouses. A delivery rider cycles across the city to a makeshift trailer where workers flip burgers. Algorithm powered robots buzz through a sprawling grid of crates and 3D printers stack layers of computer-generated data to produce food alternatives. Drawing from the concept of optimal palatability, Bliss Point reveals the entanglement of automation and human labour, and the ways in which the aesthetics and the politics of food intersect.