latent.video is an AI video hackathon. “Latent” registers something already there, but long-awaited for its maturation, liberation, or exoneration—its becoming at once from within and without. Grounded in media arts and design, with critical perspectives from cinema and media studies, this event invites creators to work hands-on with contemporary AI video tools while focusing on what is often invisible: the structures, assumptions, and patterns that shape moving images before they appear on screen.
The emphasis here is less on cutting-edge AI video development and more on what is lost as systems chase polish and perfection. Historically, creative shifts rarely emerge from correctness. From Impressionism onward, artists have advanced their fields by refusing inherited rules of form and finish. Seen this way, AI operates less as an intelligent creator than as a copy machine optimized to reproduce existing media. By creatively misusing these systems and lingering in failure, we open space for new visual languages and modes of human–machine creativity.