“The Scientist of the Holy Ghost”: Sunspring and Reading Nonsense

Abstract

Sunspring (Oscar Sharp, 2016) is the first film written entirely by an artificial intelligence program. Like many experimental films, Sunspring is fascinating not in spite of but rather because of its incoherence. While the vast majority of scholars and journalists simply dismiss incoherent AI output as a sign of poor programming ability, I am interested in how incoherence functions within Sunspring for what it suggests about the relationship between the current reading methodologies in the humanities and how they intersect with the algorithmic technologies and culture that surround us.