What about now, Minsky? * 2020
Small File Media Festival (British Colombia, Canada)
What about now, Minsky? is a video art work by António Baía Reis that treats the near-future as a sonic hallucination: part speculative essay, part glitch portrait, part performance score. Premiered at Small File Media Festival (Canada, 2020), the piece stages a playful but unsettling dialogue with techno-futurist prophecy where the timeline of “the next seven years” collides with sci-fi’s century-long imagination, and the intimate becomes the site of political doubt.
Anchored by a recurring provocation: Will a robot change my diaper while I compose? Emotions for humans, reasoning for machines? Will you allow that? The work reframes AI discourse as a question of care, consent, and embodiment rather than innovation theatre. Marvin Minsky appears less as authority than as a spectral tutor: the “ASMR-ish” cadence of his legendary MIT lectures becomes a tactile voiceover presence, a pedagogical whisper threading through an audio-visual fever dream.
Formally, the piece is built as recomposition. Baía Reis folds together jazz improvisation recorded in 2015 with anti-HD smartphone “selfie” footage, aggressively manipulated through color distortion and low-fi image violence. The result is a recycled, post-cinematic palette where fidelity is refused on purpose, and “future” is rendered as compression, drift, and pigment glitch. In this sense, the work treats the smartphone not as a neutral tool but as an ideological lens: a device of proximity, narcissism, and surveillance, repurposed into a critical instrument.
Created in the shadow of the Covid 19 pandemic’s threshold moment, What about now, Minsky? performs a minor act of resistance against clean futures and polished tech optimism. It proposes that the coming years won’t simply be engineered, they’ll be felt, negotiated through domestic vulnerability, labor, aging, and the messy ethics of delegating intimacy to machines. Here, video art becomes a speculative interface: not to predict, but to disturb prediction and to ask, again and again, what kind of future the body is being asked to accept.