Fin du Monde is a darkly comic generative AI digital narrative that meditates on the popular fascination with disaster, mortality, and teleology through representations of an apocalyptic cataclysm that manifests as a global meteor shower impacting cities across the planet earth simultaneously. La Fin du Monde—the end of the world—is an unprecedented yet highly anticipated, much-feared, and always-already-narrativized event. The world’s ending or radical transformation resulting from a celestial impact event is one we know from our popular imagination.
Fin du Monde includes two narrative layers. The first is a series of large sets of DALL•E 3 generated images of the meteor storms impacting different cities and environments such as Washington D.C., Tibet, Chicago, London, Paris, and the International Space station. These images are represented here as video slideshows. The slideshows are accompanied by AI-generated musical soundtracks that relate thematically to the events and cultural contexts represented.
The second layer of Fin du Monde is a series of short newscasts distributed in the days, weeks, and months after the cataclysmic event has taken place. They are purportedly produced by a benevolent AI system trying desperately to locate human survivors and struggling with its purpose in the absence of human interlocutors. The AI newscasters depicted in the videos are neither malevolent, nor super intelligent, but they are confused. Electricity continues to power the server farms upon which they run, but the people who used to farm them and for whom they labored seem to have gone silent. The news broadcasts are human authored but produced with AI actors.