The Hypergaussian Wars (2025)
An AI-generated audiovisual system on algorithmic warfare, media archaeology and image collapse
IA Film, color, sound, 60 minutes 43″
Music, Edition and Animation: Marcello Mercado
The Hypergaussian Wars is an autonomous AI-driven audiovisual system that examines contemporary
warfare as a computational event—accelerated, non-narrative and detached from human intention.
The work replaces representation with overload, using algorithmic repetition, synthetic noise and visual
saturation to erode meaning. Conflicts unfold without dialogue, protagonists or moral framing, revealing war as
a self-propelling system of perception and data.
Developed from non-existent game simulations and procedural synthetic environments, the images accumulate
until language, agency and temporality begin to collapse. The project extends a line of inquiry initiated in Delete,
shifting from erasure to excess as a strategy for making technological violence and algorithmic vision perceptible.
The film reconstructs and recombines the historical evolution of digital game imagery:
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8-bit and 16-bit sprites (1970s–1980s)
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16/32-bit animation from 1990s consoles
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Early polygonal 3D (1995–2000)
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Motion-capture realism (2000s)
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AI-enhanced photorealism (2010–2020)
These incompatible aesthetic epochs appear simultaneously, creating a hybrid visual field where obsolete avatars and
high-definition bodies operate in the same algorithmic battlefield.
The result is a layered temporality in which technological residues and contemporary machine vision contaminate one another.
AI Architecture & Hypergaussian Functions
Hypergaussian functions form both the conceptual and technical foundation of the work. Operating in high-dimensional spaces,
they generate complex transformations that structure the chaotic yet coherent choreography of war. They enable:
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Procedural motion synthesis for erratic but fluid character behaviors
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Controlled algorithmic glitches introducing distortions and disruption
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Audio-visual coupling, allowing sonic and visual glitches to mutate in parallel
The title refers to this mathematical model of conflict: a war fought inside algorithmic space.
The film integrates AI-driven editing with the imperfections of early cinema—unstable tracking, mechanical
crane errors, degraded textures and contaminated frames. These artefacts anchor the digital violence within the
memory of analogue failure, creating a temporal loop between the past and future of image-making.
Project Context
The Hypergaussian Wars negotiates the boundary between computation and vision, proposing a speculative
archaeology of digital warfare. It positions conflict not as a narrative to be told, but as a system of automated
seeing—where obsolete forms, emergent AI logics and overloaded image systems are forced to coexist.
Contact
For screenings, research presentations or institutional inquiries:
Still from The Hypergaussian Wars (2025); algorithmic interaction between obsolete and AI-generated forms.