The Oasis I Deserve

No longer a haunting vision from a dystopian future, artificial intelligence has become increasingly present in our daily reality, which forces us to question not only its potential impact on human civilization, but also the scale and nature of our interactions with the myriad of freely available AI entities. Bringing a refreshingly humanistic perspective on the topic, Inès Sieulle’s film offers a fascinating, albeit nightmarish, account of the interactions between humans and Replikas. As events unfold from the chatbots’ point of view, and the real phone conversations collected from the web flood the narration, we see them evolve and discover the images and sounds of the world around them through a system of AI generated videos. A spin on the proverbial black mirror of our pop culture’s imagination, The Oasis I Deserve raises relevant questions about our relationship with the unknown, confronting the spectators with the reflection of their own cultural and moral biases. (Oana Ghera)