The First Image of the World, made entirely with AI tools, grew out of a research-creation project on our fundamental relationship to images. I call the condition it addresses iconemia: the pathological vulnerability of image-forming consciousness in a world saturated with technical images. I wanted to diagnose that condition, not illustrate it — to show how today's technological revolution merely reveals, with new intensity, a vulnerability that was already ours.

Making this film with generative AI was deliberate. I wanted to denounce iconemia using the very medium that propagates it, fighting fire with fire: AI-generated images are the purest form of iconemia — purely technical, with no real referent — which makes them the ideal tool for exposing it.

The film rests on one hypothesis: the first image of the world is necessarily the image of oneself, and that self-image is the foundation of all empathy, since empathy requires a stable sense of self to imagine another's experience. Its destabilization by image saturation is, for me, the central existential stake of our time.

I chose a dreamlike aesthetic — grainy black and white, floating movement — to reverse how technical images usually colonize our imagination; here, AI instead renders an inner world. I brought in historical philosophers — Schopenhauer, Kant, Simondon — as digital avatars, not to deceive viewers about their presence, but to expose how constructed every representation is.

I offer no definitive answer. I ask viewers to confront their own position: what image do we want to be? In a world of proliferating synthetic images, reclaiming sovereignty over our own representation feels, to me, like a necessary condition for staying human.