In his first exhibition with bitforms gallery, Limit of Control, Marco Brambilla debuts a two-channel video installation examining America's media landscape, civil unrest, power, news coverage, and violence of our current day. Debuting at the gallery days after the US presidential election, real footage and AI-generated content wrestle in a layered, socio-political critique that narrates the American zeitgeist and explores individual consciousness.

This exhibition builds on his 2004 work titled Sync where Brambilla first used the technique of sampling frames from films. Sync involves three tightly edited sequences of film clips taken from fight scenes, sex scenes, and audience reactions from an archive of films. Running at up to 12 individual shots per second and projected on three suspended screens, the installation puts the viewer in a video crossfire, building violently to a state of sensory overload. The work reflects the rising threshold to graphic sex and brutality in contemporary popular culture and film.

Limit of Control approaches visual bombardment through a layered approach. The base layer of the film is created from hundreds of films and documentaries selected by the artist, with scenes of civil unrest sourced from Hollywood films using AI. With this dataset, an artificial intelligence model is trained and guided by voice prompting. The moments between each frame are expertly woven between real documentation, photorealistic AI imagery, and the abstracted artifacts in between. Brambilla welcomes these automation tools to emphasize artificial intelligence's encounters with the moving image. The work transfigures between pure abstraction and photorealism, showing different interpretations of the public and state-operated agencies. Throughout all interpretations, Brambilla remarks that news broadcasting and public media endure to be more shocking than anything imagined by new technology. The installation is accompanied by a soundtrack that samples music cues and sound effects from recordings of actual protests, processed through AI software to create a final sound collage composition.

Alongside this work, Brambilla presents Limits of Control (prompted), which was generated using AI to "re-interpret" the narrative of the two-channel sampled work. Using this technique, the imagery is further removed from reality, presenting viewers with a wholly surreal interpretation of the sometimes graphic and violent imagery contained in the original work. Paradoxically, the use of AI and text prompts communicates the depicted events in a "celebratory" way, where violence, gunshots, and human suffering are transformed into spectacle like a "dance of death." This more lyrical interpretation has a completely different psychological impact than the source material.