Me vs. You: Wrestling with AI’s Limits Through Queer Experimental Filmmaking

Me vs. You is a multi-channel video installation that explores the complexities of queer intimacy by co-opting an AI machine vision system. In this work, footage from a wrestling match is transformed through a generative video pipeline into a fluid interaction that oscillates between aggression and tenderness. The initial wrestling footage is fed through an AI depth map network—designed to separate bodies—before being reconstructed using a diffusion video process. Rather than rendering discrete fighters, the system produces unstable, shifting forms that sensually collide and merge, destabilizing a clear reading of the interaction. The work exploits the machine vision system’s inability to delineate entangled bodies, challenging computational frameworks of classification and control; instead, it repurposes AI as a tool for poetic ambiguity. Situating Me vs. You within experimental filmmaking and AI surveillance debates, this paper examines how emerging technologies can disrupt narrow modes of machine perception and proposes more expansive ways of seeing.