Statement
My practice emerges from decades of working with screens, code, and cinema, treating digital systems not as neutral tools but as spaces of improvisation shaped by commands, errors, and gestures. Through video, web-based work, digital language art, collage, and computation, I've explored how these systems can provoke and unsettle while remaining strangely familiar.
This inquiry now shifts to AI cinema. Working with language models, diffusion engines, and machine vision, I approach generative systems as collaborators and interrupters rather than instruments of efficiency. Prompts become a form of real-time direction; generation becomes source material. The machines offer their own logic (glitches, drift, and hallucination), and I respond through selection, editing, and recomposition. The models do not replace aesthetic judgment; they expand the field in which it operates.
The work unfolds through montage: layered video, synthesized voice, fragmented text, and image. I practice a fractured cinema in which sequences resist a single narrative and meaning arises through encounter rather than resolution. Each piece negotiates between human intention and algorithmic unpredictability, cultivating a space where the familiar breaks open and machine outputs reveal unexpected patterns to pursue.
Bio
Will Luers is a digital artist and writer working with AI cinema, recombinant storytelling, and computational media. His practice explores how generative systems reshape narrative, perception, and collaboration across film, video, and networked forms. His work has been exhibited internationally at venues and festivals including the Electronic Literature Organization, FILE (Brazil), and ISEA.
Recent projects include Dream Factory and Posthuman Cinema, generative AI cinema collaborations with Mark Amerika and Chad Mossholder. Represented by the Kate Vass Galerie (K011), Posthuman Cinema has been exhibited since 2024 in Istanbul (Noise Fair), Groningen (Noordlicht), and Bergen (CDN), and was selected for the 2024 International Digital Biennial in Montreal. Earlier collaborative work includes novelling (with Roger Dean and Hazel Smith), which received the Robert Coover Award for Electronic Literature.
Luers’ artistic background spans experimental cinema, screenwriting, and database-driven video works. He received Best Screenplay at the Nantucket Film Festival in 2005 and developed The Father Divine Project, a database documentary created as part of a Vectors–NEH fellowship. Across these projects, his work emphasizes montage, generative processes, and the poetic tension between human intention and machine systems.
Alongside his studio practice, Luers teaches digital cinema and generative media at Washington State University Vancouver. He is also the founding editor of The Digital Review, an international journal dedicated to born-digital essays and experimental digital writing. His teaching, curatorial, and editorial work extends his ongoing interest in AI, imagination, and emerging forms of digital storytelling.
Teaching
Generative AI
Exploring creative relationships between humans and AI tools through a practice of thoughtful, critical, and embodied making.
AI in the Arts
Exploring generative AI tools and emerging digital art cultures.
Electronic Literature
Survey of born-digital experimental writing and academic field.
Digital Cinema
Techniques and workflows in digital and networked cinema.
Advanced Digital Cinema
Advanced techniques and creative strategies for digital, networked and AI cinema.
Web Design & Development
HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript design for responsive web.
Advanced Web Design & Development
Creative programming and game design with JavaScript.
Digital Storytelling
Multimodal digital storytelling theory and practice.
Digital Publishing
Multi-format publishing workflows and design.
Intro to Digital Technology & Culture
History and theory of digital media objects.
Remix Culture
Remix as artistic and cultural method.
Mobile Tech Research Initiative
Summer student iOS app dev using HTML5 and jQuery.
Narrative Walks
Video/audio GPS walk design and authorship.