In this so-called post-truth era, the line between fact and fiction has blurred into a matter of style: what appears plausible is accepted as real. The rise of generative artificial intelligence has not merely accelerated this disintegration but formalised it. Truth is no longer something to be discovered, but something to be produced.
Within this context, White Cloud / 白云 (2023) by Emmanuel Van der Auwera functions as a case study of the destabilisation of truth, image, and representation. Based on a testimony from a Mongolian rare-earth miner who extracts materials needed for the production of electronics, the film uses AI-generated visuals to present a world that is simultaneously impossible and inevitable.
Van der Auwera is a Brussels-based artist whose work spans film, (video)sculpture, photography, and—to a lesser extent—printmaking and performance. His practice centers on a critical engagement with visual literacy, exploring how images function, circulate, and shape collective perception. Rather than offering resolution or coherent narratives, his work opens interpretive spaces—for doubt, friction, and a recalibration of the visible.
The testimony at the heart of White Cloud was originally posted on Douyin, or 抖音, the Chinese version of TikTok. In the video, he speaks plainly but powerfully about the physical toll of the job, the ecological devastation surrounding the mines, and the quiet desperation of daily life. In its raw form, his statement about the harsh working and living conditions could have served as the basis for a straightforward documentary or news report. Instead, Van der Auwera filters it through generative algorithms and cinematic codes, transforming direct witness into something far more ambiguous and unsettling.
White Cloud drops the viewer in a digital desert: detached, indeterminate, yet charged with tangible unease. Faces refuse to settle in one shape, malformed bodies appear (humans have extra arms, dogs too many legs)—as if identity itself were a rendering error. The industrial soundtrack underlines a constant threat, intensifying the atmosphere of unease. This “impossible” world not only visualises the fragmentation of truth and identity but also embodies the alienation that arises when our reality is distorted by technology and ecological crisis.
The miner’s words resonate deeply: “We are all struggling to make it through the ordinary days.” The ambiguity and the resulting unease are deliberate: this is not a reportage, but an echo of the real. What remains is a form of AI-authored credibility—and the ethical tension that trails behind it. White Cloud borrows from the tools of documentary and generative image-making, while also leaning heavily on the grammar of cinema—more precisely, body horror and psychological thriller. This film does not represent; it destabilises. It does not show; it seeps under your skin. By deliberately thwarting familiar forms of representation, White Cloud compels us to confront uncomfortable truths—making visible the often-invisible human and ecological costs of technological progress, and urging urgent reflection and awareness.
In this sense, White Cloud is not a work about AI, but a work within the algorithmic condition itself. Through its shifting, unstable visuals—indeterminate faces and synthetic landscapes—the film embodies how experience is replaced by simulation and proximity by synthetic representation. Van der Auwera does not make predictions about the future; rather, he reveals how our present is already shaped by opaque technological and ecological forces beyond direct human agency. What lingers is a visual space where truth becomes optional—not due to deliberate deception, but as an unintended consequence of technological precision. White Cloud is not merely a diagnosis, however. It is a quiet warning—one for a condition of life that may, over time, fade from our collective memory.
