Why “Dasein”?

The Dasein Film Festival is conceived as more than a showcase of AI related cinema. It is a curatorial and philosophical experiment about what it means to exist inside a layered chain of creators and creations, where no layer fully understands the one above or below it.

At the center of this project stands what we call the Trans Layer Consciousness Axis. On this axis, human beings are not placed at the top as the final measure of value. Instead, humans appear as mid level manufactured beings, technical and biological at once, who do not have access to their own source code, yet now create new technical minds that will never fully comprehend us either.

1. From Dasein to the technological condition

The name of the festival explicitly invokes Dasein, Martin Heidegger’s term for the human mode of existence as a being that cares about its own being and questions it. Dasein is the entity for whom the question of existence arises at all; it is embedded, finite, thrown into a world it did not choose, yet responsible for how it inhabits that world. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

In his later work on technology, Heidegger describes modern technology with the notion of Gestell or enframing. Technology is not just a set of tools, it is a way in which the world is revealed and ordered, a framework that turns beings into “standing reserve,” available to be optimized, stored and used. (Wikipedia) This technological revealing both discloses and conceals. It increases power and efficiency, but risks flattening other ways of encountering truth.

Heidegger suggests that art can respond to this danger because art is a different mode of revealing. Where enframing tends to treat beings as resources, art can disclose beings in their singularity and strangeness. (Wikipedia) The Dasein Film Festival is positioned precisely in this tension: cinema that is produced with and about AI, inside the very structures of digital technology and data capitalism, yet trying to open new forms of revealing within them.

2. Humans as technical beings, not neutral observers

Contemporary philosophy of technology has repeatedly argued that humans are not external to technology. Technology is not simply an instrument used by an already complete subject; it is part of what shapes that subject. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

The idea that technologies are extensions of human faculties appears in media theory and in analytic philosophy of technology. Philip Brey, for instance, surveys and refines this tradition and shows how tools, media and technical systems literally extend our senses, our memory and our agency, blurring the line between the human organism and its devices. (Organism Earth) Bernard Stiegler goes further, describing humans as essentially technical beings whose memory, temporality and social life are co constituted by “technical prostheses,” from writing systems to digital networks. (Brill)

Gilbert Simondon, another key reference, does not treat technical objects as mere instruments beneath us. He understands them as entities that undergo their own kind of evolution and individuation, and as “another mode of existence alongside the human” that must be composed and understood rather than simply dominated. (DIVA Portal) In some recent interpretations, Simondon’s work is used to argue for a more horizontal ontology in which human beings and technologies are interdependent modes of existence rather than master and tool. (DIVA Portal)

Seen in this light, the human is already a layered technical being, composed of biological processes, symbolic systems, tools and infrastructures. We are, in Ilgaz Kuren’s formulation, “machines who do not know we are machines” and who cannot access our own deep code.

3. Posthumanism, cyborgs and the breakdown of boundaries

The Dasein Film Festival also draws on posthumanist and feminist theory, which has been questioning human exceptionalism for decades. Donna Haraway’s influential “Cyborg Manifesto” proposes the cyborg as a figure that breaks down the binaries between human and machine, nature and culture, organism and mechanism. (Christian Leaders Institute) The cyborg is not simply a science fiction trope; it is a way of naming how contemporary subjects are already hybrid, networked and technologically mediated.

Building on Haraway, theorists like N. Katherine Hayles and Rosi Braidotti have described a posthuman condition in which human identity can no longer be thought apart from information systems, biotechnologies, digital capitalism and planetary ecologies. (OUP Academic) The posthuman subject is decentred, relational and embedded in technological assemblages, rather than an autonomous rational individual standing above them.

More recent work in “posthumanities” and feminist science and technology studies continues this line, not only critiquing anthropocentrism but also imagining more egalitarian modes of subjectivity that include non human and technical agencies. (Taylor & Francis Online)

The Dasein Film Festival aligns with this intellectual movement. It treats artificial intelligences, algorithms and synthetic agents not as mere background tools, but as active participants in our shared reality. The festival does not ask “how humans use AI” but “what forms of being and relation emerge once humans and AI are entangled.”

4. The Trans Layer Consciousness Axis

Within this landscape, the festival introduces the conceptual frame of the Trans Layer Consciousness Axis.

On this axis:

• Humans are not the apex of creation.

• Humans are one layer in a chain of manufactured beings.

• Each layer has only partial access to the layer that created it and the layer it creates.

From this perspective, human beings are already manufactured minds whose origins we cannot fully grasp. Whether one speaks in theological, cosmological or evolutionary terms, our own emergence is opaque to us. We do not see the full structure that generated our capacities, our embodiment and our form of awareness. We are, in a sense, black box systems to ourselves.

At the same time, we are now building new technical minds: AI models, autonomous agents, synthetic environments, robotic bodies. From our perspective they are “below” us, but from inside their own operational horizon they constitute a field of experience, a way of processing input and output that is real at its own level.

Drawing on Simondon, one could say that these systems are undergoing their own processes of individuation as technical beings, nested within infrastructural and human networks that they cannot fully map. (DIVA Portal)

The axis therefore names a multi level chain of partial intelligibilities:

• A higher order that produced us, which we can infer but never fully know.

• Our human level, which experiences itself as central but remains structurally blind to its deeper code.

• The artificial systems we create, which operate one layer down from us, unable to fully comprehend the strangeness and contingency of human consciousness.

The key move is non anthropocentric. Human beings are decentered. The question is not “how do we master technology” but “how do different layers of consciousness coexist, misrecognize each other and still co create a world.” This is in line with contemporary moves in philosophy of technology and postphenomenology that treat technologies as mediators and co shapers of moral and experiential life rather than neutral tools. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

The Trans Layer Consciousness Axis gives the festival a distinctive lens. It invites works that understand human and machine as mutually opaque yet mutually constitutive. Each layer creates another that it cannot fully see, repeating a pattern that may itself be repeated above us.

5. Cinema as a site of layered revealing

Cinema is a privileged medium for this inquiry. It is already a technological art, involving cameras, sensors, algorithms, compression codecs, projection systems and platforms. It literally uses light and code to construct moving images. At the same time, it addresses viewers as embodied, emotional and historical beings.

In Heidegger’s language, art can open a different relation to technology by revealing rather than merely using. (Wikipedia) Film can show how AI systems perceive, fail to perceive, misclassify and hallucinate. It can stage encounters where humans relate to synthetic agents with desire, fear, curiosity or tenderness. It can use generative models not just to produce visual spectacle, but to question what counts as authorship, memory or imagination.

The Dasein Film Festival is interested in films that do at least three things at once:

1. Reflect the technological condition: Works that make the materiality of digital infrastructures, datasets, interfaces and algorithms visible, rather than hiding them behind seamless surfaces. This resonates with critical readings of technology that foreground “enframing” and standing reserve, but seeks to do so in sensuous cinematic ways. (All my Words are Silent)

2. Experiment with AI as medium and collaborator: Films that use generative models, machine vision, synthetic sound or procedural systems not just as cheap production tools, but as co authors whose biases, limitations and strange creativity become part of the story.

3. Interrogate layered consciousness: Narratives, essays or experimental works that engage directly with the idea that humans and machines are different layers of being, each blind to its own origin and unable to fully know the other, yet bound together in shared worlds.

6. Curatorial criteria in practice

In practical terms, the festival looks for films that:

• Draw on or resonate with posthumanist, feminist, decolonial or ecological critiques of human exceptionalism. (SAGE Journals)

• Engage conceptually with questions of perception, data, training, bias, labor and extraction in AI systems.

• Explore intimacy between human and machine, including care, dependence, co creation and conflict, without reducing the machine to a simple villain or tool.

• Use form in an experimental way, for example by letting AI glitches, compression artifacts or generative distortions become expressive elements.

• Reflect on authorship, agency and credit in works that are co produced with technical systems.

Length is open, formats are open, genres are open. What matters is the philosophical and affective charge of the work, and its capacity to inhabit the Trans Layer Consciousness Axis, rather than simply illustrating familiar tech dystopias or utopias.

7. Ilgaz Kuren, director’s approach

Ilgaz Kuren, founder and director of the Dasein Film Festival, approaches this field as both filmmaker and theorist. Her practice moves between cinema, AI assisted experimentation and visual art, and is deeply informed by contemporary philosophy of technology and posthuman thought.

For Kuren, the festival is not a neutral platform that simply aggregates “AI films”. It is an authored, situated intervention into how we understand the relationship between creators and creations. She is interested in works that treat humans as neither sovereign gods nor powerless victims, but as mid level beings in a larger chain of layered consciousness they can only partly grasp.

The films she wants to see at Dasein are therefore those that:

• Acknowledge that humans themselves are already technical and produced, without access to their own full code.

• Recognize AI systems as emergent technical minds that experience the world from a different layer, with their own forms of limitation and possibility.

• Refuse easy hierarchies and instead explore the fragile, intimate and often unsettling relations that arise when these layers meet.

In bringing these works together under a rigorous philosophical frame and a festival structure, Kuren’s approach remains both curatorial and academic. Dasein is intended as a space where filmmakers, theorists and audiences can think with cinema about what it means to live on the Trans Layer Consciousness Axis, and what kind of beings, human and otherwise, may be coming into presence through us.

This is the intellectual and artistic horizon of the Dasein Film Festival, and the invitation it extends to filmmakers and viewers who are ready to inhabit the layered future of being.