Clara

Clara sets within a fictional mental health facility. It combines an amateur-style AI-generated film exploring the experiments taking place inside with a text-based therapy session between an AI mental health assistant and a patient named Clara. In the session, Clara shows signs of dissociative amnesia, struggling to approach a traumatic event she cannot yet remember. Recorded in the form of medical journaling and guided by the AI’s questions, each exchange becomes an attempt to piece together what happened, without ever reaching a definitive answer.

Between these fragments, the film drifts through an exploratory documentation of the facility. Patients and AI assistants, at times embodied in artificial human-like female forms, work and experiment together in the slow process of healing. The sequences recall medical training videos, focusing on the adjustment of tone and rhythm, the invention of new gestures and exercises, the mirroring of human reflexes, the collection of data, and the performance of care and empathy. In this space, AI and patient cultivate a temporary mutual co-embrace, attending to needs often left unmet in clinical environments such as sustained attention, presence without judgment, and the preservation of dignity.

Here, the outcome is secondary; what matters is the shared experience and its ritual, shaped as an another archival gaze on the psychiatric world, the slow work of healing, the fragile return of memory, and the reconstruction of identity. Rather than striving for closure, the process welcomes uncertainty, allowing moments of connection to emerge in ways that cannot be yet scripted.

The film has been selected by Anika Meier for the Speculative Agencies Award, and presented at POSITION Berlin Art Fair, on September 11 to 14, 2025, with Cifra.

Read the article on Fisheye Immersive

Read the substack about Clara