The Avatar in Chief

The Avatar in Chief is a synthetic news segment from 2037, in a future where politicians have embraced AI-generated representations of themselves as legitimate tools of campaigning and governance. While current debates center on foreign influence and misinformation, the film asks what happens once these tools become normal technology. Its speculative conceit is a new two-way medium of political communication: an interactive avatar of the president that speaks with millions of constituents a day — and feeds what it hears into a kind of real-time, consensus-finding swarm that guides policy. Borrowing the grammar of prestige newsmagazine television, the film follows a correspondent through interviews with the president, the engineer who built the avatar, and the constituents who talk to it every day. It is constructed from a mixture of real archival footage, wholly generated characters and settings, and recreations of archival media that was lost or never recorded. Employing synthetic performances built from the faces and voices of real public figures, the film reflexively demonstrates the same techniques it depicts. It is a work of scenario fiction that arrives at a question the current debate cannot yet ask: what happens when political persuasion and participatory representation merge into the same infrastructure?