San Francisco – January 28, 2026
Written by Evelyn Kreutzer, Postdoctoral Researcher and Video Essayist/Filmmaker at the Università della Svizzera Italiana

In a 1964 episode of The Twilight Zone, entitled “From Agnes—with Love,” a young computer scientist, working for the American military during the Cold War, is tasked with programming a new supercomputer. The machine, named Agnes, has the ability to speak to him in written form and to engage in constant and immediate dialogue in this way. Hoping for guidance in his personal life, the protagonist turns to Agnes for advice on how to woo a colleague he has a crush on but ends up being tricked by the machine, which becomes possessive of him and jealous of her human rival. Agnes soon sabotages both his personal and professional life, leaving him confused by not just the woman he tries to date but also by the feminized machine set up to cater to his needs.

In 2025, this early TV sci-fi vision of artificial intelligence and a chat-GPT-like therapist, friend or would-be-lover feels eerily present. It raises many of the same questions we debate today: How does AI infiltrate our personal lives and mental health? Why do we assign gender to robots and how do questions of identity influence AI images and our expectations as consumers and users?

We aimed to create a space for such perspectives at a recent two-day event at UCLA, organized in cooperation between Swissnex in San Francisco, Locarno Film Festival, UCLA, and USI Lugano. The Future of Cinema: From Locarno to LA gathered leading experts in creative AI, cinema studies, and filmmakers from both Switzerland and Los Angeles to talk about future visions, historical impacts, and innovative strategies for a sustainable AI media culture. The event also included two screenings: the feature documentary film Real by Adele Tulli (which premiered at the Locarno Film Festival last year) and a shorts program that combined contemporary experimental films and video essays about AI with historical, archival pieces from the UCLA Film & TV Archive, including the “From Agnes—with Love” Twilight Zone episode.

Yet, while these questions might be just as relevant now as they were in 1964 (if not more), the TV episode’s production history seems much more dated. While set in a computer lab at Cape Kennedy, Florida, the whole episode was shot at the MGM Studios in Los Angeles. Today, the fact that a show would be entirely filmed in LA even though it does not explicitly take place or use identifiable locations in the city might already trigger a sense of nostalgia. The city has faced major challenges in recent years, from the shutdown of media productions during the pandemic to the writers’ and actors’ strikes to devastating wildfires. Many productions now increasingly leave Hollywood and move to cheaper locations in neighboring states and abroad.

Looking back at a series like The Twilight Zone from today’s perspective offers insights not only into how it imagined technology’s impact in an alternative present or speculative future (similar to what Black Mirror has done more recently), but also into the realities behind its production. Such historical comparisons complicate current debates about AI and its impact on work, culture, and society, which often assume that we’ve entered a totally new era that has no comparable historical precedents.

The understandable fears among creatives and critics frequently paint a picture of an overwhelmingly one-sided dynamic between powerful tech companies and powerless media professionals. Yet, the histories of technology and media culture have always been closely intertwined, mutually influential and marked by cycles of upheaval and transformation. AI may feel like a new chapter, but it has its roots in a history that we can learn from.

Laying out these histories is a vital role for humanities scholars and critical thinkers and makers if we don’t want Big Tech to entirely determine and dominate the conversation now and in the future. This means that by looking at AI and cinema (or audiovisual media in general) through both an historical and a future-oriented lens, we may be better equipped to foresee how the film industry, in LA and beyond, cannot just survive but actually shape the future of audiovisual AI in a pro-active, concrete, and innovative manner.

We aimed to create a space for such perspectives at a recent two-day event at UCLA, organized in cooperation between Swissnex in San Francisco, Locarno Film Festival, UCLA, and USI Lugano. The Future of Cinema: From Locarno to LA gathered leading experts in creative AI, cinema studies, and filmmakers from both Switzerland and Los Angeles to talk about future visions, historical impacts, and innovative strategies for a sustainable AI media culture. The event also included two screenings: the feature documentary film Real by Adele Tulli (which premiered at the Locarno Film Festival last year) and a shorts program that combined contemporary experimental films and video essays about AI with historical, archival pieces from the UCLA Film & TV Archive, including the “From Agnes—with Love” Twilight Zone episode.

Rather than leaning into either naïve enthusiasm or outright dystopia, the conversations over those two days focused on the nuances we can find in between. What can historical stories and fantasies about technology teach us about our current state? And which new metaphors, new practices and perhaps even new tastes can we come up with for the future? Which new job profiles will emerge in this new era of cinema? Will it still make sense to speak of a “camera operator” when we generate footage with AI software? How will the role of the director or producer change? Can animators, special effects artists, and sound designers integrate AI into their work, rather than be replaced by it, and will the industry support them in that endeavor? While it is essential to critically evaluate AI technologies in terms of their ecological impacts, political biases, and labor implications, participants agreed that it is vital for critical thinkers, scholars, independent artists and filmmakers to actively engage with AI tools and contribute to AI discourse, rather than abstain from it.

Locarno and LA are very different places in terms of their respective size, location and socioeconomic fabric, yet from their different positions, they face similar challenges with respect to AI’s impact on film culture. Locarno Film Festival, like Los Angeles’ film industry, need to find new ways to ensure not just cinema’s survival but its creative renewal, to keep audiences attracted to film screenings and to engage them with the local communities that enable these screenings.

In that spirit, Locarno Film Festival has premiered significant AI-driven arthouse films in recent years, including Radu Jude’s Dracula (2025) and Edgar Pêra’s Cartas Telepáticas (2024), and has showcased major AI-related discussion events, including last year’s AI Quiz Show (“If AI is the answer, what is the question?”), which are based on collaborations with both academics and artists. In turn, local academic initiatives in Los Angeles, like CalArts’s new Chanel Center for Artists and Technology and USC’s AI for Media and Storytelling (AIMS) demonstrate a strong commitment towards training the next generation of artists in critical AI skills.

Artist Lauren Lee McCarthy proves that artists can turn AI, smart home systems, and the automation of everyday life back on themselves, and that they can use them to provide community encounters and critical reflections instead of isolation. While “traditional” film industry jobs and workers increasingly leave the city, new networks are forming around AI creativity in LA, as filmmaker Nik Kleverov emphasized. One might assume that AI artists and filmmakers could just find one another online, given the virtual nature of their medium, but in-person community gatherings, in Locarno, in Los Angeles, and in many places in-between, seem to remain very important, even in this new era.

Evelyn Kreutzer, Postdoctoral Researcher and Video Essayist/Filmmaker at the Università della Svizzera Italiana, participated in the 2-day event Future of Cinema: From Locarno to LA, in Los Angeles this past October. The event was a collaboration between the Locarno Film Festival, UCLA, and Swissnex in San Francisco.

For more information on our programming on the future of cinema, get in touch with Lucas Hagin, Program Manager Creative Industries at Swissnex in San Francisco.