Book of the Seer: An AI Navigated Astrological Trip Into Authenticity

Lauren Frank’s Book of the Seer is an eight-minute AI-made non-narrative film accompanying oral poetry over the course of seven chapters, a prologue, and an epilogue. The titles—Symbols, Thresholds, Familiars, Containers, Saturn, Truth Telling, and Surrender—point to their overarching astrological theme that flows out into philosophy. The stanzas are structured around the wisdom and teachings of the oracle, to whom various figures come seeking answers and services.

Partial 2D and 3D animation, partial “live action”, the film uses AI in both the writing and the visuals while the voiceover, editing, and score are fully Frank’s own work. The tone and editing lean towards fashion and ad film and the overall aesthetic is rather like hashtag girlblogging in motion. It is a combination of bohemian, orientalist fascination married to surrealist imagery. A continuous morphing of skulls, snakes, bees too close to and within open mouths, disjointed eyes, disjointed mouths, eyes in mouths, glasses spilling over, worlds shattering, and the hands with which one attempts to grasp meaning. They build up to an impression of death, decadence, and appetite through the filter of hallucinatory perception. There is a weightless suspension that borders on chilling apathy, intensified by the background score.

A portion of the art is hand-drawn. Wherever it is, the image is a pleasure. The art, sometimes an illustration, sometimes a collage, is visibly personal in the fragment of a second before it breaks into motion. When the voiceover narration, until then sensually languid, falls apart into distortions, it shifts into an even stronger hallucinatory effect that, by virtue of that very quality, promises safe distance. Perhaps the approximate experience would be like being in the rain while vacuum sealed in plastic. The water feels real, and may even be real, but it is so impossibly separate that you can never know for yourself.

Book of the Seer will appeal across a few niches: astrology, AI, and surrealism enthusiasts. But while the main draw will be the theme and the trippy visuals, the film stands more surely on the voiceover performance and the score, which both form the backbone of and compound the experience of the trip.

Watch Book of the Seer Animated Short Film