That is OCAD
Introduction
That is OCAD is an experimental fake advertisement constructed entirely from AI-generated content. With a surreal and distorted visual language, the work imagines a promotional film for OCAD University—not through human observation, but through the alien gaze of artificial intelligence.
In this speculative short film, every element—the imagery, the script, and the voice—is generated by AI, making the work a fully machinic interpretation of what an institutional ad might look and feel like. The result is a visual hallucination of institutional identity, filtered through algorithmic logic rather than lived experience.
Unlike human vision, AI perceives the world through data, pattern recognition, and statistical inference. Its sense of reality is fragmented, exaggerated, and often misaligned with human logic. This project embraces that strangeness, using AI’s errors, poetic disjunctions, and uncanny fabrications to reframe the campus into a synthetic mirage.
Rather than communicating factual knowledge about the university, That is OCAD invites viewers into a parallel visual realm—one composed not from memory, but from machinic approximation. OCAD becomes both familiar and foreign, dissolving into abstraction, repetition, and symbolic residue. What emerges is not a celebration of technology, but a subtle critique of how artificial systems see—and missee—our world.
As AI begins to narrate our environments and institutions on our behalf, this film poses a quiet, unsettling question: when the machine tells our story, do we still recognize ourselves in it?