The Mirage and Ghost In The Machine Double Feature

Music Against the Machine, an art and music fest hosted by the No Desert Data Center Coalition, presents a community double feature in collaboration with Desert Dispatch Media and Ghost in the Machine.

From 1pm until 2pm Meet and Greet with Desert Dispatch Media co-facilitators Jodi Darby and Melinda Matson Spina.  Connect with community members in the movement against mining, militarization, surveillance, data centers, and other harms for AI.

The screenings will begin at 2pm.

The Mirage: Inhumane Tech in the Silicon Desert (15min) by media artist Jodi Darby and composers Sage Bond and Kevin Van Winkle

The Mirage: Inhumane Tech in the Silicon Desert is an impact video to catalyze public knowledge and discussion on hyperscale threats in the North American desert region, produced by Desert Dispatch Media with Jodi Darby, Sage Bond, and Kevin Van Winkle.

Media Artist Jodi Darby co-directed the 2015 award-winning documentary, Arresting Power: Resisting Police Violence in Portland, Oregon.

Composer Sage Bond is a Diné composer and vocal artist ‘in residence’ from the Four Corners region, who has performed at Carnegie Hall and who collaborates with her partner, composer and orchestrator Kevin Van Winkle.

GHOST IN THE MACHINE (110 min)
Ghost in the Machine is a gripping and urgently relevant investigative documentary that exposes the buried history of artificial intelligence, not as a neutral system of algorithms, but as a technology shaped by racism, misogyny, eugenics, and entrenched structures of power long before it entered everyday life. Rejecting the notion of AI as inevitable or objective, the film traces how myths of progress and efficiency have obscured deeper political and cultural agendas, revealing the ideological foundations beneath the systems now reshaping modern society.

Structured as an eight-chapter inquiry, the film blends historical excavation with contemporary analysis to confront essential questions: who built these systems, whose values they encode, and who they benefit. Directed by Valerie Veatch, whose Sundance-premiering films ME @ THE ZOO (HBO) and LOVE CHILD (HBO) examined how emerging technologies transform identity, power, and culture, Ghost in the Machine employs a bold yet accessible cinematic approach that is as unsettling as it is illuminating, offering a visceral understanding of a technology that now touches nearly every aspect of modern life.

This is not a film about machines. It is a film about power. Ghost in the Machine interrogates who builds AI, who benefits from it, and who bears the cost.

Desert Dispatch Media is a grassroots production group, led by women and based in the desert southwest, tax-deductible through the Desert Advocacy Media Network; and in search of a regional director to collaborate with in producing a feature documentary on the desert regional movement against inhumane extraction, expansion, and deployment for AI.

Build capacity for Desert Dispatch Media productions by making a donation at thedamn.org/DDfund

This is a Community Rental presented by Ghost Doc LLC.