Joy Machine

At the precise moment when AI image-making risked being dismissed as a novelty or absorbed quietly into existing production workflows, Joy Machine made a different argument: that it was an entirely new category of cinema, and that it deserved its own institution.

“The problem with a medium that has no venue”

By the summer of 2024, a small but significant community of practitioners had developed serious, sustained bodies of work in AI filmmaking. The work existed, in private feeds, in speculative reels, in the portfolios of directors who had no obvious home for it. What did not exist was a context in which it could be shown, discussed, and assessed on its own terms rather than in relation to what it might eventually replace.

The institutional gap was not simply about exhibition. It reflected a deeper uncertainty about what AI filmmaking was, whether it belonged to technology, to advertising, to art, or to cinema proper. This ambiguity was useful to no one: not to the practitioners who needed their work taken seriously, not to the industry professionals who needed to understand what was coming, and not to the broader creative community whose livelihood the technology would materially affect.

Joy Machine was Karim's response to this situation. Founded and programmed from Iconoclast's gallery space on Woodseer Street in east London, it was conceived not as a festival or a showcase but as a recurring event with a deliberate curatorial position: that AI filmmaking is an instrument, not a replacement, and that in the right hands, an instrument produces something profound.

“AI Cinema, A New Community, and a Deliberate Argument”

The Programme

The inaugural Joy Machine, held in July 2024, brought together twelve image-makers including Nick Knight, Tom Furse of The Horrors, Joy Fenell, Floam World, Bengt Tibert, Kents Kooking, and ALAN & ROSA, two AI directors created by Karim himself, who now make their own work independently. The audience was a cross-section of the industry that rarely occupies the same room: tech leaders, traditional directors, founders, journalists, and working creatives whose relationship to AI ranged from enthusiastic adoption to frank anxiety.

The second edition, Joy Machine 2, followed in September 2024. The third, Joy Machine 3, was held in collaboration with Runway ML, itself an acknowledgement that the most significant generative video infrastructure was now attending rather than merely enabling. Season 2 launched in February 2025, expanding the programme and introducing a formal retrospective structure: a ten-minute account of the tools, moments, and works that had materially shifted what AI filmmaking could do in the preceding twelve months.

“When curating the first show, my main intent was to show image-makers that AI isn't a tool, it's an instrument... in the right hands, an instrument creates something profound and beautiful”

“Why institution matters at this moment”

Significance

Joy Machine occupies a specific and important position in the current AI creative ecosystem. It is not a technology conference, not a product launch, and not a competition. It is a curatorial act, a consistent editorial position about what constitutes serious AI filmmaking, maintained across multiple editions and resistant to the hype cycles that tend to flatten discussions of generative media into either utopian celebration or dystopian warning.

SHOWstudio, one of fashion film's founding institutions, has featured Joy Machine as a platform for AI film work, a recognition that carries particular weight given SHOWstudio's own thirty-year history of identifying emergent moving-image practices before they become mainstream.

Results & Impact

“Building the institution the medium required”

• 8 editions in Season 1 (July, September, November 2024), each sold out; Season 2 launched February 2026
• Joy Machine 3 held in formal partnership with Runway ML, the first major AI filmmaking infrastructure company to co-present a Joy Machine event
• Featured by SHOWstudio as a home for the future of AI moving image, alongside Nick Knight's ongoing AI residency
• Covered by Little Black Book (LBBOnline) as a significant institutional development in AI creative culture
• ALAN & ROSA, the two AI directors created by Karim and premiered at Joy Machine 1, now produce independent work, the first AI directors to develop an ongoing creative practice through a curated public programme
• Featured AI artists and directors from over 50 countries