In 2025, court documents revealed that the company Meta had deliberately downloaded content from Library Genesis (LibGen) to train its AI models, absorbing knowledge through illicit archives while publicly positioning itself as an innovator. This event crystallized a long-standing dynamic in which big tech corporations extract, repackage and control intellectual labor—transforming unauthorized knowledge into a proprietary resource.

This project revisits an earlier, more tangible form of unauthorized reproduction through the visual language of bootleg DVD covers. Mounted behind plexiglass, these cases replicate and reinterpret pirated editions of films that have shaped collective imagination of artificial intelligence—from dystopian cautionary tales to utopian speculations. These films, often concerned with control, autonomy and simulation, have themselves been subject to an informal economy of circulation and modification, where bootlegs function as acts of recontextualization.