Total Pixel Space

Total Pixel Space is a nine-minute AI-made essay film written, directed, produced and narrated by Jacob Adler, a composer and musician who also works in film and photography. It was released on his YouTube channel on 22 December 2024 and is also listed on Curious Refuge's AI film gallery and on WatchAIShortFilms. The YouTube upload had about 98,000 views when last read on 10 October 2026.

Daily Doc says Adler made it entirely in 2024 using AI tools, and Laughing Squid describes it as using generative AI to explore the nature of digital images. A catalogue page on WatchAIShortFilms says the visuals were generated with Runway Gen-3 and edited in DaVinci Resolve with a separately recorded voiceover. That page is an aggregator and no interview with Adler confirmed it in the pages read, so the tool list should be treated as unconfirmed. Short of the Week describes Adler as a musician by training who had carried the idea for several years without a way to express it; AI gave him the means, and enjoying making AI videos has led him to take up non-AI filmmaking too.

The film won the Grand Prix at the 2025 Runway AI Film Festival, shown in New York and Los Angeles. Short of the Week, in a piece dated 6 June 2025 on the festival's Lincoln Center screening, called it the writer's favourite of the programme, with a "magical, almost hypnotic effect", while also finding it possibly the most pretentious of the finalists. Artnet's Ben Davis, who attended the June 2025 screening at Alice Tully Hall, where the judges included Harmony Korine and Gaspar Noe, called it his favourite of the ten and described the soundtrack and washed-out palette, while also calling the technology already passe.

Runway's Cristobal Valenzuela shared the film on 24 June 2025, and Laughing Squid and Daily Doc covered it in July 2025. On Instagram Adler said he was honoured that it was selected for the festival. Computational Complexity, a computer-science blog, wrote about it in August 2025, saying the New York Times had highlighted it, and used Kolmogorov complexity to argue that compression shrinks the film's image counts; its tone was playful and largely positive.

It has also become a reference point in arguments about originality. A blog post on The Big(gin) Blog uses the film to ask what "unique" means when every image is a finite arrangement of coloured dots, and ties that to wider disputes over AI art, authorship and the music world's chord-progression plagiarism cases. The pages read give no formal critical reviews beyond the festival coverage.