Weidi Zhang & Rodger Luo

You Only Have Seven Seconds is a poetic, human–AI collaborative documentary that unfolds as both a visual archive of an internationally exhibited installation and a cinematic experiment in memory preservation. Against the backdrop of rising Alzheimer’s cases and the emergence of machine-generated false memories, the film reimagines remembrance through the lens of artificial intelligence.

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Inspired by her grandmother’s cognitive decline, the artist(s) developed a custom AI system that transforms fragmented spoken recollections into synthetic visual sequences. Presented as an interactive AI art installation, the project ReCollection has traveled worldwide, welcoming thousands of visitors to whisper their fading memories—each within seven seconds—into the artwork and generate visual memories in real time. These memories form the foundation of an evolving archive, constructed through speech recognition, text auto-completion, and text-to-image generation.

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Drawing from this archive, the film incorporates emerging speech-to-video technology to weave a collective, culturally diverse montage of love and loss. The participatory datasets are curated to build dialogical relationships, forming patterns, counterpoints, and resonances that evoke a poetics of relation. Initially conceived as a personal reflection, the work has evolved into a living, breathing, shared world-building experience that reassembles the ephemeral past into a dynamic portrait of collective human selfhood.

Artist(s)/Filmmaker(s): Dr. Weidi Zhang and Dr. Rodger Luo

Sound Production: Paul Taro Schmidt

Voice Denoising: Jonas Füllemann

Screenwriter: Dr. Lijiaozi Cheng

Special Thanks to: Dr. Sam Green