“Total Pixel Space” is like “The Tower of Babel” meets “Koyaanisqatsi” meets AI.
It’s a 9-minute quantum mind melt that suggests every image, every film, and every life—real or imagined—already exists… as coordinates.
This one isn’t sci-fi. It’s math. And it might be the most ambitious short AI film ever made.
Thanks to Tim Ferriss and his 5-Bullet Friday newsletter for the tip on this one.
Trailer for “Total Pixel Space”
You Can’t Make This Sh*t Up
- The math used estimates a total of 107,874,572 possible 2-hour films at 1024×1024 resolution—more than atoms in the known universe (1080).
- The film shows a hypothetical “million-year-long documentary” of an alien civilization’s rise and fall—already encoded in pixel space, waiting to be revealed.
- It claims every dream, every death, and every future scientific breakthrough already exists somewhere—statistically—among the static coordinates of this vast space.
Watch “Total Pixel Space”
You can watch “Total Pixel Space” for free by clicking the video embed above.
Ratings:
- My Rating: 90/100
- IMDB: No ratings yet
- Rotten Tomatoes: Not ratings yet
- Festival Win: Grand Prix at the 2025 Runway AI Film Festival (NYC + LA)
Director’s Note: Jacob Adler made this entirely in 2024 using AI tools. He also narrates. More about him here: jacobadler.us.
Release Date: December 22, 2024 (YouTube); April 2025 (Runway Festival win)
My Review of “Total Pixel Space”
The Setup
This 9-minute short proposes that every possible digital image already exists—as a combination of pixels. From there, it snowballs: if you stack those images as frames, then every possible film also exists. That includes your birth, death, every life you never lived, and every possible history of Earth—and non-Earth—playing out from every angle.
More Highlights from the Doc
- Adler suggests that what we experience as the flow of time could actually be nothing more than our minds moving through slices of this static, all-encompassing set of digital images, making past, present, and future all equally “real,” hidden somewhere among the near-infinite pixels.
- The film uses slow, haunting narration and spacey synths to walk viewers through complex topics like combinatorics, entropy, and perception.
- Stunning AI visuals include pixelated galaxies, faces, worlds, and abstract mathematical structures hovering between chaos and form.
- It reframes photography as “traveling to a predetermined coordinate”—not creating a new image, just selecting one that already exists.
- Time is described as an illusion—just our consciousness sliding from one fixed frame to the next.
- Calls pixel space “the ultimate determinism and the ultimate freedom.”
Wrap Up
“Total Pixel Space” is a philosophical thought experiment made into pixels that just might blow your mind if you let it.
Thanks for reading!
Rob Kelly, Chief Maniac, Daily Doc