PROJECT OVERVIEW

Al Jazeera Untangles commissioned 39X to produce a landmark series confronting one of history's most defining forces: colonial rule. Across four 25-minute episodes, the series dissects the mechanics of British, French, Portuguese, and Spanish colonialism, not as distant history, but as a system whose architecture still shapes the present.

Each episode functions as a case study in power, how it was taken, how it was justified, and what it left behind.

THE AI DIMENSION

To tell stories that no archive could fully capture, 39X deployed generative AI as a storytelling instrument. Dramatic reconstructions were built entirely through AI-generated imagery, using a collage aesthetic that deliberately fractures the clean narrative of colonial history. We designed a fictional Colonial Academy, a classroom of empire, rendered through synthetic environments, where the logic of colonization is taught as doctrine.

This was not AI as shortcut. It was AI as critical perspective.