Human Movie2024

“In Human Movie, noise is the emblem of independence, the freedom that ... is essentially human, and which all these AI processes seek to contain and manage by claiming the digital machine is a mirror of the human mind.” — Michael Betancourt, Found Footage Magazine Review

Human Movie: Six Meditations on a Compression Algorithm is an award-winning 35-minute video essay contrasting computational processes of diffusion models and the human metaphors used to describe them — such as temperature, creativity, image recognition, memory, reason, and the unmodeled. It is a spiritual sequel to the 2023 film Flowers Blooming Backward Into Noise.

Created from a blend of glitched AI-generated video, archival and found footage, the film is not about machines at all, but rather, seeks to assert a humanist counterfactual to comparisons between human thought and the limited capacities of generative AI. The film approaches these metaphors at face value, but slowly peels back the superficial nature of such comparisons to examine the nuance, and appeal, behind the comparisons of humans and today’s computer systems.

Central to the film’s subject is the idea of AI as a filter for noise, a filter said to mimic a humanlike response to the world. But what human is this like? The film asks which mental states are being modeled, and whether it is proper to isolate those patterns of thought in unsupervised ways. Crafted with a surreal visual language emphasizing compression artifacts and AI-generated errors, the film soaks in the media environment it aims to analyze, which is AI-generated imagery.

Informed by the artist’s technical understanding of AI systems and aiming for nuance in an often noisy and polarized discussion, Human Movie aims to raise more thoughtful questions about the relationship between how we imagine ourselves and how we project this imagination on to machines. What lies beneath the surface of this instinct?

AWARDS 2026. Exhibited, Fotografiska, Stockholm.

2026. Screening, Art + Film + Vienna festival.

2025. Premiere, National Communication Museum, Melbourne.

2025. Screening, Jeu de Paume, Paris, for The World According to AI exhibition.

2025. Invitational Screening, Max Planck Institute, Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome.

2024. Official Selection, Experimental Film, AI International Film Festival, Los Angeles.

2025. Winner, Short Film Category, New York Short Cinema Awards.

2025. Winner, Best Animated Short, Columbus International Film & Animation Festival.

2025. Official Selection, Seattle AI Film Festival.

2025. Performance, University of Oslo’s HumAIne Research Lab.

2025. Screening, Alfred University.

2025. Screening, Antimatter Media Art Festival, Canada.

2025. Screening, Clapham International Film Festival, Turing Institute, London.