Human Movie: Six Meditations on a Compression Algorithm contrasts 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.
Eryk Salvaggio
EN