Human Movie: Six Meditations on a Compression Algorithm (2025)
Still from Human Movie. Two children on a beach seen through digital static.
“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.”
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
Official Selection, Experimental Film
AI International Film Festival, Los Angeles
2025
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?
Screening Inquiries
This film is not available online but a streamer copy is available for presentation at film festivals, art galleries, exhibitions and other venues by request.
Human Movie is a variation of the film designed to be performed with live narration by the artist, adding the dimension of human presence to the machine mimicry on screen and in sound. Typically it is performed with a short Q&A to follow and can be presented ahead of panels, conferences, or other events.
To express interest in screening or performing this work, please contact Eryk Salvaggio at eryk.salvaggio@gmail.com or using the form below.
Selected Screenings & Performances
Global Premiere, National Communication Museum, Melbourne
European Premiere, AIxD Slow AI Festival, Amsterdam
American Premiere, Gray Area Festival, San Francisco
Screening, Jeu de Paume, Paris, for The World According to AI exhibition
Screening, Max Planck Institute, Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome
Performance, University of Oslo
Screening, Antimatter Media Art Festival, Canada
Screening, Clapham International Film Festival, Turing Institute, London
Performance, Apiary Studios, London
Still from Human Movie.
Still from Human Movie.
Still from Human Movie.