Human Movie: Six Meditations on a Compression Algorithm (2025)

Still from Human Movie. Two children on a beach seen through digital static.

Human Movie: Six Meditations on a Compression Algorithm is a 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.

This film is not available online but is available for presentation at film festivals, art galleries, exhibitions and other venues by request. Human Presentation 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.

To present this work, please contact Eryk Salvaggio at eryk.salvaggio@gmail.com or using the form below.

Still from Human Movie.

Still from Human Movie.

Still from Human Movie.