AI and Artistic Practice with Sam Pluta & Brea Souders

Monday, April 28, 4 – 5:30 PM, reception to follow, UMBC Library Gallery.

“Composer and sound artist Sam Pluta, visual artist Brea Souders, and video artist and writer Eryk Salvaggio each use and interact with AI in their artistic practice. They will introduce us to their work, reflecting on their experiences, doubts, and breakthroughs creating works using these technologies. This will be followed by a discussion moderated by UMBC Assistant Professor of Art Eric Millikin.”

AI x Design Slow AI Festival: Movie Night

May 2, 7-10pm: AI Film Screening, Netherlands Film Academy

I will be co-hosting, with Fabian Mosele, an AI Film Screening for the AIxDESIGN Festival in collaboration with the Netherlands Film Academy.

During the event, we will screen a selection of films by makers experimenting with AI in their films, such as Notes to My Future Self by Paul Trillo (including VFX-breakdown), Meme, Myself and AI by Private Island, Wizard of AI by Alan Warburton, Democratising Synthiola by Fabian Mosele, and three shorts from Eryk Salvaggio: Extraction, Moth Glitch, and Dance Like.

In addition to the screenings, we will also discuss the making process, authorship and aesthetics in the use of AI in Film. This evening also marks the (un)official kick-off of the AI Greenhouse project a two-year research project by the Netherlands Film Academy, AIxDESIGN and other partners, in which we work on critical and creative practices to integrate AI in film.

AI x Design Slow AI Festival: Human Presentation

May 3, 5:30 to 6pm, Loods6

Eryk Salvaggio’s latest film, Human Movie: Six Meditations on a Compression Algorithm, has already won awards in AI and non-AI film festivals, and been presented at film screenings around the world. For the AI x Design Slow AI Festival, Salvaggio will perform a live reading of the video essay over the original film and soundtrack.

Created from a blend of glitched AI-generated video, archival and found footage, Human Movie 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.

SCREENING: The Dark Rooms of AI ♯3

Jeu de Paume, Paris, France.

Note that Eryk Salvaggio will not be present for this screening but will be at the Jeu de Paume on May 20.

Moth Glitch is included in a series of short films alongside a screening of Stan Brakhage’s Moth Light. This program of films and discussions, curated by Alice Leroy, a film critic and visual studies researcher, explores the material and social dimensions of artificial intelligence, far removed from the common representations in commercial cinema that reduce it to a replica of the human brain or an abstract, disembodied entity. This series is conducted in conjunction with “The World According to AI” exhibition, which runs April 11 to September 21.

On the program:

• Stan Brakhage, Mothlight (1963) 4'

• Eryk Salvaggio , Moth Glitch (2024) 3'

• Evelyn Kreutzer, All the Data in the World (2025) 4'30

• Johannes Binotto, Along the Rim (2024) 3'

• Johannes Binotto , Not Exactly a Still Life (2024) 4'

• Gregory Chatonsky , The Kiss 3: recursive Cinema (2022) 2'41

• Quan Zhang, KwAIdan (2024) 4'53

• Kevin B. Lee, Afterlives (current project) 7'

• Silvia Cipelletti, Algorithmic Borders (2025) 7'

• Marine de Dardel , (DES)ASTRES.ai (2025) 5'

• Dayna McLeod, So I didn't sleep very well last night (2022) 3'

• Occitane Lacurie , Xena's Body (2024) 11'40

• Roc Albalat , Latencies of the Statistical Image (2025) 9'

• Radu Jude and Vlaicu Gocea, Beginnings (2025) 18'

Artist Talk: Eryk Salvaggio, The Hypothetical Image: Reading the Artifacts of Generative AI

06:30pm - 08:00pm, Tue 06 May 2025, The Photographer’s Gallery, London.

How might we "read" the media produced by generative artificial intelligence? Eryk Salvaggio suggests we engage them as infographics: data visualizations of archives and datasets that strives for plausibility rather than expression or documentation. 

In a presentation blending artistic research into images, video, and sound, Salvaggio will examine the ways artists can hijack the spectacle of AI to engage more critically with its politics and dangers of AI ordering the world on our behalf.

Machine Bildwissenschaft: Digital Art History and Critical AI Studies

May 12 11am - 7:15pm, film screening to follow.

For the conference, there will be a 20 minute talk with a screening of Human Movie: Six Meditations on a Compression Algorithm. The event is hosted by the Max Planck Institute and organized by Leonardo Impett. Timing is for full festival, for specific details see the “Public Event Details” link through the button below.

Talk: This is (not) an Image of Noise: Creative Reflections on Diffusion Models
Eryk Salvaggio reflects on the role of noise in AI systems and in his creative practice, which engages with images of noise as a tool for forcing errors of recognition, and therefore media production, in diffusion models. The process of noising and denoising in multimodal generative AI includes "visual" mediums of images and video, but extends also to music, which is generated through images of sound. Salvaggio explores noise in his creative practice as the opposite of machinic categorization, and an overlooked element of attempts to trace the inscription of patterns from training data into generated media. 

Human Movie Screening
Eryk Salvaggio’s latest film, Human Movie: Six Meditations on a Compression Algorithm, has already won awards in AI and non-AI film festivals, and been presented at film screenings around the world.

Created from a blend of glitched AI-generated video, archival and found footage, Human Movie 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.

Artist Talk / Eryk Salvaggio: Embodied Generativity: Critical AI, Art & the Body

May 13, 6:30pm, Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK)

The interface of generative AI presents a passive mode of media production, modeled after the submission of a ticket to a tech stack, or a request for a chatbot helpdesk. What other modes of interaction might artists engage with to get at these tools beyond the keyboard? In a presentation of selected works, the artist, theorist and AI researcher Eryk Salvaggio explores positions, gestures and attitudes toward AI that reflect its brittle comprehension of creative logic and the world at large. This talk will present works and propose novel workflows that challenge ideas of "generativity" by moving it from the visual senses to the body, examining video, performance, dance, and puppetry.

In cooperation with the DIZH-Bridge Professorship for Digital Cultures and Arts with the Department Fine Arts (DFA) at ZHdK. The event will be held in English. Venue: Raum 6.K04 / Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, Pfingstweidstrasse 96, 8031 Zürich.

A closed event for faculty will also be held from 12:30 to 2pm.

Reshape Forum for Artificial Intelligence in Art and Design
Feel the Noise: Notes from an Adversarial AI Artist

HfG Gmünd, H2.10 (Aula) floor 2

Eryk Salvaggio's artworks use AI to work against AI. Favoring an adversarial, rather than "collaborative" position, creates ways of "removing the imagination" of what AI is, in order to see the truth of what it does and is more clearly. Beyond simple opposition, this practice creates opportunities for more nuanced claims about what defines the human when it is removed from the isolating context of rationality, efficiency, and productivity.

The Dark Rooms of AI ♯4: Potential Stories – Excavating Memories

Jeu de Paume, Paris, France.

The first synopsis of Alain Resnais's film, written with Remo Forlani, suggests more than one analogy with artificial intelligence: like it, the national library processes an unlimited amount of data, which it collects, catalogs, and classifies, in order to promote the generation of new content. But what faces and stories of humanity does this machine invent, which substitutes its memory for ours? Echoing Resnais's reflections, Arthur Chopin and Eryk Salvaggio each offer epistemological reflections on AI, based on its biases and limitations, while, in the 1970s, Otto Beckmann generated his first computer images using a machine, the "ai70," designed by his son Oskar to serve utopian and dreamlike structures.

This series is conducted in conjunction with “The World According to AI” exhibition, which runs April 11 to September 21.

On the program:

• Alain Resnais, All the Memory of the World (1956) 20'

• Arthur Chopin, 512×512 (2024), 20'

• Eryk Salvaggio, Human Movie: Six Meditations on a Compression Algorithm (2025) 35'

• Discussion With Alice Leroy, Arthur Chopin and Eryk Salvaggio

Australasian Science & Technology Studies Conference: Signals & Noise

Human Presentation (Time TBD)