Now Streaming: Human Movie

"Noise is the central image of Eryk Salvaggio’s Human Movie: Six Meditations on a Compression Algorithm. Its sources are varied but familiar: instructional films, found footage from commercials, the detritus and AI-generated slop forced into a dialogue with the noise that infuses every shot. Brief moments of sharp clarity only make noise more apparent as the force lurking just under a veneer of recognition and familiarity, with the video clearly broken by intertitles into six sections which structure the noise that never diminishes. In Human Movie, this noise is the emblem of independence, the freedom that the video suggests 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, reviewing "Human Movie" in Found Footage Magazine.

Human Movie is an award-winning film that toured the US, Europe, and Australia in the summer of 2025. Many of those presentations were in a unique format in which I narrated the film in person, followed by a discussion of the themes of the film. The linked video takes from the second version of this performance, part of the incredible AIxD Slow AI festival in Amsterdam. Please watch it somewhere beyond your email browser. :)

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 seductive 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.

I hope you do enjoy it, share it, circulate it, let me know!