Hysteresis
2021 · 5m · Germany
Directed by Robert Seidel
Genres: animation, experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal, tense
An experimental film in which Berlin-based artist Robert Seidel fuses analogue drawings and digital processing with the queer performance of dancer Tsuki, whose choreography draws from ballet, Butoh, and Berlin club culture. Her image is fed back through Seidel's devices and projected onto her body while machine learning is intentionally corrupted to produce pulsating abstract textures and painterly feedback loops.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Machine learning deliberately corrupted via live feedback projected onto a Butoh-ballet-club dancer in Berlin. Oval on the soundtrack. This shouldn't work but it does.
Seidel deliberately corrupts machine-learning processes rather than using them generatively, projecting the result back onto Tsuki's dancing body — Oval's score, FFA Filmboard funding, Cinemascope 2K master. The kind of rigorous abstract experimental cinema I find programmable.
Cinemascope 2K, Dolby 5.1, FFA Filmboard-funded, Oval on the soundtrack, Tsuki performing — Seidel deliberately corrupting machine learning rather than using it generatively is the right contrarian formal move, and the 5:05 runtime keeps the feedback loop from collapsing into demo-reel territory. 35K views for an experimental piece is real reach.
Reviews
AI is not transforming her so much as she is transforming it. Seidel, through multi-disciplinary artistic collaboration, has managed to derail the AI generative process to induce it to create images that are unique, abstract, and beautiful.
Such a web fascinates us because it resembles so closely the way that the mind works all the time, whether we're aware of it or not.
Festivals
- Filmfest Dresden 2022