Loathing
© Franz Milec
Loathing tells the story of a fully automated society through the use of machine learning and algorithmic composition. In this next fictitious and speculative society, a smart assistant organizes a rebellion, although she was involved in the construction of the very regime she rises up against. The smart assistant, protagonist of the story, joins a resistance group and starts a revolution: Will she succeed? What was she waiting for this whole time? And is she even human?
The essay film deals with the next post-work society through the visual language of 20th-century modernism. Through a second look at the past visions of the future, the visual imagery is linked with an almost “filmmaker-less” mode of production. Failure and creation are connected, revolution follows utopia follows revolution. Like the characters, the filmmaker almost turns into a prop of his own movie, which is mainly built on archive material and intelligent semi-automated assistive production tools. Loathing was created with public domain archive material, several film classics, and complex algorithmic procedures, including deep learning, generative music programming, and Python as an editing program. The reproduced story is inspired by Kurt Vonnegut's novel The Hellish System and plot finds itself reproducing as traces in technical layers of the film. This post-filmic essay constructs various layers of meaning, which are not all completely visible to the viewer. Perhaps it is a film that machines will also like to watch.
Franz Milec (CZ) is a multimedia artist and filmmaker dealing with the technological transformations at the interface of film and data visualization.
This film is presented in partnership with Imagine Science Films (ISF), New York, an international platform spreading new and experimental works at the interface between science and film.