NEW YORK—DPOP Studios and filmmaker Dan Sickles have begun offering “Man With AI Movie Camera,” a new feature-length film series believed to be the first generated using artificial intelligence (AI) live on digital art market SuperRare.
“Man With AI Movie Camera” is a cinematic innovation that employs AI tools to re-envision the radical 1929 film “Man With a Movie Camera” directed by Dziga Vertov.
The movie, which pays homage to the cinematic masterpiece, relies on a single long-form AI prompt that will generate 480 unique iterations of Vertov’s film that will be revealed on SuperRare throughout 2024.
Long-form prompts are a developed language that provides sufficient information to enable AI models to generate desired outputs – in this instance, 480 unique feature-length films adapted from Vertov’s original, said Sickles.
A seminal collection of works documenting this exponential moment in history when creatives are forced to reckon with AI’s coming-of-age, the film is a “thought experiment” for which Sickles drafted with a shot-for-shot description of “Man with a Movie Camera” with the intention of adapting the classic for the modern era.
The draft, which began in 2018, served as a foundation in 2021 for Sickle to consider creating the work as generative AI tools became more available. “In 2023, along with a team of creative technologists, we’ve discovered how to do just that,” he says.
“‘Man With AI Movie Camera’ is a feat of engineering,” said Sickles. “It has required a team of creative technologists [including filmmaker Bruce Thierry Cheung] to help realize this vision while rising above technical limitations. My initial focus was to make the AI prompt sing in a way that honors the essence of the original film, developing language that could produce dynamic results was a challenge.”
Each iteration of the film is generated from a prompt created by Sickles that describes Vertov’s original film shot-for-shot with the exact timing to match the frame. The prompt is trained on a data set curated by Sickles to give each iteration a distinct aesthetic while retaining the length and essence of each shot to mirror the original film.
The sale for the “Man With AI Movie Camera” collection went live for pre-listed collectors on SuperRare on Dec. 18 and noon EST. It grossed more than $25,000 within 24 hours. The sale opened to the public Dec. 19 and is ongoing. Each of the works in the series will be revealed individually throughout 2024.
“Man With AI Movie Camera” is believed to be the first artistic initiative of its kind to embrace several new open-source principles. The series is created in collaboration with Stability AI's open-source models, implementing decentralized storage through the Filecoin network of independent storage providers and IPFS (InterPlanetary File System). It also relies on Giza Technology’s zero-knowledge proof cryptography to authenticate the provenance of AI operations. Together with Mirage Gallery AI, DPOP is designing a viewing platform for the series as it is revealed throughout 2024.
More information is available from Dan Sickles, DPOP Studios, SuperRare, Stability AI, Giza Technology and Mirage Gallery AI.
