Guli Silberstein’s Somewhere We Live in Little Loops won BAFTA qualified Bolton International Film Festival 2021, which awards innovative and creative talent in digital media, film and games.

The work is selected in Best Experimental among 22 different sections in the festival covering a diverse range of genres from the documentary, animation to VR and 360.

Silberstein has been developing his particular style of video works with a new form of aesthetics, overlapping sceneries and glitching images. Somewhere We Live in Little Loops drives his practices further by using machine-learning based video prediction technology.

Guli Silberstein and Bolton Film Festival Award

“The computerised synthesis of images by a neural network learns video clips and then guesses how they will continue, recreating them in the process. The reborn video images are then woven together into an audio-visual poem, revealing both computer and human cognition processes and raising reflections regarding the implications and future of this new technology.” - Guli Silberstein

It is not so recent that machines discover patterns and make a model to guide the next actions. From the mundane example of weather forecasting to recommendations on YouTube or Spotify, AI or Deep Learning outcomes already take a part in our everyday lives. While some people expect advances in human achievement, someone feels “eerie” or “uncanny” from a machine’s penetration in every realm of human life.

Still from the Somewhere We Live in Little Loops by Guli Silberstein

The artist describes his work as “a collaboration with a machine-learning based AI technology of next-frame prediction” showing the combination of how a human perceives the world and how a machine sees it. 

In Somewhere We Live in Little Loops, familiar images vanish and it constructs other forms and structures as the computer picks what comes next. Audiences are invited to the moment of morphosis, filling the gaps between human and machine or, revealing those gaps. 

Still from the Somewhere We Live in Little Loops by Guli Silberstein

As the work provides the boundary-crossing experiences between nature and technology, human and machine, perception and imagination, it was also nominated for Best European Film on This is Short, and has been shown internationally including Competition Experience, Un Festival C'est Trop Court! - UFCTC 2021 in Nice, France; SEEN FROM EUROPE - VIDEOFORMS festival in Clermont-Ferrand, France; and AI art online gallery 2020 for NeurIPS Workshop on Machine Learning for Creativity and Design.

Top image: still from the Somewhere We Live in Little Loop by Guli Silberstein