ALGO-RHYTHM
ALGO-RHYTHM
"Data dust … used for algorithmic electioneering to enforce authoritarian, anti-democratic policies." ZONTA Award - Jury Statement, 65th Kurzfilmfest Oberhausen
A hip hop musical against automated propaganda, directed by Manu Luksch
Starring: Gunman Xuman, Lady Zee, OMG
Convenience, not choice. Efficiency, not freedom. Frictionless experience.
In marketing and the retail sector, data analytics is widely used to profile and micro-target consumers and to predict behaviour. The ultimate goal, apparently, is for humans to be able to outsource all decision-making to machine intelligence (make Google do it!). What is at stake within the political realm?
ALGO-RHYTHM , shot in Dakar with the participation of leading Senegalese musicians, poets and graffiti artists, probes the insidious but comprehensive threats to human rights and agency posed by the rise of the quantification and algorithmic management of daily life. Using hiphop, drama, street art and data-driven filmmaking, the work explores how our embrace of the convenience of machine intelligence, refracted through the slick interface of smartphone apps, makes us vulnerable to manipulation by political actors. Recognising the urgent need for a new visual language to illuminate this concern, Manu Luksch collaborated closely with Jack Wolf and Mukul Patel to develop a hybrid narrative form that unites photogrammetry and volumetric filmmaking with traditional approaches. Through its auratic and poetic use of computational imaging technologies, ALGO-RHYTHM scrutinizes the limitations, errors and abuses of algorithmic representations.
AWARDS
Globale Perspektiven Awards 2020 – 2nd Prize, Germany
65th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen 2019, ZONTA Award
“Data dust, rushing data points: convincing images for the fine-meshed global system of voluntarily given, retrievable data … used for automated propaganda campaigns and algorithmic electioneering to enforce authoritarian, anti-democratic policies.” – Jury Statement
FESTIVALS
2021
5th Ramsgate International Film & TV Festival, UK
e-flux Film & Video: True Fake: Artists’ Films Troubling the Real
28th New York African Film Festival 2021
Austrian Film Week, Austrian Embassy Manila, Philippines
contemporary art biennale in Toulouse 2021
VIS 2021 Vienna Shorts. Expedition: You Better Listen!
2020
Deutsches Filmmuseum Frankfurt, Award ceremony Globale Perspektiven (online due to Covid19)
9th Olhar de Cinema – Curitiba International Film Festival in Paranà, Brazil. Competition programme
7th European Film Festival Palić Young Spirit of Europe 2020.
Glasgow2020. Africa in Motion
Video & Film Festival Zürich 2020 – VIDEOEXperimental. Competition programme
Angewandte Festival 2020, Vienna
43rd Norwegian Short Film Festival. Nominated for Golden Chair Award
Vienna Shorts 2020: Austrian Competition
PannOpticum 2020, Neusiedl am See
Annecy International Animation Film Festival 2020 (nominated Perpectives City of Annecy Award)
DIAGONALE 2020 (cancelled du to Covid19)
Tricky Women Tricky Reality 2020 Int. animation festival Vienna
13th Cairo International Forum for Animated Films: International Competition
13th Glasgow Short Film Festival, International Competition
Centre for Media Art Werkleitz, Halle, Germany: Videorama
Cineteca Madrid: Focus Manu Luksch
10th SHORTZ, Novi Sad, Serbia
2019
Int. Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, Switzerland
32. exground filmfest, Wiesbaden, Germany
22nd Antimatter Media Art, Victoria, BC, Canada
Kassel 19 – 36. Dokumentar und Videofestival
38th Uppsala International Short Film Festival, International Competition
63rd BFI London Film Festival: Short Film Awards & The Culture programme
60th International short film festival Brno 16
CURTOCIRCUÍTO – International Film Festival of Santiago de Compostela, EXPLORA Official Competition
65th Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen. International Competition. Winner of ZONTA Award
RAW Material Company, Dakar
F.A.M.E. #5, Paris
Privacy Salon / Computers, Privacy and Data Protection Conference CPDP 2019
PRESS & WRITING
Interview with Manu Luksch, Substrand, 01/2019
“A young woman president facing the powerful elite, denouncing a political process that favours a political establishment that influences voters and manipulates the youth – more than social commentary, this is a view that many young Senegalese have of their political system.“ Nicolas Haque, Voters await offcial result in Senegal’s presidential elections, Aljazeera (video), 26/02/2019
“ALGO-RHYTHM surfaces the very human phenomena of street art, hip-hop and drama, while utilising computational imaging technologies to examine the vulnerability of people to digital manipulation” Tamlin Magee, TechWorld Oct 04, 2019
“Last, but not least, part of the Shorts Competition Programme 2, this intriguing work, shot in Dakar, is described as a hip hop music deconstructing the threats that algorithmic management of daily life through digital platforms pose to human rights (…)”. #LFF2019 Mixtape: Films For Music Lovers, Rober Awards
“The opening six-film program is Algo-Rhythm on Oct. 16, named for the highly innovative 14-minute film of the same name by filmmaker Manu Luksch. This project makes its North American premiere at Antimatter.” Antimatter 2019: The best in experimental media art comes to Victoria, Monday Mag
Cinéma permanent. Projection 4 films en continu.
Artistic investigations into privacy take the stage in Brussels, Imperica
Dog and Wolf – LFF2019 Reviews
Verleihprogramm der Kurzfilmtage, WAZ
CREDITS & CONTACT
Directed by Manu Luksch
Starring: Gunman Xuman as Mr X, CEO of Data Analytica, and Mr Y, Good News anchor
Lady Zee and OMG (Oumy Gueye) as the Presidential Candidates
Featuring: Adja Fall, Illégal, Kruh Mandiou Mauri, MC Mo and Rhapsod.
Soundtrack/Music: Mukul
Lyrics based on a text by Manu Luksch & Mukul Patel, co-written with Gunman Xuman and Keyti Cheikh Séne
Translation French: Keyti Translation German: Mathias Forberg, Fahim Amir
Live Graffiti: Madzoo
Immersive FX consultant & recording: Jack Wolf
Animation: Georgi Stamenov
Camera Op and dronista: Malick Sy
Production Management Dakar: Baila Sy
Project Assistant Dakar: Jojo Shone
Supported by the Open Society Foundations and denkbar projektentwicklungs gmbh
Distribution& Sales: sixpackfilm
contact: gerald[at]sixpackfilm.com
PRESS KIT
pdf ALGO-RHYTHM_Pressfolder
pdf (24MB) Arbeitshilfeblatt zsg ezef.de
high-resolution film stills ALGORHYTHM_filmstills_300dpi
film poster for download ALGORHYTHM_poster_A4
MAKING OF:
About the method
Multiple approaches, tools and techniques were chosen to reflect the multilayered content of the work. A major part of the imagery was created through photogrammetry, a method of ‘computational photography’ in which algorithms are used to calculate the path of the ray that hits the image sensor. Our use of computational photography to reveal previously hidden information in an image points to the use of Ai on personal datasets to reveal previously hidden information about individuals or groups.
The computational photography element of the work was carried out using low-cost tools and DIY/hacker approaches and custom-programmed effects as far as possible, to demonstrate that in the ‘AI era’, the incumbent powers do not have a monopoly on computation. Our image capture equipment included a DSLR, a pair of compact video cameras with 235° fisheye lenses mounted back-to-back to capture a complete 360° field of view, a drone-mounted 4K video camera, and a Microsoft Kinect motion sensing game input device.
Stills from the DSLR and sequences of stills from the 360° immersive video and the drone camera were fed into photogrammetry software that stitched them together and computed depth information, to create a large 3D point cloud or polygion mesh. The Kinect’s time-of-light’ camera illuminates nearby objects with pulses of IR light, and calculates a depth map (3D image) of the exposed surfaces from the timing of the reflected pulse.
The resulting motion and depth information is used to construct point clouds (a set of points representing the 3D extent of the scene) and polygonal meshes. The Kinect sensor can produce point clouds/meshes at film-like rates, resulting in a a moderate resolution video file that can be ‘moved around’ in three spatial dimensions. Higher resolution static 3D images (of several million points/polygons) are produced from a series of images taken by a moving camera.
These still or motion photograms (points and meshes) can be combined with 2D camera images to create a photorealistic video augmented with depth information (a 3D video, which can be navigated around). We also processed this additional depth/motion data to distort the 2D images in ways that suggest the deduction of additional information, such as the intention or character of a person in the frame. By decimating (simplifying) the polygonal mesh of a person, we extract their essential character – in the same way that algorithms reduce us to a finite set of correlated data points that supposedly reveal who we really are. Facebook – and Visa – know you better than you know yourself. But, like the algorithms managing our societies, our photogrammetric algorithms produce hollow shells of characters…
