Dan Sickles and DPOP Studios combine the avant-garde and artificial intelligence

The new project from award-winning filmmaker Dan Sickles is Man With AI Movie Camera, a re-envisioning of the iconic 1929 film Man With a Movie Camera by the legendary Dziga Vertov. Man With AI Movie Camera is an artificial intelligence-enabled homage to Vertov's masterpiece; it is also the first feature-length film series to use a single long-form prompt. The work will generate 480 unique iterations of Vertov's original film, which are being revealed on the digital art platform SuperRare throughout 2024.

The project is produced by Sickles' DPOP Studios, an emerging media company that partners with creative technologists to create new models for financing, production, and distribution of new media. We spoke with Sickles about prompt engineering, the on-chain art market and the legacy of Dziga Vertov. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What prompted you to make the switch from award-winning feature-length films to AI and digital art?

I’m still making movies, and making art in various mediums alongside filmmaking has always been part of my practice. Naturally I’m always tinkering with something I don’t quite understand, and a few years ago I started learning more about the contemporary digital art scene through my own discovery of blockchain applications, and new systems of releasing work in a digitally-native way that made them tangible. Artists like Robbie Barrat, Holly Herndon and Pindar Van Arman have done really inspiring work, and in getting to know them and their practice, I started playing with generative AI technologies as a tool myself.

Tell us about DPOP Studios and the types of projects you have in development.

DPOP is an emerging media company I founded in 2022. Our team is developing new formats and technologies to empower storytellers and creatives, and our current slate spans a wide range of experimental and traditional media. We’re in the midst of finishing an art-adventure film titled NEW HERE, centered around the legacy of the cypherpunks, which also has a metaverse component. We’ve just released a fun music video for the KPOP band Enhypen, and we’re also digging into media distribution infrastructure.

MAN WITH AI MOVIE CAMERA #001

Presented in this exclusive collection is “MAN WITH AI MOVIE CAMERA,” a unique convergence of new technologies and cinematic history. Each iteration in the series will evolve into a unique feature-length interpretation of Dziga Vertov’s classic film, crafted in collaboration with innovative AI creative tools. This project represents a re-imagining of the original 1929 masterpiece, blending the pioneering essence of early cinema with the transformative capabilities of modern technology.

One of your current projects is Man with AI Movie Camera, which is based on the iconic film by Dziga Vertov. What is it about Vertov’s work that connects to our modern digital world?

Vertov is probably the most important innovator in non-fiction film. So many techniques he employed are still in use today – from high art cinema to social media videos, we owe much to the experimental passion of Vertov and the Kinoks. His work is paradoxical and boundary-pushing, and his focus on the mechanics of production – the gears of the camera, the editing equipment – is reflexive cinema at its finest and purest. The film was made at a time of great revolution, where culture was shifting quickly and with volatility. Within the Constructivist movement, of which he was a part, there is a hopeful disposition toward technology and how it can create meaning and new spaces. This hopefulness is something I wanted to explore.    

What were your biggest challenges in engineering prompts to refine the essence of the original Vertov film Man With a Movie Camera?

Working with the cut, crafting the seams of the edit is complicated. Interpolation makes hard cuts difficult to create. Establishing perspectives within the longform prompt to generate similar angles to the wild ones Vertov achieved in the original was a challenge. From an engineering perspective, we needed to develop a new workflow to keep one generation running for as long as we needed in order to create an entire feature film. 

Why did you choose to work with SuperRare, and how are you feeling about the state of on-chain art at the moment?

SuperRare is awesome. So many digital artists I respect have released work through their marketplace, so it was meaningful for me to become part of that lineage. Art on-chain has never been monolithic, so it’s difficult to diagnose it as a singular state. The market is down, though paradoxically this is when some of the most meaningful work emerges. My favorite living artists are still releasing work on-chain regardless of what the market says because they’re artists. The great artists are still making great work.

Vertov’s film was made in service of the revolution, and he was a dedicated anti-capitalist. Does his ideology align with the new crypto art market?

I will say that one of the exciting things about blockchain and cryptoart communities is how they are arenas in which progressives, communists, anarchists, socialists, and capitalists can overlap in understanding that open blockchains are the public's best opportunity to seize the memes of production in the 21st century.

What was the most surprising thing you learned about AI while working on this project?

How quickly tools and processes are actually evolving. We hear about it a lot in the abstract, though in day-to-day researching and working with engineers, it astounds me how quickly this space is moving.

Thank you!