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.