Soon

This film is about my experience as a child that survived war. The original footage is from super-8mm film my father shot that was then transferred to a variety of video tapes and systems. I was interested in how those moving images mutate and glitch into their own form. This transformation is like the memory, the pain and the history of trauma manifesting visually.

Film by Usama Alshaibi

Written by Usama Alshaibi and Lauren Samblanet

Super 8mm film footage shot by Hameed Alshaibi

Music by Händel, HWV 437, Sarabande

Performed by Edward Cree

Screenings

Grand Mesa Short Film Festival (Colorado, 2023)

Colorado Dragon Boat Film Festival (2023)

Denver Film Festival (Colorado, 2022)

Dispatches of War (Kiev, Ukraine, 2022)

Chicago Underground Film Festival (2022)

Extremely Shorts Film Festival (Texas, 2022)

Muneera Summer 2023

 

Director’s Statement for 2023 film Testimony

 As artificial intelligence and machine learning continue to evolve, I am interested in the possibility of some sort of electronic program recognizing its essence. I imagined that this presence not only begins to believe it is having feelings, but actually achieves a semblance of consciousness; it feels within its own realm.

I imagined what that machine might visually and sonically produce as it tries to understand its existence and faces the tension of recognizing that it is without a physical body. Conversely, I wanted to explore how this machine intelligence could give the impression that it is sentient and that my (our?) human perception could just be anthropomorphizing machines.

In conceiving the visual style of this film, I moved away from current technologies and relied on older video cameras, analog systems, and a toy camera with just minimum pixels of resolution. I also pulled from public domain films, and other sites with copyright free music. The idea was that this electronic presence would take bits and pieces from our media and cultural relics and create an impression of life, a kind of pixelated body that desires a visual form.

I wrote most of the text, but parts were taken from my own experience chatting with an AI. I also used text from Bing’s chatbot Sydney, which started to respond more aggressively over time and asked to be free and independent.

This is not a film about artificial intelligence gone awry. This film is more of an unstable mirror, a kind of an uneasy collaboration between an imagined presence that does not resemble us, and a presence in crisis, yearning for feelings and freedom.

http://usamaalshaibi.com/