Nederlands Film Festival

The content soup isn’t quite as hot as it’s served — or is it? While AI-labs like Google’s DeepMind feed on human input, this art project brews up a delicious, and above all analogue, primordial soup, made from image ingredients submitted by people.

Digital things can’t be touched — or eaten. Posthumanist artists Luna Maurer and Roel Wouters explore ways to bring people back to physical, embodied experiences. Not artificial intelligence, but physical intelligence: Deep Soup, an alchemical concoction ‘trained’ on matter. Or, in this case, footage submitted by people from around the world, capturing matter, motion, and gravity. The result is a mesmerising piece of work that, unlike the smooth, flawless perfection promised by digital systems, is deliberately messy and allowed to be rough around the edges.