‘Sincerely, Victor Pike’: the innovative work of award-winning AI filmmaker Gregor Petrikovič
If James Cameron’s classic movie Terminator wasn’t believable enough to strike the fear of artificial intelligence (AI) into you in the 1980s, perhaps recent discourse on the matter has begun to raise your eyebrows. The rise of ChatGPT and other similar programmes over the past few years may not have us envisaging homicidal humanoids just yet, but many people are fearing for their online privacy and future employment.
AI has exhumed several important, long-pondered questions regarding human redundancy. Indeed, without the correct legal framework, it poses a threat to millions of jobs worldwide. Just as mechanisation in agriculture forced us into office jobs, 21st-century technological advancements seem poised to thin manpower across several industries in one fell swoop. Though it is hard to imagine humans surrendering to mass unemployment, the AI question mustn’t be ignored.
The arts industry is one of many that will undergo dramatic changes as AI takes a firmer grip on human activity. Artists with a more traditional outlook cling to their pencils and paper, rattling with apprehension, while others appear ready to embrace the future and roll with the punches. Among those tentatively humouring the embryonic humanoid is today’s featured artist, Gregor Petrikovič.
The Slovakian-born multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker first fell in love with fashion as an art medium. “My mum designed costumes for theatre, so I was surrounded by the idea of character and playing identities from an early age,” he recalled. “After I moved to the UK at the age of 16 on a scholarship, I picked up photography.”
The aspiring shutterbug admired the art of visual storytelling but felt he could never become a filmmaker due to issues with his memory and comprehension. “I found it challenging to pay attention to narrative and scripted dialogue,” he told me. Thus, following the format of traditional Western movies he grew up with wouldn’t work for Petrikovič, and he began to immerse himself in slow cinema, particularly the works of Tsai Ming Liang, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Bi Gan. “Their films opened my eyes to the possibility of creating longer, visually-driven works that defy traditional storytelling,” he added.
Petrikovič would later discover that his memory and comprehension deficit was likely the result of undiagnosed sleep apnea and ADHD. However, he refused to let this obstacle hinder his aspirations in filmmaking. “In 2016, I began recording conversations with my friends while studying for my Philosophy degree,” Petrikovič continued. “I have a terrible memory and wanted to preserve these conversations, perhaps to write essays about them later on. The project grew from there, and I started recording with friends, family members, and strangers.”
Over time, Petrikovič accumulated an extensive archive of recordings and various story fragments and situations, many of which he couldn’t remember. While they failed to work as a cue for his memory struggles, Petrikovič saw artistic value in their Burroughsian nature. “I wasn’t interested in AI for its own sake but saw it as a tool to rework this archive,” Petrikovič explained. “I always knew there was a wealth of content—funny, heartfelt, and emotional—but I could never figure out how to put it into practice. Given its fragmented nature and the unclear identities and situations, I wanted to use AI to revive these scenarios, not as they happened but in a dreamy and surreal way.”
With significant improvements in AI technology over the past few years, Petrikovič was able to transcribe the conversation snippets efficiently. “I started to think about these transcripts as ‘scripts of life’ and used them to guide the storytelling,” he said. “I then began generating imagery through text-to-video software. At that time, the outputs were very short, so the technology dictated the film’s fast-paced structure.”
Enlightened by his convoluted dream sequence, Petrikovič used the lack of coherence to his creative advantage, “responding to each line of the narrated story by generating images that came to mind, producing a vast amount of content.” This created a vast body of media from which he could sculpt his final product.
While working on the project, Petrikovič was particularly inspired by the work of Pendleton Ward and Duncan Trussell on their animated television show, The Midnight Gospel. “I really liked how it merged podcast-inspired conversations with fictional, animated, psychedelic visuals,” he revealed. “The range in the show felt authentic and complex but not overly scripted. I was intrigued to see if I could use AI to combine real and fictional elements and situate the film in this in-between space.”
Like most of us, Petrikovič is wary of AI in the wrong hands, applied to nefarious ends or with a lack of consideration and human input. “We find ourselves in contrast with AI, and there is a fear that it might overshadow the human contribution, which is what makes art special to us,” he offered. “I think right now is a crucial time to explore what it means to be human and what makes us different. That’s what I try to do in the film.”
Petrikovič’s film, Sincerely, Victor Pike, which recently won Colección’s SOLO’s AI Award, showcases how humans can interact with AI to create something entirely unique. The movie is elevated by the use of AI, conjuring images and themes that run adjacent to oblique sonic cues. Without AI, the movie wouldn’t contain some of its artistic nuances, but as a creative project, it is undeniably the fruit of Petrikovič’s labours. “While it’s an AI work, the heart of the project remains deeply human,” he asserted. “It’s based on human conversations and aims to reflect human experiences. AI is simply a means for me to respond to the material and create imagery for memories that might otherwise have been lost.”
“AI is merely a tool, and it’s up to us to decide how to use it,” Petrikovič finally mused in response to the AI question. “I personally want to keep finding ways to use AI constructively in a way that contributes positively but always brings it back to what is real. For me, it’s the real world and our connection with one another.”
You can watch Sincerely, Victor Pike below. The final 12-minute edit runs with a poetic, evocative and often poignant narrative just as muddled and anxious as modern life itself. As we have seen in music videos over the years, visual accompaniment is shown to be even more effective when not entirely responsive to audio cues. If you like what you see, you will be pleased to hear that Petrikovič is only at the very start of his AI filmmaking voyage. Next, he plans to develop the stories of Victor Pike into a longer film and present it as a multi-channel installation.
