Deep Assignments #03

Screenings

• Human Movie by Eryk Salvaggio
• Diffeomorphism (Submerged) by Tim Murray-Browne

Performance

• Matt Spendlove - live multichannel a/v work

Critical Discussion

• Tim Murray-Browne
• Viviana Caro
• Eryk Salvaggio
• Hosted by Júlia Polo, with audience Q&A.

7 - 11pm on 4th December 2025 at Apiary Studios, Hackney Road, London.

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Human Movie: Six Meditations on a Compression Algorithm

Eryk Salvaggio’s award-winning 35-minute video essay contrasts computational processes of AI with the human metaphors used to describe them. An expressionistic blend of live performance, glitched AI-generated sound and video, archival and found footage, and digital compression artifacts. Human Movie is not about machines at all, but asserts a humanist counterfactual to comparisons between human thought and generative AI. In this presentation, the film is presented as intended, with a live narration of the film by the artist followed by an open audience discussion.

Eryk Salvaggio has been a digital artist since discovering the world wide web as a teenager in the late 1990s. Working “with and against AI,” his practice is grounded in a humanist critique of AI. He has presented work and ideas at The Photographer’s Gallery and The Turing Institute in London, the Jeu de Paume and Centre Pompidou in Paris, at the New Museum in New York City, Unsound Festival (Krakow), South by Southwest, and at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and National Communications Museum in Melbourne.

Diffeomorphism (Submerged)

Diffeomorphism is a half-decade long journey contemplating what the proto-perception of AI has to reveal about how intelligence emerges in the universe. Beginning in 2021 having overloaded a StyleGAN3 model with my whole lifetime’s catalogue of photos, I’ve been exploring its nature through its flaws and imperfections. Presented here is unfinished work-in-progress, an audio-visual meditation, an attempt to share something of this medium of emergent perception, flawed yet eerie, and a mirror through which we might catch a glimpse of one of the building blocks of our intelligent universe.

Tim Murray-Browne’s computational art foregrounds the moving body, embodied thinking and the wild messy chaos of being human. He studied maths and computer science at Oxford and completed a PhD about interactive sound installations at Queen Mary University of London. In the 13 years since, he’s collaborated with dancers, sculptors, musicians and researchers to create interactive installations and performances. These include training AI models to interpret live dance into sound, installations inviting people to explore algorithmic worlds of light, image and sound through movement of their body, and an award-winning ensemble of bespoke musical instruments played exclusively by the audience (still touring after 12 years). He’s hustled work into the atriums (atria?) of Tate Modern, Barbican, the V&A, and into the galleries of Arbyte, the Centre for Contemporary Art Glasgow, and the Leonardo da Vinci Museum of Science and Technology in Milan. He’s a slow thinker, he spends too much time in the studio and not enough time on social media.

Matt Spendlove - Live Multichannel A/V

Matt Spendlove is an artist from London who creates installations, audiovisual performances and sonic artefacts. Across these situations he explores spatial ambiguity, structural form, waveform materiality and the illusory contours of psychophysics.

His work channels the dynamics of sound system culture by incorporating low frequency vibration alongside hacked code and optisonic experiments. He combines a preoccupation with emergent behaviour, rule based repetition and chaotic systems to generate enlivened visual stimuli and shape dubbed out, cracked and reductive sonics into audible geometric form. Through textured intricate production, his shows bring corporeal presence carved out with a minimalist’s scalpel.

International commissions, recordings and performances have included Mutek, Montreal; High Zero, Baltimore; Unsound Festival, NYC/Krakow; Club Transmediale, Berlin; Filmwinter, Stuttgart; Algorithmic Art Assembly; San Francisco; E-FEST, Tunisia; MoTA Gallery, Ljubljana; Cafe OTO, London; Melbourne International Film Festival; Metro Arts, Brisbane; and Serralves Museum, Porto.

Viviana Caro

Viviana Caro is a doctoral researcher and artist working at the intersection of neuroscience, immersive sound, spirituality, and critical theory. her work explores how sound, especially when spatialised, intentional, and ritualised, can shift perception, activate imagination, and support expanded states of consciousness.

Her PhD investigates how spatial sound environments can facilitate absorption (deep listening) and evoke profound aesthetic and self-transcendent experiences. She studies how electronic music, immersive audio systems, and ritual-like sonic architectures trigger states such as flow, awe, unity, and peak experience, states she understands as powerful cognitive technologies for expanding consciousness and strengthening personal and collective agency.

Her practice integrates scientific research methodologies with an artistic approach rooted in deep listening, minimalism, and contemporary ritual. She draws on the lineage of Pauline Oliveros, the teachings of Plum Village (founded by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh), and Carl Jung’s active imagination, bringing imaginative, intentional, contemplative, and intuitive sensibilities into her sonic work.

Júlia Polo

Júlia Polo is an independent curator and researcher based in South London and Barcelona.

Her research focuses on artist moving image, with a particular interest in expanded forms of cinema and the elastic dimension of filmmaking and video art, and how these can be mediated through process-oriented exhibition formats.

She is interested in examining embodied knowledge as a critical vessel through which to unpack themes of identity, place, transcience and memory, and examine meaning-making through effects, consequences and resonances on the body/collective bodies.

Her curatorial approach is grounded in collaborative, digressional and relational practices. She works through dehierarchical and feminist methodologies, engaging site-sensitively though formats that foster active participation and cultivate intergenerational and diverse collectivities.

She is the co-founder of soft shock collective, alongside Georgie Worth, devising socially engaged public programming that centre collectivity, slow-doing, and reciprocity with more-than-human entities.