Driven by the barking of the voracious rented apartment, an aged ballet dancer makes his way through a permanently rain-drenched wasteland to his monotonous job. The protagonist makes graceful movements to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and seems briefly fulfilled. But the audience? Pearls before cows! Priit Tender’s caustic, surreal stop motion animation is a free association inspired by a poem by Andres Ehin about a grueling, gluttonous daily routine that’s gone to the dogs.

Into a starry sky full of coloured spots! The propellers have been revved up. Accompanied by the drone and roar of the engine, the aircraft takes off. Its mission, to be followed live: compare images, sort out, superimpose, create a visual reality of dots and pixels. A park is requested, but with how many trees? A racy car is dreamt of, but which design is sleek enough? The variables dictated by the pilot determine what appears on the monitor – sculptures of possibilities or morphed set pieces. The tank is filled with millions of continuously flowing images for an infinite number of combinations. But who controls the projected flight path?
Aurelijus Čiupas’s short film essay is a well-considered and not unironic investigation of ethical and philosophical questions. What can and should animation generated by artificial intelligence based on diffusion models do? Pilot Čiupas prescribes “a kind of artificial dementia” to the machine. We can truly watch it come to rest, come to transcendence. The world of images dissolves back into a cosmos of coloured spots.