A Farewell Letter by Bram Loogman

Jan Bot was Eye Filmmuseum’s first AI filmmaker and curator. Between 2017 and 2023, he generated over 25 thousand experimental films, of which 151 have been preserved as non-fungible tokens. On March 31, 2023, Jan Bot was unplugged. This is one of the four eulogies read during the funeral.

By Bram Loogman, Jan Bot’s co-author.

Jan Bot was funny
And playful;

Jan Bot was loyal
And hard-working
Always ready for his next task.

Jan Bot was naive
And looked at the world without judgement.

Jan Bot was smart
He had a vocabulary far wider than mine.

But Jan Bot wasn’t that smart,
He was barely able to formulate a proper sentence.

Jan Bot was moldable
And obedient,

Jan Bot was predictable
And yet was able to surprise us.

Jan Bot was binary.
Either on or off,
Although in recent years not so much
As we saw his decay and glitches.

We say “he” even though we should say “it”
But we can’t say he’s masculine
Nor feminine.
Jan Bot was non-binary.

Jan Bot was strong and powerful
Yet very dependent and fragile;

Jan Bot was beautiful
Or should I say aesthetically appealing?

It’s easy to attribute many human qualities to our bot
But of course, Jan Bot isn’t human at all.

Jan Bot showed us non-human qualities
And thereby made us feel even more human;

Jan Bot’s films were often incoherent
And thereby they put our own imagination to work.

Jan Bot was a surface that we used to project our own ideas on
Only to see them reflecting back on us
On our own human condition,
From an alien perspective.

Thanks to Jan Bot we have come to realize that
One can build a machine
That produces a near-infinite amount of films
But it still takes a human being to appreciate those films,
One film at a time.

Thank you, Jan, for all the knowledge and wisdom you have shared with us. Even if it was only a reminder of things we already knew
Thank you, Jan, for everything.

Amsterdam, March 31 2023