A Farewell Letter by Giovanna Fossati

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 Giovanna Fossati, Eye Filmmuseum’s chief curator.

Dear friends and colleagues,

We gather here today to bid farewell to Jan Bot, at least in its original manifestation as a film curator bot.

Born from the creative minds of Bram Loogman and Pablo Núñez Palma, Jan Bot served as a guest film curator at Eye Filmmuseum for the past five years. Jan Bot was not just any bot. He was our first curator bot and, as such, he was part of our team, and we will miss him dearly.

Jan Bot’s work was truly remarkable, and his witty approach to film curating was unique. Even if we will never know if the humour was intended or not, we will undoubtedly miss it.

His contributions to film archiving, inside and outside Eye Filmmuseum, and Jan’s commitment to activating archival footage, were evident to anybody who knew his work.

Jan Bot engaged extensively with the special collection of Bits & Pieces held at Eye: several hundred unidentified film fragments from the silent era that have been compiled by Eye’s curators since the 1980s and that stand for the innovative approach to film archiving, curation and reuse this institute is internationally recognized for. Indeed, as my colleague Irene Haan pointed out discussing Jan Bot:

“Researching and experimenting with innovative forms of presentation […] is one of the museum’s priorities.”

Jan Bot has undoubtedly been the most avid ‘re-user’ of Eye’s Bits & Pieces as he relentlessly created 25,000 films that match these fragments from the past with today’s stream of online trending news, creating, at times, quite unexpected results.

His dedication to his craft was second to none. He literally didn’t have a life outside his work with the film collection.

Jan Bot’s efforts did not go unnoticed. Many occasions saw his work in the spotlight, and he had numerous international fans within the academic and archival field.

He was first presented to a curious audience in Eye’s Cinema 1 during the event Meet the Archive in 2018 that opened the 3rd Eye International Conference on the topic ‘Activating the Archive’.

He was later introduced to the international archival and academic communities in Bologna, Torino, Istanbul, and Berlin. He was also exhibited as an installation (the one standing outside this theatre) at several events.

Jan was a trailblazer in his field, and he set a high bar for all those who will follow in his footsteps.

I would like to acknowledge the role that ChatGPT played in writing this eulogy. I felt the need to involve a fellow bot to help find the right words to express our deepest gratitude and heartfelt farewell to Jan Bot. (Even if I ended up rewriting the whole thing.)

Finally, on behalf of Eye Filmmuseum, I would like to say goodbye to Jan Bot. We will miss him and his unique curatorial practice.

As my colleague Elif Rongen Kaynakçi once said:

“To me Jan Bot is both naïve and complex as a filmmaker.”

It is indeed this dichotomy of naiveté and complexity that we will miss.

We are grateful for the time we had with him, and we wish him a happy afterlife through a selection of his films, turned into NFTs and preserved in Eye’s digital collections.

Farewell Jan Bot!

Amsterdam, March 31, 2023.