Interview with Eric Millikin

Note: The award for Best Art Direction is shared by two films: this film and “Little Martians: Dear Human, My Muse”.

Synopsis by the Director: Dance of the Nain Rouge is an experimental de-colonial Detroit demonology deepfake dream dance documentary, based on the legend of the Nain Rouge (“Red Dwarf") of Detroit. According to folklore and urban legend, the Nain Rouge is a supernatural shape-shifting native being who was brutally attacked by xenophobic colonists and has since been seen dancing as an omen of successful rebellions by the oppressed. The video, soundtrack, and voiceover are all created with custom artificial intelligence systems, programmed and trained on a hacked-up second-hand Macbook laptop to minimize environmental destruction and maximize class warfare.

IAG: Before we get to the story, let’s first talk about the art direction. The swirling, constantly shifting red visuals are positively hypnotic. Technically, how did you create this? (I know you explain this in detail in the logline section of FilmFreeway—so we can also just take your answer from there—whichever you prefer).  

EM: Thank you! Yeah, the short version is that I created several new technical systems for using artificial intelligence to help me create The Dance of the Nain Rouge, including for the animated visuals, the musical score, and for the script and voice-over. I created and ran each of these custom AI systems on a hacked-up second-hand Macbook laptop to minimize environmental destruction and maximize class warfare. I did this in part to show what independent artists can do without relying on AI programs hosted on corporate cloud computers.

For the animated video, I trained an AI on Victorian-era and early-20th-century photos of spiritualists and factory workers. These include an emphasis on the hoax spiritualists the Fox Sisters, in part because I was thinking about how the sort of misinformation, hoaxing, and false belief systems spread by the Fox Sisters was somehow a precursor to similar work by Fox News. Among the factory workers I focused on were people like the “Radium Girls” who were killed by their employers in the early 20th century, poisoned by radium paint before stronger workplace safety and labor laws. I also trained this AI on early 20th-century dance, science fiction, and horror film stills. Among the works I used for this were early films about artificial life and artificial intelligence, like Thomas Edison’s Frankenstein and the German film The Golem: How He Came into the World. And I also trained this AI on microscopic images of red blood cells that I collected from myself and my friends, and telescopic images of red dwarf stars. 

For the musical soundtrack I created a system using an AI trained on stethoscopic recordings of various human, carnivorous plant, and fungus organs, and also radio waves from space. Part of the idea here, similar to the blood cells and red dwarf stars, was to work with things that were as deep inside us as well things that are as far away from us as possible. I also converted images from the film into sound files and trained the AI on that as well.

For the narrated script, I made an AI to create prose poetry. This is based on systems I have been working on since elementary school. I programmed the system to start with the first line of The Nain Rouge from “Myths and Legends of Our Own Land,” and end with the last line of The Nain Rouge from “Legends of Le Detroit”. These are the two main original texts about the Nain Rouge. I programmed the AI to write text in between based on other  “red” texts that were contemporary to those original Nain Rouge stories. These “red” texts include Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death and Other Tales, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life, Leonora Blanche Alleyne’s The Red Fairy Book, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, The Grand Grimoire (also known as The Red Dragon), and Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, volumes 1-3, which is “red” because, you know, socialism.

IAG: What inspired you to tell this particular story?

EM: This film was a long time in the making! One of my long-term, ongoing research interests is how we manufacture fear, particularly fear in politics reflected and manufactured through popular media. My interest in this is based, in part, on my ancestor Mary Eastey, who was executed along with her sister, Rebecca Nurse, during the Salem Witch Trials. So, I am very interested in how we “demonize” each other, which intersects with my interests in the legend of the demonic Nain Rouge from Detroit, where I previously lived for over a decade. 

I have been working with the Nain Rouge and other “monsters” and “demons” from myth, folklore, and urban legend since I was in early elementary school. I grew up in a mobile home deep in the woods of rural Michigan, and those woods always seemed full of legendary creatures. It was also in early elementary school that I began creating my first artificial intelligence programs and animations in the BASIC language on the Commodore VIC-20 that my dad bought for my brother and I in the early 1980s. Among my previous works that led to The Dance of the Nain Rouge is another short AI film I first screened in 2019, The Birth of a Vampire Nation, which I made with an AI I trained primarily on F. W. Murnau’s vampire film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror and the racist blockbuster of early 20th-century film: The Birth of a Nation. That was one of the first things I made while I was at graduate school at Virginia Commonwealth University. While I was working on that, I met up with dance and video artist Dean Moss, who, if I recall, had been working with clips from early 20th-century cartoons of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and one of the main artists on my thesis committee was Bob Paris, who had made a sort of psychedelic cut-up of Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” that I had seen at the Whitney Biennial. 

ISo, yeah, a lot of things came together--long-term projects and thinking and working with others--to bring me to the point where I made this film.

IAG: One of the reasons I’m intrigued by this film is because it ties together two things that I also spend a lot of time thinking about and working on: avant-garde film and economics. To slightly subvert Winston Churchill’s famous quote about democracy, my feeling is that capitalism is the worst form of economics, except for all the others. What’s the alternative?

EM: Our main alternative, at least as I see from here in the United States, is that we should focus on the best parts of our economy, which are the most socialist parts, like Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, the Affordable Care Act, the minimum wage, public libraries, public schools, public roads and highways, public utilities like water and sewer systems, and on and on. Let’s make all of those bigger, faster, stronger, better, and make more wonderful systems like those.

IAG: What’s your next project?

EM: I am always working on multiple projects! Among the things I am working on right now is a system for creating live-coded music and concert visuals based on artificial intelligence, marine biology, and the biblical sea monster or devil Leviathan. For this, I have been making a new AI system trained on the stop-motion dinosaurs from the 1925 film “The Lost World” to get some mashed-up sea monsters, along with Paul Wegener’s “Golem” films and Thomas Edison’s “Frankenstein” to get in some of that sweet occult artificial life, along with myself from my own performance films. My plan, for now, is to work them into some super early pre-film motion picture devices like zoetropes and phenakistoscopes. So, hopefully, I will end up with some interesting live performances with some super futuristic AI combined with some super old-school early 1800s technology, with shape-shifting artificial humans and supernatural sea monsters. Part of what I am thinking about is how some of our apocalyptic climate change flood scenarios are a bit biblical, and while that might be an apocalyptic dystopian future for human beings, it could be more like a utopia for marine life and artificial life.

IAG: Lastly, what are three films or filmmakers that have strongly influenced your work?

EM: It’s hard to keep this to just three! I’ve already named a couple of film directors, so these will mostly be video artists. Tony Oursler is one of the first artists who helped me decide to really focus on video art. I made a road trip to Chicago when I was an undergrad at Michigan State University and saw one of his video sculptures where there was a doll under a chair with the projection of the head of performance artist Tracy Leipold on the doll screaming at me. I thought it was the greatest thing I’d ever seen. I later ran into him and Mike Kelley when they  weregetting ready for a show of their “Poetics Project” at Metro Pictures gallery in New York, which was a big influence on my documentary work, and it was also through Oursler’s collaborations that I got into the sound work of Stephen Vitiello that has influenced all of my soundtracks.

I have also been into Tony Cokes videos for a long time. Cokes hits a ton of my interests: Working with political activism, working with history, and working with pop culture like 80s industrial music as well as more academic theory. There are a lot of Frankensteining things together, music from one cultural source combined with text from another and maybe video footage from yet another. He used to make these videos that I was always seeing on a small monitor in a corner of a museum somewhere, but now almost everything I see from him is huge and colorful and makes a whole room glow.

I just realized my first two influences are both named “Tony.” For the third one, part of me wants to name another Tony, just to keep things weird. But I am going to go with Aideen Barry. She had an exhibition “Fair is Foul & Foul is Fair” at American University in Washington, DC at the end of 2019 and came to Virginia Commonwealth University as a visiting artist. Again, somebody who hits a ton of my interests: Victorian gothic themes, dark humor, the occult, witchcraft, political activism, animated filmmaking and video art installations and sculptures and extremely laborious performances for camera, with stop motion with props, settings, and her own body. She has a bunch of great films. I feel like I am always explaining her “Possession” or “Levitation” to someone.

So, yeah, Tony, Tony, and Aideen’s work--that’s probably a good summary of things I am thinking about and people who have helped me get to this point.