Alterity

Alterity is a 60-minute Dutch documentary and installation work by musician and media-archaeologist Jacco Gardner, which premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in January 2026. The film looks back at the 1980s as a pivotal decade in which home computers — particularly the Atari ST and Commodore — democratized creative production by bringing filmmaking and music composition capabilities directly into people's homes, bypassing the traditional studio system entirely. Rather than relying on cameras or musical instruments, a new generation of creators turned to generative software to produce original work. Gardner presents this era not as a precursor to a bleak AI-dominated future, but as evidence of a playful and optimistic collaboration between human creativity and machine intelligence. A central inspiration is the 1988 digitally-made film Merak, co-created by video game designer Jeff Minter and composer Adrian Wagner — pioneers who demonstrated that machines could serve as genuine creative partners rather than mere tools. Gardner incorporates Minter's generative software Trip-a-Tron and an intelligent sequencer called M as key structural elements within the work. The piece embodies its own subject: it combines sound, images, and algorithms that interact with each other in real time, continuously generating new combinations, experienced either as a live performance or as a self-guided installation. Overall the film is a meditation on a historical moment when technology was understood not as something that mimics human expression, but as a fully developed creative collaborator in its own right.

Sources: IFFR (iffr.com), TMDb (themoviedb.org)