The artist and filmmaker is based in Paris and has a background in fine art and visual studies. Before graduating from Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts, he worked for the Forensic Architecture research agency which uses architectural analysis to document human rights abuses. His artistic work is imbued with this double training and navigates between online open-source investigations and the critical use of new media as a tool for documentary. His films and installations explore the power relationships embedded in such technologies and seeks to build counter-narratives.
What was your starting point for „Their Eyes„?
The starting point for Their Eyes comes from a previous film I made in 2020, called VO, which was investigating the first deadly accident between a self-driving car, operated by Uber, and a pedestrian who was crossing the street in the middle of the road. That film was focusing on the role of the safety drivers, also called Vehicle Operators (VO), who had to monitor the cars as they were learning to drive alone. In that film, I focused on the phenomenon of false trust that builds around highly automated systems, which, to me, said a lot about our relationship towards the black boxes of new technologies.
During my research, I also discovered that one of the reasons for the crash, which I didn’t highlight back then, was that the software of the car was not programmed to detect pedestrians anywhere outside a crosswalk. It simply didn’t have a category for humans walking on the roadway. This missing category really startled me, and I decided to explore further how these AI systems are trained to categorize the world. I discovered that this training still has to be done manually. It relies on a massive number of images that needs to be prepared by hand. This immense amount of tedious manual work can’t be automated yet and is thus mainly outsourced to countries of the Global South where the workforce is cheaper. That’s when I decided to dig deeper and try to get in touch with some of the people who are doing this crucial but hidden labor. The researchers Florian Schmidt, Leonard Nally Simala and Niside Panebianco, as well as the journalists Karen Hao and Andrea Paola Hernandez were of invaluable help during this research.
Do you have a favorite moment in the film? Which one and why this one in particular?
In the film, there is a short sequence during which some of the workers describe how they investigate the origins of the images they are working on without knowing who took them nor where. This is a key moment for me because it flips the a priori of passivity and exploitation that may surround this kind of online micro-work. On the contrary, it highlights the collective agency of the workers, however precarious it may be. One purpose of the whole system of online outsourcing, aside from the main economic impetus, is to render everything really opaque and difficult to piece together so as to blur the traces and protect the companies’ backs. So I find it both strong and touching that workers are nonetheless trying to share information in order to make sense of this system they are part of. It is also central for me because it refers to a time during my research when I was trying to connect the dots myself and so, through the act of searching, I felt like there was somewhat of a more horizontal relationship that could emerge there. We were looking at the images together with the workers and searching for clues to solve the riddle. In the film we set out to recreate this sense of a „live“ search, so to speak, without solving or spoiling the answer of the investigation, so that this sense of questioning is shared equally among the workers and the viewers. This hopefully creates room for a more egalitarian connection.
What do you like about the short form?
Working in-between the fields of visual arts and cinema, the short form really seems natural to me. It is a format that enables to develop an idea and a reflection while maintaining its radicality, be that in terms of visual approach or narrative structure. I like how the short form, due to its reduced scale, somehow begs oneself to be more elliptic and work with the absence and the negative rather than trying to show and explain everything. I feel like in a short film, one really has to play with the hors-champ, which is something I really love in films in general.
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PRESS REVIEWS
„Mixing disembodied matter-of-fact narration with hallucinogenic, nightmarish, night-vision goggle-esque images, Their Eyes comments on low wages, depersonalised globalist labour and a world increasingly losing its humanity to the never-ceasing advances of AI.“
review by Redmond Bacon for Journey into Cinema
„[T]he non-fiction title Their Eyes by Nicolas Gourault (France) sees workers talk about their everyday lives editing the images that will teach cars how to self-drive, gently exposing the inequality that lies at the heart of the global economy.“
mention by Laurence Boyce for Cineuropa
„Aber auch mit Their Eyes und Dar band sind zwei brillante Filme im Programm, welche die Überwachung und Kontrolle durch Technologie sowie die Beziehung zwischen Globalem Norden und Süden im KI-Entwicklungsprozess thematisieren und damit einen starken Bezug zu aktuellen Entwicklungen aufweisen.“
mention by Peter Bratenstein for zeitgeschichte online
„Einer der interessantesten Kurzfilme ist die Dokumentation Their Eyes von Nicolas Gourault. Die Protagonisten sind Clickworker aus Venezuela, Kenia und den Philippinen, die erzählen, während uns die Aufgaben gezeigt werden, die ihre Arbeit am Computerbildschirm ausmachen.“
mention by Isabel Roy & Verena Nees for World Socialist Web Site
„Que font les protagonistes de Their Eyes ? On découvre peu à peu, pixel après pixel, la tâche que ces « petites mains » exécutent depuis l’autre bout du monde pour un géant de l’électronique : cartographier détail après détail des lieux qu’ils n’auront jamais l’occasion de voir de leur propres yeux. Nicolas Gourault compose un puzzle passionnant qui dévoile progressivement un monde secret et une réalité sociale invisible. Dans son basculement final, le film provoque un vertige qui fut l’un des moments forts de cette Berlinale.“
review by Nicolas Bardot & Gregory Coutaut for Le Polyester
„How does a machine learn to read the world? In a series of testimonies and screen recordings, clickworkers from the Global South talk about their daily work. Their job is to analyse, edit and label countless images of traffic on the streets of the Global North with the aim of training the AI of self-driving cars to navigate. In transnational chat rooms, the clickworkers imagine micro-strategies to hack the system that is exploiting them.“
mention by Curation Hour
reactions on letterboxd
Berlinale Shorts 