ARE YOU A BOT? is an experimental short film I created for my MA in Visual & Media Anthropology at HMKW. Made entirely from screencasts, with 60 GB of raw footage, the work reimagines the Voight-Kampff test from Blade Runner as a way to expose political bots on social media.
The film’s protagonist, Steve Deckard, named after Steve Bannon and Rick Deckard, embodies the blurred line between artificial intelligence and human agency online. Just as Philip K. Dick’s androids were indistinguishable from humans, today’s bots flood our feeds with misinformation, shaping elections and fueling populist politics.
While the film draws on sci-fi aesthetics, its real concern is the politics of the present: the spread of fake news, the collapse of trust, and our drift into a “post-truth” world where being verified doesn’t guarantee being human. Produced during the shift from U.S. election debates to the outbreak of COVID-19, the work reflects on how isolation, digitization, and constant online presence transform us—slowly making us more like the bots we seek to detect.