About

Artist statement

Regardless of the medium I’m working with, I consider myself an essayist. Whether through film, media art, or writing, my work is driven by a desire to dissect the technological infrastructure that shapes our everyday lives. I chronicle the hidden world of devices, systems, and codes, giving visibility to what is designed to remain unseen.

For over a decade, I have been exploring the unstable intersection of cinema and high technology, staging encounters between moving images and the logics of smart devices, artificial intelligence, and big data. I treat them not simply as tools, but as subjects with their own aesthetics, behaviors, agendas, and contradictions.

My aim is to create cinematic experiences that resist their instrumental logics, subverting them in order to expose the poetics within. It is a mission as frustrating as it is alluring, a negotiation with systems that are at once banal and sublime.

My practice gravitates toward haunted landscapes: abandoned cities, peripheral zones, weird realms where the promise of progress has been broken. These places, whether real and virtual, feel like home to me, because they enshrine the contradictions I seek to explore. They are sites where memory and speculation coexist, where infrastructure and imagination blur, where ghosts of the past meet the algorithms of the future.

Curriculum Vitae

October 2019 – present
Freelancer, Prague, Czechia / Rome, Italy
Filmmaker & Multimedia Artist


August 2018 – October 2018
Canadian Filmmakers’ Distribution Centre, Toronto, Canada
Internship at the Tech Department


October 2017 – September 2019
Academy of Performing Arts, Prague, Czechia
Film & TV Faculty, Center for AV Studies
Master's Degree


October 2016 – September 2017
Schwules Museum*, Berlin, Germany
Internship at the PR Department


September 2014 – September 2017
Academy of Performing Arts, Prague, Czechia
Film & TV Faculty, Center for AV Studies
Bachelor's Degree

References

We decided to give a special mention to Abstract Horror by Franz Milec for its outstanding imagery, otherworldly music, and sound design. Based on an interview with one of the most controversial thinkers of our times, this science-fiction journey collapses motion graphics - 3D imagery, in an innovative and uncanny way.

– Andrea Lissoni (Chief Curator of the Film Collections, Tate Modern) & Carlos Casas (Filmmaker & Artist) in a Ji.hlava IDFF jury statement

With the animation titled Head First, Franz Milec goes straight into the depth of the field of a TV screen in a careful, minimalist fashion. The video is a perfectionist, foggy, gloomy, yet suggestive loop, built as a slow passage through the scenery of a post-apocalyptic urban space, observed by the 'camera-eye‘, unrestrained by real-world technical possibilities.

– Matej Nytra (Film Publicist) in his 2018 review of works from CAS FAMU

Bio

I’m a Czech/Slovak experimental filmmaker, media artist & film researcher currently spending my time between Rome and Prague. In my artistic practice, I tell stories with data.

I graduated from CAS FAMU in September 2019, and over the past few years, my works have been screened at festivals and shown at exhibitions in the United States, Canada, Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and many other countries.

I’m a regular at the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival (part of the Doc Alliance), and my works belong to the Canadian Filmmakers’ Distribution Centre catalog.

 

Contact

Send me a message via email.