Super-playful videos in this week’s selection - all the games, the AIs and the big stars (Thom Yorke and Paul Thomas Anderson)

A lot of abstract, playful joy in this week’s audio-visual from the bounty of digital culture… Above is a promo-ad for an animation festival, Playgrounds, which exemplifies the spirit of play exactly.

This is when the machines are let out to play.. From Aeon:

Learning how to do a backflip can be a difficult, risky endeavour. That’s why, after many failed attempts and a stubbed toe, Nikita Diakur, a filmmaker based in Germany, opted for an unconventional method – machine learning. To achieve the feat, Diakur created a digital avatar of himself and, with code and inspiration pulled from a research paper titled ‘DeepMimic’, programmed it to train on YouTube tutorial videos until it could land a backflip successfully.

The resulting short is a wildly original and amusing snapshot of both the potential and current limits of AI. And underneath its wry slapstick humour, Backflip is a thoughtful exploration of fear – not just of the unpredictable future of machine learning, but also the physical world we inhabit, where the results of jumping from your feet and landing on your head can’t be shaken off quite so easily.

A great film director and great musical artists will surely generate play… So we couldn’t resist Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest video for the post-Radiohead outfit, The Smile, and their release Wall of Eyes. It’s dark and sombre, but aware enough of its own pomposity…

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