We are happy to announce the first Digital Aesthetics Workshop event of the year. Please join us in welcoming Luciana Parisi, who will present on “The negative aesthetic of AI” on October 20, 2-4PM PT. The event will take place in the Stanford Humanities Center Boardroom, where refreshments will be served. Below you will find the abstract and bio attached, as well as a poster for lightweight circulation. We look forward to seeing you there!
Does AI have an aesthetic form? Perhaps one can argue that this form may entail a thinking without self-reflectivity and yet one may still hang on a function of imagination for artificial thinking. But one cannot neglect that self-reflectivity precisely defines the procedure by which reason is supplemented by imagination – a generative function that grants the system not to fall into its dogmatic premises. From this standpoint, the function of imagination seems to collide with the role of noise and randomness in generative AI. The scope here however is not to establish a direct correlation between imagination and noise or even to argue for a machine aesthetics that carries through the project of aesthetic judgment in the moment of the sublime, namely the encounter with the incalculable and the unmeasurable. Instead of a prosthetic extension of aesthetic judgement, this talk discusses the negative function of imagination in Generative AI as an instance of a negation of aesthetics: a socio-techno-genic insurgence of radical alienness from where the recursive iteration of the sublime fails its task of rebooting the system.
Bio:
Luciana Parisi’s research lays at the intersection of continental philosophy, information sciences, digital media, computational technologies. Her writings investigate technology in terms of ontological and epistemological possibilities of transformation in culture, aesthetics and politics. Her publications address the techno-capitalist investment in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, nanotechnology to explore challenges to conceptions of gender, race and class. She has also written extensively within the fields of media philosophy and computational design in order to investigate metaphysical possibilities of instrumentality.
She was a member of the CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) and currently a co-founding member of CCB (Critical Computation Bureau) through which she co-ideated the Symposium Recursive Colonialism, Artificial Intelligence and Speculative Computation (Dec 2020) https://recursivecolonialism.com/home/
In 2004, she published Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire, which investigates capitalist experimentations in molecular strata of nature together with non-linear theories of endosymbiosis to argue against biocentric models of sexual reproduction and conceptions of sex and gender in terms of biodigital replications and non-filiative bacterial sex. Her book Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics and Space (2013) explores algorithms in architecture and interaction design as a symptom of global cultural transformation, where algorithmic computation represents a mode of thought that challenges dominant models of human cognition. Her current project, Automating Philosophy (forthcoming) explores the possibilities of a radical thought and critique which starts with inhuman intelligence and cosmocomputations. Part of this research has been published in recent articles “Media Ontology and Transcendental Instrumentality” (2019) and “Xenopatterning: Predictive Intuition and Automated Imagination” (2019).
I am happy to announce this year’s first two events of the Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford. Both events focus on critical and self-reflexive uses of AI at the intersection of theory and practice.
The first event, on Friday, October 13 (12-2pm in the McMurtry Building, room 360), includes a screening of Carlo Nasisse’s short film “Uncanny Earth.” In this film — which is equally about technology, ecology, human and nonhuman agency — an AI attempts to tell a story about the earth and its inhabitants. Following the screening, we will discuss the film and the many issues it raises for working and thinking critically with AI with the filmmaker.
Carlo Nasisse is a director and cinematographer. His work has been featured in the New Yorker, PBS, SXSW, Slamdance, and the New Orleans Film Festival. His most recent short film, “Direcciones”, won the Golden Gate Award for Best Documentary Short at the San Francisco Film Festival. He is currently completing his MFA at Stanford University.
RSVPs to shane.denson@stanford.edu are appreciated, though not required, so I have a rough headcount for refreshments.
The second event, on Friday, November 3 (4:30pm, location TBA), will feature Prof. Matt Smith and his wonderfully weird graphic novel remix of Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lies in an Nonmoral Sense” composed in awkward and agonistic collaboration with the AI graphics engine Midjourney — it may be humanity’s last artwork!
Matthew Wilson Smith is Professor of German Studies and of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford. His interests include modern theatre and relations between science, technology, and the arts. His book The Nervous Stage: 19th-century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre (Oxford, 2017) explores historical intersections between theatre and neurology and traces the construction of a “neural subject” over the course of the nineteenth century. It was a finalist for the George Freedley Memorial Award of the Theater Library Association. His previous book, The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (Routledge, 2007), presents a history and theory of attempts to unify the arts; the book places such diverse figures as Wagner, Moholy-Nagy, Brecht, Riefenstahl, Disney, Warhol, and contemporary cyber-artists within a coherent genealogy of multimedia performance. He is the editor of Georg Büchner: The Major Works, which appeared as a Norton Critical Edition in 2011, and the co-editor of Modernism and Opera (Johns Hopkins, 2016), which was shortlisted for an MSA Book Prize. His essays on theater, opera, film, and virtual reality have appeared widely, and his work as a playwright has appeared at the Eugene O’Neill Musical Theater Conference, Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater, and other stages. He previously held professorships at Cornell University and Boston University as well as visiting positions at Columbia University and Johannes Gutenberg-Universität (Mainz).
I am excited to announce that Timon Beyes’s Organizing Color: Toward a Chromatics of the Social will be the fifth volume in the Sensing Media book series! See below for a description, and see here for more info.
We live in a world that is saturated with color, but how should we make sense of color’s force and capacities? This book develops a theory of color as fundamental medium of the social.
Constructed as a montage of scenes from the past two hundred years, Organizing Color demonstrates how the interests of capital, management, governance, science, and the arts have wrestled with colour’s allure and flux. Beyes takes readers from Goethe’s chocolate experiments in search of chromatic transformation to nineteenth-century Scottish cotton mills designed to modulate workers’ moods and productivity, from the colonial production of Indigo in India to globalized categories of skin colorism and their disavowal. Tracing the consumption, control and excess of industrial and digital color, other chapters stage encounters with the literary chromatics of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow processing the machinery of the chemical industries, the red of political revolt in Godard’s films, and the blur of education and critique in Steyerl’s Adorno’s Grey.
Contributing to a more general reconsideration of aesthetic capitalism and the role of sensory media, this book seeks to pioneer a theory of social organization—a “chromatics of organizing”—that is attuned to the protean and world-making capacity of color.
Timon Beyes is Professor of Sociology of Organisation and Culture at Leuphana University Lüneburg.
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Endorsements:
“The immanent critique and ‘tender empiricism’ of this book, its eloquence and capacity to move from detailed grounding to exciting passages of speculative thought, ensures that Organizing Color escapes ‘the archaic stillness of the book.’ Impressively researched and written.”
—Seán Cubitt, University of Melbourne
“Inventive, brilliantly written, and very readable, Organizing Color recovers and explicates the relevance of color to social form—be that chromatic or racialized color.”
—Esther Leslie, Birkbeck, University of London
“Organizing is often imagined as a functional concept that belongs in business schools. In this beautifully written and illustrated book, Timon Beyes sprinkles aesthetics and politics over this black and white picture. The result is a breathtaking work that will change the way we understand how to ‘see’ organization.”
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, “Pulse Index”, 2010. “Recorders”, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2011. Photo by: Antimodular Research
On Saturday, September 30, at 9am Pacific Time, I’ll be giving the following talk at ASAP/14 (online):
Correlative Counter-Capture in Contemporary Art
Computational processing takes place at speeds and scales that are categorically outside human perception, but such invisible processing nevertheless exerts significant effects on the sensory and aesthetic—as well as political—qualities of artworks that employ digital and/or algorithmic media. To account for this apparent paradox, it is necessary to rethink aesthetics itself in the light of two evidently opposing tendencies of computation: on the one hand, the invisibility of processing means that computation is phenomenologically discorrelated (in that it breaks with what Husserl calls the “the fundamental correlation between noesis and noema”); on the other hand, however, when directed toward the production of sensory contents, computation relies centrally on statistical correlations that reproduce normative constructs (including those of gender, race, and dis/ability). As discorrelative, computation exceeds the perceptual bond between subject and object, intervening directly in the prepersonal flesh; as correlative, computation not only expresses “algorithmic biases” but is capable of implanting them directly in the flesh. Through this double movement, a correlative capture of the body and its metabolism is made possible: a statistical norming of subjectivity and collectivity prior to perception and representation. Political structures are thus seeded in the realm of affect and aesthesis, but because the intervention takes place in the discorrelated matter of prepersonal embodiment, a margin of indeterminacy remains from which aesthetic and political resistance might be mounted (with no guarantee of success). In this presentation, I turn to contemporary artworks combining the algorithmic (including AI, VR, or robotics) with the metabolic (including heartrate sensors, ECGs, and EEGs) in order to imagine a practice of dis/correlative counter-capture. Works by the likes of Rashaad Newsome, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Hito Steyerl, or Teoma Naccarato and John MacCallum point to an aesthetic practice of counter-capture that does not elude but re-engineers mechanisms of control for potentially, but only ever locally, liberatory purposes.
My new book Post-Cinematic Bodieshas not, as far as I know, been translated, but it is getting some discussion in languages other than English. An interview I gave recently for Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences has been circulating on other sites, including this Spanish translation. And now there’s also what appears to be an hour-long walkthrough of the book in Chinese by a Shanghai-based YouTuber.
Incidentally, a new volume is out in Chinese, titled Flash-Forward, which includes translations of a number of chapters from the 2016 open-access book that I co-edited with Julia Leyda: Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film.
I’ve been traveling a lot outside of California this summer, but whenever I get the chance I like to spend time up north in Mendocino or Fort Bragg, where my wife Karin is part of the artist collective at Edgewater Gallery.
Earlier in the summer, we observed tons of California brown pelicans and common murres (which look like penguins) camped out on some small offshore islands. The assembly has attracted a lot of attention — from locals, tourists, artists, and scientists. The local newspaper, The Mendocino Voice, just put out a long piece on the birds and the possible reasons for their convergence there, and they quoted Karin and featured a glitch collage that she did a while back.
Karin has been photographing, filming, glitching, and painting pelicans and other California wildlife for several years now. Check out more of her work at karindenson.com.
Audio of my talk on “The Future of Intelligence and/or the Future of Unintelligibility” (from the Locarno Film Festival’s Long Night of Dreaming about the Future of Intelligence, Aug. 9, 2023), followed by a conversation with Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish, is now online on the Film Comment Podcast.
I was dealing with jet lag, and it was a late evening event, so the talk gets off to a somewhat rocky start but fairly quickly settles into a groove. Devika Girish was a great interlocutor and asked very good questions.
Recently, I was interviewed by Andrew Myers for Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences. The exchange, which focuses on my recent book Post-Cinematic Bodies, is now online: here.
The following is an excerpt of my talk from the Locarno Film Festival, at the “Long Night of Dreaming about the Future of Intelligence” held August 9-10, 2023. (Animated imagery created with ModelScope Text to Video Synthesis demo, using text drawn from the talk itself.)
Thanks to Rafael Dernbach for organizing and inviting me to this event, and thanks to Francesco de Biasi and Bernadette Klausberger for help with logistics and other support. And thanks to everyone for coming out tonight. I’m really excited to be here with you, especially during this twilight hour, in this in-between space, between day and night, like some hypnagogic state between waking existence and a sleep of dreams.
For over a century this liminal space of twilight has been central to thinking and theorizing the cinema and its shadowy realm of dreams, but I think it can be equally useful for thinking about the media transitions we are experiencing today towards what I and others have called “post-cinematic” media.
In the context of a film festival, the very occurrence of which testifies to the continued persistence and liveliness of cinema today, I should clarify that “post-cinema,” as I use the term, is not meant to suggest that cinema is over or dead. Far from it.
Rather, the “post” in post-cinema points to a kind of futurity that is being integrated into, while also transforming and pointing beyond, what we have traditionally known as the cinema.
That is, a shift is taking place from cinema’s traditional modes of recording and reproducing past events to a new mode of predicting, anticipating, and shaping mediated futures—something that we see in everything from autocorrect on our phones to the use of AI to generate trippy, hypnagogic spectacles.
Tonight, I hope to use this twilight time to prime us all for a long night of dreaming, and thinking, maybe even hallucinating, about the future of intelligence. The act of priming is an act that sets the stage and prepares for a future operation.
We prime water pumps, for example, removing air from the line to ensure adequate suction and thus delivery of water from the well. We also speak of priming engines, distributing oil throughout the system to avoid damage on initial startup. Interestingly, when we move from mechanical, hydraulic, and thermodynamic systems to cybernetic and more broadly informatic ones, this notion of priming tends to be replaced by the concept of “training,” as we say of AI models.
Large language models like ChatGPT are not primed but instead trained. The implication seems to be that (dumb) mechanical systems are merely primed, prepared, for operations that are guided or supervised by human users, while AI models need to be trained, perhaps even educated, for an operation that is largely autonomous and intelligent. But let’s not forget that artificial intelligence was something of a marketing term proposed in the 1950s (Dartmouth workshop 1956) as an alternative to, and in order to compete with, the dominance of cybernetics. Clearly, AI won that competition, and so while we still speak of computer engineers, we don’t speak of computer engines in need of priming, but AI models in need of training.
In the following, I want to take a step back from this language, and the way of thinking that it primes us for, because it encodes also a specific way of imagining the future—and the future of intelligence in particular—that I think is still up for grabs, suspended in a sort of liminal twilight state. My point is not that these technologies are neutral, or that they might turn out not to affect human intelligence and agency. Rather, I am confident in saying that the future of intelligence will be significantly different from intelligence’s past. There will be some sort of redistribution, at least, if not a major transformation, in the intellective powers that exist and are exercised in the world.
I am reminded of Plato’s Phaedrus, in which Socrates recounts the mythical origins of writing, and the debate that it engendered: would this new inscription technology extend human memory by externalizing it and making it durable, or would it endanger memory by the same mechanisms? If people could write things down, so the worry went, they wouldn’t need to remember them anymore, and the exercise of active, conscious memory would suffer as a result.
Certainly, the advent of writing was a watershed moment in the history of human intelligence, and perhaps the advent of AI will be regarded similarly. This remains to be seen. In any case, we see the same polarizing tendencies: some think that AI will radically expand our powers of intelligence, while others worry that it will displace or eclipse our powers of reason. So there is a similar ambivalence, but we shouldn’t overlook a major difference, which is one of temporality (and this brings us back to the question of post-cinema).
Plato’s question concerned memory and memorial technologies (which includes writing as well as, later, photography, phonography, and cinema), but if we ask the question of intelligence’s future today, it is complicated by the way that futurity itself is centrally at stake now: first by the predictive algorithms and future-oriented technologies of artificial intelligence, and second by the potential foreclosure of the future altogether via climate catastrophe, possible extinction, or worse—all of which is inextricably tied up with the technological developments that have led from hydraulic to thermodynamic to informatic systems. To ask about the future of intelligence is therefore to ask both about the futurity of intelligence as well as its environmentality—dimensions that I have sought to think together under the concept of post-cinema.
In my book Discorrelated Images, I assert that the nature of digital images does not correspond to the phenomenological assumptions on which classical film theory was built. While film theory is based on past film techniques that rely on human perception to relate frames across time, computer generated images use information to render images as moving themselves. Consequently, cinema studies and new media theory are no longer separable, and the aesthetic and epistemological consequences of shifts in technology must be accounted for in film theory and cinema studies more broadly as computer-generated images are now able to exceed our perceptual grasp. I introduce discorrelation as a conceptual tool for understanding not only the historical, but also the technological specificity, of how films are actively and affectively perceived as computer generated images. This is a kind of hyperinformatic cinema – with figures intended to overload and exceed our perceptual grasp, enabled by algorithmic processing. In the final chapter of the book, I consider how these computer-generated images have exceeded spectacle, and are arguably not for human perception at all, thus serving as harbingers of human extinction, and the end of the environment as defined by human habitation.
At least, that is what you will read about my book if you search for it on Google Books — above, I have only slightly modified and excerpted the summary included there. Note that this is not the summary provided by my publisher, even though that is what Google claims. I strongly suspect that a computer, and not a human, wrote this summary, as the text kind of makes sense and kind of doesn’t. I do indeed argue that computer-generated images exceed our perceptual grasp, that their real-time algorithmic rendering and futural or predictive dimensions put them, at least partially, outside of conscious awareness and turn them into potent vectors of subjectivation and environmental change. But I honestly don’t know what it means to say that “computer generated images use information to render images as moving themselves.” The repetition of the word images makes this sentence confusing, and the final words are ambiguous: are these supposed to be “self-moving images,” or images that, themselves, are moving? Or do the images use information to render themselves as moving images? What would that mean? The images are self-rendering? There is a multilayered problem of intelligibility involved, despite the fact that the sentences are more or less grammatical. The semantic ambiguities, the strange repetitions, and the feeling that something is just a little off are tell-tale signs of AI-generated text. This is not full-blown “hallucination,” as they say when AI just makes things up, but instead a kind of twilight recursion, suspended between the past of the training data and the future of the predictive algorithm, generating a sleepy, hypnagogic loop or a quasi-lucid, semi-waking dream.
But that summary was generated back in 2020. Since then, with GPT and other tools proliferating, we have witnessed a quantum leap in the intelligibility of AI-generated texts. In preparation for this event, I asked ChatGPT to summarize several of my books and to explain key concepts and arguments I made in them. The results were much better than what I just discussed (even though I was using the basic version that runs on GPT-3.5, not the more advanced GPT-4). Asked to explain my theory that “media are the originary correlators of experience,” the algorithm responded: “In this context, ‘originary’ suggests that media have been present from the beginning of human existence and have continuously evolved alongside our species. They are ingrained in our social and cultural development and have become integral to how we make sense of the world. […] Whether it’s language, art, writing, photography, film, or digital technology, each medium influences and organizes our experiences, constructing the framework through which we navigate reality.” That’s not bad, and it gets at what I’m calling the environmentality of media, including the medium or milieu of intelligence.
We could say, then, that artificial intelligence technology functions as a contemporary manifestation of the correlation between media and human experience. ChatGPT represents a significant leap in the relationship between humans and technology in the digital age. As a sophisticated language model, it mediates human interaction with information, communication, and even decision-making processes. ChatGPT is an intermediary that transforms the way we engage with knowledge and ideas, redefining the boundaries between human and machine. As an AI language model, ChatGPT embodies the fusion of the organic (human intelligence) and the artificial (machine intelligence). This fusion blurs the lines between human creativity and algorithmic generation, questioning traditional notions of authorship and creativity.
The only problem, though, is that everything I just said about ChatGPT was written by ChatGPT, which I asked to speculate, on the basis of my books, about what I would say about large language model AIs. The impersonation is competent, and even clarifying, as it brings out implications of my previous thinking in transferring them to the new case. Significantly, it points the way out of the impasse I described earlier with reference to Plato’s Phaedrus: AI will neither simply empower nor simply imperil human intelligence but will fundamentally alter it by transforming the parameters or environment of its operation.
The fact that ChatGPT could write this text, and that I could speak it aloud without any noticeable change in my voice, style, or even logical commitments, offers a perfect example of the aforementioned leap in the intelligibility of AI-generated contents. Intelligibility is of course not the same as intelligence, but neither is it easily separated from the latter. Nevertheless, or as a result, I want to suggest that perhaps the future of intelligence depends on the survival of unintelligibility. This can be taken in several ways. Generally, noise is a necessary condition, substrate, or environment for the construction of signals, messages, or meanings. Without the background of unintelligible noise, meaningful figures could hardly stand out as, well, meaningful. In the face of the increasingly pervasive—and increasingly intelligible—AI-generated text circulating on the Internet (and beyond), Matthew Kirschenbaum speaks of a coming Textpocalypse: “a tsunami of text swept into a self-perpetuating cataract of content that makes it functionally impossible to reliably communicate in any digital setting.” Kirschenbaum observes: “It is easy now to imagine a setup wherein machines could prompt other machines to put out text ad infinitum, flooding the internet with synthetic text devoid of human agency or intent: gray goo, but for the written word.”
Universal intelligibility, in effect, threatens intelligence, for if all text (or other media) becomes intelligible, how can we intelligently discriminate, and how can we cultivate intelligence? Cultivating intelligence, in such an environment, requires exposure to the unintelligible, that which resists intellective parsing: e.g. glitches, errors, and aesthetic deformations that both expose the computational infrastructures and emphasize our own situated, embodied processing. Such embodied processing precedes and resists capture by higher-order cognition. The body is not dumb; it has its own sort of intelligence, which is modified by way of interfacing with computation and its own sub-intellective processes. In this interface, a microtemporal collision takes place that, for better or for worse, transforms us and our powers of intelligence. If I emphasize the necessary role of unintelligibility, this is not (just) about protecting ourselves from being duped and dumbed by all-too-intelligible deepfakes or the textpocalypse, for example; it is also about recognizing and caring for the grounds of intelligence itself, both now and in the future.
And here is where art comes in. Some of the most intelligent contemporary AI-powered or algorithmic art actively resists easy and uncomplicated intelligibility, instead foregrounding unintelligibility as a necessary substrate or condition of possibility. Remix artist Mark Amerika’s playful/philosophical use of GPT for self-exploration (or “critique” in a quasi-Kantian sense) is a good example; in his book My Life as an Artifical Creative Intelligence, coauthored with GPT-2, and in the larger project of which it is a part, language operates beyond intention as the algorithm learns from the artist, and the artist from the algorithm, increasingly blurring the lines that nevertheless reveal themselves as seamful cracks in digital systems and human subjectivities alike. The self-deconstructive performance reveals the machinic substrate even of human meaning. In her forthcoming book Malicious Deceivers, theater and performance scholar Ioana Jucan offers another example, focusing on the question of intelligibility in Annie Dorsen’s algorithmic theater. For example, Dorsen’s play A Piece of Work (2013) uses Markov chains and other algorithms to perform real-time analyses of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and generate a new play, different in each performance, in which human and machinic actors interface on stage, often getting caught in unintelligible loops that disrupt conventions of theatrical and psychological/semantic coherence alike.
Moreover, a wide range of AI-generated visual art foregrounds embodied encounters that point to the limits of intellect as the ground of intelligence: as I have discussed in a recent essay in Outland magazine, artists like Refik Anadol channel the sublime as a pre- or post-intellecitve mode of aesthetic encounter with algorithms; Ian Cheng uses AI to create self-playing videogame scenarios that, because they offer not point of interface, leave the viewer feeling sidelined and disoriented; and Jon Rafman channels cringe and the uncomfortable underbellies of online life, using diffusion models like Midjourney or DALL-E 2 to illustrate weird copypasta tales from the Internet that point us toward a visual equivalent of the gray goo that Kirschenbaum identifies with the textpocalypse. These examples are wildly divergent in their aesthetic and political concerns, but they are all united, I contend, in a shared understanding of environmentality and noise as a condition of perceptual engagement; they offer important challenges to intelligibility that might help us to navigate the future of intelligence.
On August 9, I will be speaking at the Long Night of Dreaming about the Future of Intelligence, which is taking place from dusk to dawn (8:44pm to 6:17am) at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland. I was asked to give a pithy statement of my contribution, and I settled on this:
“The future of intelligence depends crucially on the survival of unintelligibility.”
I’m still working out what this means, and if (and how) it’s even correct, but it’s prompted by some thoughts about the quantum leap forward that generative AI has recently made in terms of producing “intelligible” text (and other contents). Intelligibility is of course not the same as intelligence. Meanwhile, some of the most intelligent art using these new technologies works against the grain of “innovation,” foregrounding instead the unintelligible noise upon which these algorithms depend.
Here’s more info about the Long Night of Dreaming from their website:
On Wednesday, August 9th, “A Long Night of Dreaming about The Future of Intelligence” takes place at the Locarno Film Festival. From sunset to sunrise, Festival guests and visitors are invited to learn and dream together about possible futures of intelligence. Guided by researchers, artists, and cinephiles, these questions will be addressed: how do different forms of artificial and ecological intelligence manifest today? How might intelligence change in the future? And what is the role of cinema in shaping intelligence and rendering it visible? For the duration of an entire night, emerging forms of intelligence and their impact on society can be discussed and experienced in talks, workshops and performances.
The Long Night is a collaboration between the Locarno Film Festival, BaseCamp and the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI). It is supported by Stiftung Mercator Schweiz. The event is a successor of “The 24h long conversation on The Future of Attention” at Locarno75. As last year, it is curated by researcher and futurist Rafael Dernbach.
“Our image of intelligence has become a feverish dream, lately.Generative Artificial Intelligence has opened up a world of wondrous pictures, sounds and texts. We are astonished, amused, or disturbed by these creations. And by their loud promises of a radically different future. At the same time, ecological critique and its images of devasted landscapes, anticipating forests and networking fungi challenges our concept intelligent behavior: Have we neglected non-human forms of intelligence for too long? Might fungi be more capable of solving certain problems than human minds? Cinema, with its deep relation to dreams, has a strong influence on what we perceive as intelligence.”
During the Long Night, leading researchers in the field of cinema and intelligence such as Shane Denson (Stanford University) and Kevin B. Lee (USI) will share their research. Filmmakers such as Gala Hernández López will give insights into her work with emerging technologies. And designers such as Fabian Frey and Laura Papke will create intimate learning encounters to experience different forms of intelligence and explore its futures.
Inspired by cinema’s deep relation with dreams – but going far beyond the world of moving images – this night creates a unique opportunity for exchange about intelligence from artistic as well as scientific perspectives. It offers the chance for unexpected and memorable encounters with guests of the Locarno Film Festival. The exploratory journey starts on August 9th at sunset, 20:44 – and ends nine hours later on August 10th at sunrise, 6:17. Every full hour a new encounter, talk, performance or experience will take the lead, and visitors can join throughout the night.
The Long Night of Dreaming is open to anyone who is interested (free admission) and will take place at BaseCamp Istituto Sant’Eugenio (Via al Sasso 1, Locarno). The detailed program will be soon available here.
