Visions of the Future: Then and Now | Q&A with filmmakers

Okay, do you want the bad news? Or the good news? Well, first, the good news is you're here. You made it. Thank you for coming. Um the bad news is we're 9 to 2 or 2 to 9, I guess is what I should say. So, you made the right choice because there's no uh more baseball in this Yes, so I apologize for being rather casual about it, but here we are. My name is May Hong Ha-zong. I'm the director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Welcome to the first night of Future of Reality uh screenings co-presented by Locarno Film Festival, Swiss Next San Francisco, and the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television. Let's give all our partners a round of applause. We have another screening tomorrow night in this series as well as daytime events in the Future of Cinema Symposium held on UCLA campus. Please visit cinema.ucla.edu for more information on these events. All of the screenings at the Wilder are free thanks to a gift from an anonymous donor, and we're grateful to them for their support. To our staff, the students uh working theater, our projectionist, and um programmers um who worked on this. So, thanks to all those folks. Um just sharing a little bit about how we got here. Earlier this year, the archive was invited by our esteemed colleagues in the School of Theater, Film, and Television to collaborate on a screening series showcasing works for the Locarno Film Festival in recent years alongside materials from the archive's collection. So, you saw a little trailer about the archive. Everything that was in that was something that we preserved, that staff did work on, that the technical detective work, finding elements, working with filmmakers, restoring those films. All of those clips were from our tremendous history. So, we're excited to showcase some of them tonight as well. The curatorial team, Evelyn Kreutzer, Kevin B. Lee, Chris Revetto, Biag Biagio Lee, sorry, and the archives team, Maya Montañez Smuckler, Mark Quigley, and Nicole Useto worked together to select moving image media on the themes of automation, the future, and new technologies. Building off of Kevin and Evelyn's work in the Locarno Future Reality Conference, were the experimental and innovative short films that we're including tonight, which will expand on themes around the uses of AI. We worked to connect these contemporary works with moving images from the 20th century from the archives holdings that portrayed Americans in the pre-internet era discovering and experimenting with technologies. TV episode of Sorry. There's a TV episode and then also several Hearst newsreels which will screen with the Locarno shorts throughout the evening. Unfortunately, we don't have the filmmakers from the Hearst newsreels which would be William Randolph Hearst potentially or and I'm blanking right now on the name. Rod Serling will not be here, but the other filmmakers will. So, that will be exciting. We're pleased to partner for the first time with Locarno and Swiss Next San Francisco as well as our continuing long-standing partnership with the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television. The archives roots run deep with TFT where we were founded some 60 years ago. We're thrilled that Dean Selena Perenius Shimizu recently joined UCLA and we're honored that she came to join us tonight. So, Dean Celine, say hello. We want to thank everyone who worked on this program including Lucas Higen, Emma Borgini, Evelyn Fritzer, Kevin B. Lee, Chris Rovetto, uh Biagio, um Amy Viarengo, Maya Montemez, Meckler, Mark Quigley, and Nicole Usedo. Um Nicole and Maya put in a lot of work as well on the series. I just want to give them a special thanks and shout out. Please be sure to stick around after the screening for a Q&A with curators and filmmakers moderated by one of um by both of tonight's um two representatives from Theater, Film, and Television, uh the School of Theater, Film, and Television, um Chris Rovetto and um of course Amy Viarengo. So, to say a few words about uh the collaboration and how we got here will be both of them. Let me just briefly introduce them. Um uh Chris is a professor of film, television, and digital media at UCLA. She's the author of Unmaking Fascist Aesthetics, My My Mythopoetic Cinema, Digital Uncanny, the forthcoming The Trouble of Ghosts, and she researches and teaches in the areas of film, digital media, dance, copyright, surveillance, and ghost effects. Um Amy is a professor of film, television, and digital media at UCLA. She was previously the Frederick J. Whiton Professor of Humanities in the Department of Performing and Media Arts um at Cornell University where she taught 1997 to 2020. She's published widely in cinema and media studies including Lesbian Rule, Cultural Criticism and Value of Desire, which won the Katherine Kovacs Award for best book from SCMS, and her essays have appeared in a range of peer-reviewed journals including New German, Critique, Social Text, GLQ, Film Quarterly, Cinema Journal, uh which is now JCMS. Please join me in welcoming Professors Chris and Amy to the stage. We have a little bit of thanks to do, too, so bear with us and and then just a little bit of a statement about the series in general and what we hope that we can get from the films that we're going to watch tonight. So, first of all, I'd like to thank Kevin B. Lee at the Università della Svizzera italiana and the Locarno Film Festival and Evelyn Kreutzer, both of whom you'll see their work tonight, but they were really instrumental in getting this whole collaboration together. I'd also like to thank Emma Lucas Hagen with Swissnex, Maya Montes-Muxler, and Nicole Ucedo with the UCLA Film Archive, along with Kevin and Evelyn. They curated this wonderful series you'll see for us. And I'd personally like to thank my colleague and co-organizer Amy Villegas who originally supported this program when she was chair and our current chair Fabienne Wagmister for his continuing support. Additionally, we'd like to thank our program coordinator Brian Brown and our graduate student coordinator here Teo Evans from Film and Media Studies. They are the ones who worked behind the scenes to make everything run smoothly. We'd like to say just a few words about why we think this is such an important topic and why it is crucial to have creative artists, scholars, and people working within AI industries collaborate in a meaningful discussion. A recent study by Michael Gerlich, the head of the Center for Strategic Corporate Foresight and Sustainability, quite a title, at the Swiss Business School, has found that increased reliance on artificial intelligence tools is linked to diminished critical thinking abilities. His research and related studies at MIT, Brandeis, and Carnegie Mellon suggests that many users of AI channel these resources into passive consumption that is driven by AI-enhanced content curation. This trend aligns with findings on digital dependence, such as what Chen Gong and Yang Yang call the Google effect, where the convenience of AI fosters a feedback loop that prioritizes entertainment over critical engagement. AI is very good at offering us any type of content that we can imagine or desire, including generating AI girlfriends, boyfriends, or interlocutors of all sorts. The question for us is how can we make sure this entertainment does more than turn us into passive consumers. A key concern is what scientists call cognitive offloading, where humans might become overly reliant on AI, leading to a decline in our ability to perform cognitive tasks independently. Just as muscles can weaken without exercise, cognitive skills can deteriorate if they are not regularly used. I hope tonight's films can offer us some thought-provoking insight into how we might critically engage with AI, big data, and cloud computing. Thank you, May. Thank you, Chris. I join Chris in thanking our colleagues for their support and an extraordinary collaboration. One quick emphasis that I wanted to add in advance of our screenings is this. The overall approach to AI in our corner of academia has been instrumental. Our Infotech employees conduct regular briefings on how I AI is making an impact on arts education or they conduct workshops such as one this very week about AI in the classroom quote to learn, reflect, and exchange ideas about how AI is shaping how we teach, design our courses, and assess student work. This weekend screenings and conversations promise a different route whereby programming and art are understood themselves to think and help us think about reality. The questions with which we grapple here are less on the order of how do contemporary films and artists use AI though surely they do and more like all great discussions about art how do these films help us understand and navigate massive transformations on every scale in every domain in our world. We look forward to the conversation to follow. Please enjoy the screenings and we'll introduce the artists before we resume the stage. So thanks so much. What an amazing selection. Thank you so much to um those who took part in the curation of that. Um please join me um and Chris and Amy on the stage um who are going to start a conversation with the three filmmakers from tonight's program. Allison de Fron is a filmmaker, video essayist, and scholar whose work explores the intersections of sexuality, gender, film, media, and science technology with a particular focus on how earlier conceptual histories and audiovisual practices inform contemporary representations. For over a decade she's been making, writing uh making, writing about, and teaching video graphic criticism with her work featured in venues ranging from classrooms to galleries to international festivals to the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum. Uh Kevin B. Lee is a filmmaker and media researcher who has produced nearly 400 video essays exploring film and media. His award-winning um Transformers: The Premake introduced the desktop documentary format. His work has screened at the Museum of Modern Art at the Berlinale, uh Rotterdam, as well as what websites such as the New York Times and Mubi. He is the Locarno Film Festival Professor for the Future of Cinema and the Audiovisual Arts at Università della Svizzera Italiana. Um his new film Afterlives recently premiered at the BFI London Film Festival and Doclisboa Documentary Festival in Lisbon. And finally, Evelyn Cruzen uh Cruzer is a media scholar, video essayist, and curator at um also Università della Svizzera Italiana. I am so sorry. Um uh where she co-leads the SNSF-funded research group The Video Essay: Memories, Ecologies, and Bodies with Kevin B. Lee and Johannes Binotto. She is interested in audiovisual memory and we can use and and we can use different film genres to activate and reflect upon it. Um her newest research project focuses on AI's impact on audiovisual memory. Her first book, Televising Taste, which consists of both written and videographic components, will be published by Lever Press next year. Please join me in welcoming our panel to the stage. I feel like I'm the newcomer um because you all have been immersed in a practice of videographic criticism, of thinking through a set of formal aesthetic political commitments through this work. They shine most powerfully tonight to me around feminism. Um and maybe we we would want to start there. Um but I I wonder if we could just start by talking a little bit about the form of your work about desktop desktop documentary about compilation, about all of the kind of things that that inform this practice. I guess that's maybe a place to start. Okay, I'll I'll I'll offer a first thought. Um yeah, I've been practicing video essays since about 2006 and for me it's always about how to use um film and media in such a way that it can reflect critically upon itself. Um and I mean given the the the works that we just saw just now. Um I like to think of this whole program actually as a a video essay in itself. Like just using these newsreels um and presenting them in such a way that we actually provoke a critical awareness that they did not intend but that we are able to um recognize. And um and and yeah, you're right that there are basically kind of two halves of this program. This first half is very strongly has these feminist um considerations, you know, even if these these works definitely do not the the Twilight Zone and the the newsreels. Um and then the second half is about more focusing on AI. Like how do we use AI in such a way to reflect on itself? And I really see your work, Allison, as kind of a hinge between these two and it's really that moment. I this this this this phrase has stayed with me ever since I first watched your video essay, how the fembot in a red dress can actually be an opportunity to spark a moment of critical hesitation that okay instead of just falling for the fembot in the red dress we actually have to kind of be taken aback and reflect and this has been such a a key concept for me in thinking about what my own practice wants to achieve and I think with these AI works cuz yeah we were in a session this morning and there was one one student who said like you know what do you think you're doing even using AI you should not even be using AI at all like it's so it's so problematic for so many reasons but for me and I think for our research group it is about okay AI is AI is here you know it's it's upon us and how can we actually use it in a way that can spark a critical hesitation I think that's what these last works do and kind of continue this video graphic um practice that I think you you've done so well as well Or maybe just talk about the humor and and and some of the ways that we can connect with the machine by sexualizing it and that sort of was a theme through some of the work too and then possibly you know your work is not humorous and it's dealing with memory and sort of questions of ethics um what would that connection be for us then to enter it Well I think it's also um my immediate response is well are we sexualizing women by turning them into machines right and I think that's um that's something that runs runs through the program and through the whole um conference and and series um is this this question of how does a focus on technology automation AI change the way that we perceive that that isn't technology AI etc including ourselves including identity uh etc um and in all of that yeah I I I agree it's it's a it's a curatorial practice making a video essay, it's a curatorial practice, putting a screening like this together. Um and I think a lot of this sort of ironically in the AI context has to do with pattern recognition. Um you All of a sudden you notice recurring patterns. Uh I mean um I was very involved in putting this program together and today I was like, "Oh my god, there's so much smoking there." I didn't realize how many cigarettes were involved in all of this. Um that's it's it's kind of wild. Um also maybe we should briefly mention what we made cuz I realized you don't have credits in in your piece. So So Kevin Kevin made the um Well, you can say it yourself. >> an excerpt from a feature film that just premiered uh that's looking at the legacy traces and effects of extremist propaganda that I was engaged with like a decade ago and just seeing how it can be found in um certain people who've been exposed to it, what they're doing now, and also yeah, how it's found on the internet when so much of it has actually been removed. And so this this excerpt um looks at how AI has um become an unintentional archive for ISIS propaganda. I think I'm going to uh uh speak personally um about my own piece um and where it comes from. So this piece began um I was doing a dissertation on representations of artificial women in art, film, um and popular culture. And as I was doing it, I was also working on a documentary um about uh people who were attempting to create the perfect woman in the industrial robot and life-size sex doll industry. These two things were happening simultaneously. I somehow imagined I could bring them together um as my doctoral work. And at the time theory practice um my I mean my program was was uh like many like many doctoral programs at the time were interested in in bringing theory and practice together but but actually didn't know quite how to support that kind of work. And so these two projects remained fundamentally different. They just remained they informed one another but they remained separated and I ended up um so this was actually the first video essay ever made and it came after doing a workshop at Middlebury College in videographic criticism. And it was like suddenly I found the way of saying everything I couldn't say in 250 pages and in an hour and 20 minutes. Somehow I just got it all down. And in some ways I do I see this as a kind of feminist practice for me. It's like it is a practice of pattern recognition of thinking by doing of speaking in different registers. Some of them are humorous, you know, um of of speaking and pacing and in music. I mean I loved Evelyn's piece. Um for me it's just a a beautiful example of of um uh um musical thinking. And and so I what I what I feel most about this practice is it's a way of expressing in a variety of different registers that we don't often get to express in as um as scholars. Um yeah, I made the the short video to let out of the world um with all the libraries black and white um shots of of imaginary libraries and this was uh inspired by um to let me know what do you want the famous French essay film from 1956 by Alain Resnais. Um, and that film um which is really a pair with another essay film he made um Nuit et Brouillard about the Holocaust uh and the atrocities of World War II. Um, and that but that film is on the surface level is about the French National Library and how the archive works and how knowledge is stored. Um, but of course thinking that through the lens of the post-war moment and and a crisis of knowledge and archives or this idea of what does it do to us to remember from our mistakes in history when clearly we're not remembering it properly. Um, and so yeah, 1956 is also um the year in which the term artificial intelligence was used for the first time incidentally. So, I thought, well, um I mean I I don't want to draw any great historical parallels here, but we're clearly also in another moment of crisis around knowledge, archiving, memory, how we understand history, how we forget history, how we can or cannot trust historical documents and film as an historical trace of the past. Uh, so I wanted to reimagine that film um through this new moment of of crisis uh and um use AI generative AI to produce a visual around what these imaginary libraries of artificial intelligence might might look like. Um and yeah, though actually the score was entirely analog uh was just me messing around in a synthesizer, but it was also a little bit like I'd just gotten that synthesizer and I thought I I have to master this machine while I'm trying to master um the AI machine as well. Just as a footnote, Evelyn, you have a book forthcoming um that is a synthesis, right, of videographic criticism and um traditional writing or whatever we call that now. Has have things changed since Allison was struggling with that combination of theory and practice in graduate school? It feels like maybe not entirely. Um I mean it's based on my dissertation, but I finished the dissertation in traditional a written form 5 years ago and back then I I did my video essay work on top of it or on the side. Um but then I I kind of let it rest for several years during my post doc and uh eventually actually figured okay, this is the right way to come back to it is by joining it with my practice in in in video essays and turning it into a multimodal book. It's also a book about music um and I I I had a very similar experience to what you describe Allison. There's just something to being able to show um engage with experiment with literally play um that can be so musical in a way that like length lengthy descriptions um just don't quite do justice to and yeah. So it it turned out to be um a book that is both uh 300 pages of written text for those who like to read and a total of 2 hours of video essays for those who like to watch and listen. Can't wait. Could you say um something about your personal voices cuz all three of you sort of featured your own voice in each piece? Uh yes, you like that was not your voice, but there was a voice there and that voice literally sounded like a honey kind of voice in it is so it's >> it's generated. It's the that the voice came from the original film extracted with AI, but that yeah, that's the the only indexical trace of the original film. Okay. So just that that in there you're you're actually invoking some form of memory, but the rest of you are invoking a form of memory and images that as you pointed out in your work are getting a little out of control. Right? They're monstrous future speculative images and your voice is sort of or the voice of your indexical trace is trying to sort of contain something. So, maybe you could speak to that. >> just say that Yeah, nice that you put it that way cuz then in that way you can sort of think of the voice at least in my film as a sort of navigational device or a sense-making mechanism. It sounds but yeah, cuz it it go kind of goes between subjective and objective registers. Like on the one hand I'm I'm reporting facts but then it's coming from a voice that is uh delivering some kind of affect. I mean, there's I don't know what what what it sounded like hearing my voice in terms of what sort of feeling it was giving off. Um not quite objective. Not like these, you know, middle-aged white guy voice-overs in these like newsreels. It's a It's a very I mean, it's really interesting to have that as like a reference point. Like that was what was normal uh voice-over, documentary voice-over, newsreel voice-over back in, you know, for like half a century. And so, how does my voice in this particular example uh compare? What is it doing differently? And um yeah, and it's it's definitely performing a a kind of disturbance. Like I am disturbed by what I am discovering. Um but at the same time I'm also considering, okay, how do I how do I convey that to the audience without, you know, disturbing them excessively? Um just keeping them in a certain position of of critical engagement. Again, it's about critical engagement. Which I think emotion and affect does have a role in in determining. So, and and you know, it's it's part of the the dramatization of it. So, yeah. It's uh it's understanding how the voice works as an instrument. Um I know Allison, this is something that you've you've thought a lot about as well. >> Actually, when my when my video started, I leaned over to Kevin and said, "I hate my voice in this." And you you wrote about my voice in this, too, I think. >> Yeah, yeah. Um I mean um I have struggled with my voice um in in video essays. Um what what I feel like I was trying to do in this video essay was um um express uh perform a kind of grain, grain of the voice. And and and I'm really um projecting from my lungs. And there is a little bit of a a kind of sexy lilt as I'm talking about the femme bot in a red dress. And I'm attempting to um produce something, you know, very very female and very human. Um yeah. It's interesting. The The video essay I made after this was about um uh Ex Machina. And and uh Kevin commissioned it when he worked for Fandor. Um and the Fandor put it up on YouTube. And it's the only video I've ever created that sort of went viral. And um and I think a lot of it had to do with Ex Machina, but um it's and it's the only video I've ever had to spend on YouTube. And there were all of these comments. And I would say a good quarter of them were about my voice. And it was so exceptionally It made me feel so vulnerable. And, you know, some people loved it, some people hated it. There was a whole thing about whether I was a robot or not. And and I I can't think of a single male video essayist who's who's even had a comment about his voice. And I I just realized, "Wow, even if it's just your voice, it's to make a video essay is is quite a to put something out is is gendered if if it if that voice is female. Well, it also makes me just just think about how how many male voices we've heard in our screening tonight and how few female voices and yours is really the the strongest presence there. I mean, with the I I um the Twilight Zone episode, obviously, we don't hear her voice. We uh that's quite meaningful, the the famous disembodied voice. But yeah, I mean, this is an obvious point about your your video, but a really important one, I think, to hear a female voice lead us through this incredible pattern across decades, across art forms, uh and across so many scenes of robotic women being moved around and being pointed at by by male scientists um essentially mute and and without agency. Who have a robotic response, though. I mean, I think that's the point of it. It's it's interesting. I mean, I have to say something about that Twilight Zone episode, which is awesome. Did it you you Did you choose this episode, Evelyn? Mark Quigley uh suggested it and we're very grateful for that. Yeah, to a certain extent, in a way what I'm trying to work against is the sort of stereotypical um analogy between um female sexuality and the machine in such a stereotypical way. Um and I would I couldn't help but think when I was watching that Twilight Zone episode, it came out in the early '60s. So, at that time, the vast majority of programmers were female. But you wouldn't know that from watching it. It's like it might as well be, you know, I Dream of Jeannie or or another um magical female uh sitcom. As were many, many film editors and uh video essays essaying above all is uh editing as well. Yes. Just saying that's a a shortcoming on the part of the writers and the producers of the show that they were playing on some sort of stereotypical assumptions on who's who's doing scientific work. Um that they just >> and whether they're sexy or not, too. Poor Wally Cox. I know we're old enough to know who Wally Cox is. Marlon Brando's best friend. I think we should open up to audience questions, but we have to be able to see you guys, so. There's a question here. And do we need a microphone for somebody here? Yeah. So, in the front. And I'm sorry I I can't see some I just want to say this was amazing seeing all of this um uh just learning and about the history and and current events and such, but I think the one that struck me the most was Evelyn's um video essay. Um when you're talking about all the knowledge and where does it go and it's just like never-ending how much knowledge we can consume or just that is where do you store it all. And then there was this image of like uh I don't know, big structures, grid-like structures that were emptying and you were like going to where does does it all go? And it reminded me very much about what is happening today with data centers that are going up all over in this country and a lot of people don't know about it, but it is happening now and it is something that needs to be paid attention to in the matters of what it does with you know, climate change change, depleting water supplies and they put these up so fast, like almost overnight, and in the poorest regions where people don't have enough time, so it just really brought home that point to me in a way >> you. Yeah. That That was That was an important thought thought of mine as well when I when I when I made it and in part it's there's this idea I mean I one of the many experiments I started with was to Google stock images that appear when you look for artificial intelligence. What What are the images? What are the visuals we associate with it? And it's it's very much related to what what Kate Crawford calls the the myth of clean tech. It's these like light light configurations or like a visual representations of a human brain with dots going off. We've seen a lot of that here, too. And or the idea of a data server um as as this isolated clean thing. And this is of course all completely divorced from the actual resources and the very real physical sites in which all of this stuff is happening, which really don't get represented. So I instead of going into into those actual visuals, I wanted to represent the flatness and and porousness of the clean version that we that we have of it or the the surface aesthetics of both AI and the way we think about where AI is located. It's wild in a way you can draw an arc backwards from that to it was also reminding me of um and I don't know if anyone's familiar with this with Vannevar Bush's As We May Think. So this was an essay that came out in the Atlantic in 1945 a few months before um the atom bomb was dropped and he was basically raising the question what are we going to do when the war is over? And um what are we going to do with all that data? And he imagined this machine that could sit on your desk that you could interact with and it would contain all of the information in the world and um, many people felt that he envisioned the future of the internet. Um, and he was the father of the military-industrial complex. So, everything he imagined, you know, was made true by DARPA. There's a question here. Hi. I had a question for Kevin and for Evelyn, um, but also anybody who wants to talk about it. Um, specifically Evan Evelyn, your film made me think a lot about like AI slop on vertical video um, platforms like TikTok or Reels and like we were someone brought up pattern making before and you can definitely see in a video essay that's quite intellectual the same vein as something that's like generated and thrown up online with not much thought put behind it. And I think that could say the same thing for the images that we watch be generated in Afterlives. So, I was curious if you all have thought about those things or if you see those parallels at all or if that feels totally separate. Um, I was just curious. Are you basically asking how is our work not slop? I'm curious if you know of it at all or if you think of it. >> eye of the beholder. Is that your response? >> even a I mean, was slop even a thing when you were making your work? I mean, it really kind of blew up over the summer, I I'd say. Yeah, I think I think I'm not sure. I may have not have come across the term by then, but um, so I wasn't consciously dealing with slop, but what I really did want to engage with was was this the the surf the flatness the flatness of AI. Um, flat temporality, uh, flat worlds, flat spaces. Um, in our uh, panel uh, today it's part of the conference, um, this idea of coherent or incoherent world-building came up. Um, I mean, AI filmmaking tools are developing rapidly in this regard, but at least at the time when I made this, um, I I was just struck by how by the absolute incoherence of, um, of or the fragmentization of audiovisual material when you work with these tools. You create a clip, then you try to change and then it just changes other stuff in your clip. And and by the time you found the thing that you wanted to create, you've exponentially just blown up I I don't know how many how many, um, images yourself. So, it's it's working with absolute abundance and, um, and and still you you keep that that hierarchical temporal, um, spatial flatness. And and that's something that I wanted to engage with and that, um, for me also of course metaphorically speaks to, um, the perhaps the flatness or the the incoherence of the knowledge that we're that we're saving here. There's something aesthetically interesting about some of the slop. You know, if you think of the Vertigo piece and the way that Scotty is deconstructed and Madeleine is just like a monstrous figure along with what Kevin's sort of presenting with these ISIS images that are one could say slop, but there's something really provocative about that that this cleaning up of the world is not going to produce in the same manner. It's just going to look more real than we do. And there's something much more unsettling about that than the slop. Yeah. What I would propose and yeah, thank you for bringing up Johannes's Vertigo piece. I really wish he was here to talk about it. Um, I think what that that piece does and what Evelyn's piece does and what I hope my piece does is uh generate um a dual consciousness or a a consciousness of a reality, an image reality beyond the image that you're seeing, that the image that you're seeing is referring to another image field, another another image reality that may have come before that I think um AI slop uh kind of numbs us to or or doesn't want us to think about. When you see, you know, Michael Jackson dancing with Jake Paul in an AI slop, are you are you thinking about things such as uh image rights, rights to a a person's image, or to how how it's being generated, who's who's uh exploiting this image to whose benefit. Um another another field of considerations that I think we need to hold onto. And and I think that's what your piece does so well. Like it keeps us thinking about a larger frame around the woman the fembot in the red dress. I think yeah. Um you Johannes' melting montage also, and that's what he calls it in in vertigo. It's also just um really hones in on uh how gi- given how the given that AI filmmaking tools are being developed to be more smooth, more realistic, more perfect, etc. um it's up to artists and and and critical makers uh and creatives to um find and perhaps expose and play with the glitches, uh the mistakes, uh the errors, the disturbances, the the uncanniness and doppelgangers. Um I think we've seen this across across the works today. Um and really uh use these tools against themselves or to reflect upon them and and and to expose them from from within uh and and perhaps use them against what their um developers uh would want them to do for us. And that's that's I think that's a really important political, also feminist uh um glitch practice. Over here. Question for Kevin. >> Oh, hold on for the microphone. >> Who's actually erasing the images when it comes to ISIS images and how does AI archive the images if they're erased? Well, AI feeds on image sets like the stable diffusion for example. Of course, like I'm a bit jet lagged so I forget the name of the the data set. I think it's like Leon. Uh is this image set that was, you know, they're basically doing web crawling for years before platforms such as YouTube or even Internet Archive started taking more strict content moderation policies. So, you know, all of this was basically vacuumed into the image data set that then trained stable diffusion. And then then there was a much stricter policing of the internet afterwards and it's based on each individual platform, but I think there was kind of like a a widespread, you know, cleaning up or sanitization of the internet that took place starting maybe 2018 or 19. So, that leads to this odd situation where yeah, these these image sets which I mean thanks to this one website project by Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst called have I been trained.com which was actually intended to protect artists' rights. Like it was meant because they they're artists and they noticed that their work was being um used or referenced in AI generated images and they were wondering how this is possible. So, they started this project that kind of created a a partial sampling, not a full sampling, but a partial sampling of the Leon data set that allowed artists to just kind of search their own names and see what images had been used to train um stable diffusion. Um but in in so so it was meant to protect artists, but actually in doing so you could actually see all kinds of images that were being used to train, including ISIS images. And so, that's how I that's what I used to kind of reverse engineer this trail of what images might have gone into feeding the ISIS vocabulary of um of generative AI. Okay. Can you put your hand up? Hi. Um a lot of this sounds more interesting than I feel it may be in reality. Um and I I know I noticed in the discussion about the fembot, which I liked, um somebody said encountering this uh you know, artificial representation of whatever can create a critical hesitation that comments on itself or something to that. Okay. Um would you like to just define critical hesitation and talk about its good points and its bad points? Because, you know, I it's nice it's nice to throw a word like that or a phrase like that out and it sounds very impressive, but unless you're dealing with people and you may be dealing here with people who are far more into this than I am. Uh and so, I I'd like some of the terms defined. And also, I would say as a present as a pre-presentation piece it would be useful because I'm I'm not certain which piece each of you made. And and so, you know, it would be nice to have, "Hi, my name is Joe, and here's my presentation." But I I realize that would take more time, but it would also connect the artists. Although, in the discussion, I think we know kind of who made to what. Uh but you don't know that going in. Um I can begin. Um I'm Allison. I made the fembot piece, and um I really believe there is a critical hesitation in all three of our pieces um in different ways, but in in terms of the fembot, um if I were going to put it simply, I would say this. Um A lady in red, you know, a femme fatale, is the if a femme fatale on film or or on the street, her purpose is really to create the sort of swivel and ogle of the male gaze. It's like, "Woo, there she goes." Um and then if you take an artificial woman and you put her in a red dress, you create that swivel and ogle, and then there's a but wait a minute. >> She's mechanical. >> But she's mechanical. And that's the moment of critical hesitation. Because on the one hand, you know, you're you're um you're having a sexual response, and on the other hand, you know, a variety of other things might be kicking in, like your Judeo-Christian fear of being attracted to inanimate objects. Um And and so there's this As opposed to other What What other cultures? Well, there are other I Okay, we won't get into that, but but but so there's there's a moment of contradiction, and um and an inability to reconcile that moment. Um and so part of what I was trying to do in that video is um and you know, when I was talking about I was able to do in the video what I wasn't able to do in my dissertation and and um in my documentary um there was a place where I really wanted to you know, many people were speaking about fembots as just you know, the latest greatest objectification of women and and in some ways it's true. It's a female object, but um I I kept feeling like there's there's more to say about this. It's doing some cultural work that I'm trying to get at and in the process of just looking at a series of fembots in red dresses, I I was finally able to to get to it rather simply. Um and I would say in many of the pieces that you saw tonight, there are these moments of irreconcilability. And that's the moment of critical hesitation. In the cultural history that she lays out. Watch the Ted Turner colorized version. We're going to take another question if that's okay with you. Here in the in the center. Um watching these works and seeing the generative AI one thing I wonder about and maybe this more towards the future is do you see like more bespoke video experiences for people like guided by artists to happen? So everyone watches, you know, a film but it's all generated for them and their desires and their likes. But maybe an artist isn't a guide the style or guide the action. Do you ever see something like that happening where you know, your piece is not going to be static. It's going to be changing with it, you know, newer technology and generation of AI based off of people's the viewers experiences or desires. Well, that's a very open question cuz then well, what what are the outcomes of that? Is it that okay, each viewer can derive their own insights or takeaways from it. So there's not like So it's just customized to one's own biases or or desires. Like what what is the >> And but be guided by, you know, an artist. So like a you know, artist might think I'm going to have this be an experience where you're going through a cave and discovering your childhood. And however it happens, it happens. But that's that's the experience I'm going to guide you through. And you know, the AI itself can say, I know your childhood. I'm going to generate these images based off that. And have the but still have the artist's intent of this is what I wanted to happen. Well, I know there's a lot of um speculation or assumptions about that that being one of the directions in which AI filmmaking might go is that it's kind of like choose your own adventure. We'll cater um you know, um 8 billion different versions of a given film to 8 billion different people. Um perhaps not exactly in the sort of Freudian way that that that you evoke. Um but then I mean as a as a film scholar, my immediate response would be but we're already doing that anyway, anytime we watch anything, right? Like all of all of us in the room have had uh individual specific We've watched the same thing on screen, but we've had individual subjective experiences, associations. We've you know, as spectators, as as humans here in this room, we all we fill in the gaps in between the different parts we've seen and and in between the frames. So, um yeah. It's already here. Maybe we have time for one more question and we have to let these wonderful people go to sleep because they've come from Switzerland, so. Is there one more question? Oh, there's someone in the back that I can't see. Well, if there's no questions, let me make a comment on the the what the guy just said. Um I'm a print uh I I'm a uh I want to make a comment on what the guy said since there's no more questions. Uh I'm a print graphic designer and so I'm used to uh choosing the font, choosing the size, choosing everything. Uh but in the in now that there's websites, I don't get to choose the font. I don't get to choose the size. And so, as a designer of websites, I have to recognize that part of it's going to be me doing the design, but part of it's going to be the viewer choosing certain things. And so, it's it's a combination of both. So, perhaps that's the future. All right. Thank you. >> actually did have one more question over there. >> are okay staying up for a couple more questions? Yeah, yeah. I There was one hand over there. Yeah. Um I just wanted to ask about uh you discussed it a little bit the cleaning up of the internet and I think it goes into like the 2010s, uh someone who grew up during then, there's a lot of intense imagery on the internet, very easily accessible. And in the last 5 years, there's been an incredible sweeping off of that, but yet not to pick out any specific examples, you know, you go on the internet, extreme videos still show up and everyone sees them now. And so, I I it very interesting that you How do you reckon with the fact that I think that those images were considered a dehumanization of many people, the fact that we were able to access them so easily. But now there's an added layer of the unreal and maybe even delegitimization of actual violence that has occurred now that it might be easily made to be a fake version of what was a real incident. Yeah. It it it offers a new definition of what we mean by violence. Like it's a different and that's that's what um is mentioned towards the end of the the excerpt is that it's a new violence upon the indexical value of images themselves. Like there's like less and less of a reality basis for the images we see and so that I think that is exercising a certain violence on on history, on memory, on our cognitive abilities to make sense of what we're seeing. So I I personally find myself more challenged than ever to make sense of the images that I encounter online. Um to the point that it's like why why am I you know, does it even make sense to be online anymore? Um So There's also something really interesting about um when you're speaking about imagery um representations of technology and technologized images about um where the human is hidden and this is this just making me think about I don't know if anyone's seen The Cleaners about the people who actually clean up the imagery who who tend to be in developing nations who get paid very little who are experienced in um PTSD often from having to I don't know if this is the way the ISIS images are cleaned. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think we're going to say goodnight and thank you to these wonderful panelists.