◡◶▿ SOFT09 | Sentient studios
🏗️ Building a smart environment with clumsy hands. Could Kryten help your actor cry on cue? Plus: essential new Japanese cinema long read tip. | Imaginary Software of the Filmmaking Future Week 09
Hello filmmakers. Hello students. We’re three-quarters of the way through our speculative future history of AI and software-driven filmmaking. But it doesn’t matter if you missed some. You can read it later!
Last week, for example, we covered virtual appendages. And how:
The filmmaker’s mouse and keyboard might be replaced by more granular, skill-specific interfaces.
These interfaces might include substances such as non-computery as smart herbs or networked timber.
Nicholas Negroponte asked a crucial question about whether non-human intelligence (in particular: the porpoise) might understand human cinema.
AI could acquire or fabricate a body to better understand the tug and toil of the human experience.
I did mention that this week we would look at some use cases within departments. But that’s next week. First, we’ll look at how to bring AI out of its box and into the studio. This will involve briefly mentioning Negroponte and Demon Seed again. “Déjà vu.”
Make yourselves comfortable, and let’s see how:
🤖 Using robots to film the human condition creates a feedback loop in an age when the human condition is so robotic.
😔 On the other hand, maybe the robot’s awkwardness works as a metaphor for the human loneliness of the crowded film set.
📹 This awkward human-robot hook-up on the awkward human film set could make a perfect playground for absurdist filmmaking.
🔌 The smart studio or sentient filmmaking environment may require you to plug it into yourself, or plug yourself into it.
Warning: contains RUDE WORDS. Not my words. The words of Ashley Hans Scheirl. The filmmaker behind Flaming Ears (1991) and Dandy Dust (1998)
Missed a week? Joined late? Don’t worry about reading these lessons out of order. Each functions independently. They are sent in a sensible sequence but hardly reliant on it.
I’ll also tip you off to a must-read article on a vibrant subcategory of Japanese filmmaking! Good. Enticing.
Soft machines
You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.
In Demon Seed (Dir: Donald Cammell, 1978), the fictional Dr. Alex Harris invents an artificial intelligence named Proteus IV. Proteus IV sets himself the task of researching the human species. Proteus IV soon realises he cannot truly know the human condition without a human body.
But he is able to live a quite human routine by hijacking Dr. Harris's highly advanced smart mansion. A Corbusian machine for machine-living in.
Here’s a contemporary truism at play: it has become easier to give robots an authentic human experience because the authentic human experience has become so robotic.
So, how do we use artificial intelligence to create movies that help us rediscover that lost human? Perhaps we give the filmmaking software deeper access to the mush, bones, and neurones of the human filmmaker. A soft machine for robot-filmmaking in.
Cyborg hive mind
“For a computer to acquire intelligence, will it have to look like me, be about six feet tall, have two arms, two eyes, and an array of humanlike apparatus?” asked Nicholas Negroponte in 1975.
Better ask Kryten. Better ask Spock! Kryten is an android who spent the day in a human body. Spock is a half-human alien with limited exposure to the culture and atmosphere of Earth. Not so different from some of the people you meet on a film set.
Or, instead of asking, you could wait and see. Intelligent-ish software is real and it’s here. It’s “trying.” Trying to imagine how it might lean differently if it had a sensual memory of belly button fluff.
The struggle of such misfits recalls the social creative processes of the film studio. On a film set, nobody quite belongs and everything is different. But soon, the gathered human intelligences evolve and combine. This glitchy hive mind with mismatching eyelashes and dozens of stomachs barely drools its way through infancy before being ripped apart, its contaminated cells redistributed to disparate new minds and ecosystems.
So, what holds this jigsaw intelligence, this single-job human software, together? An idea? A producer? The pastry table?
Space and time. Light and touch. Hunger and embarrassment.
Things a computer cannot yet share on the same terms.
And so, to bring quasi-intelligent software into the human film studio, to the hive mind, perhaps you have to give it a taste of the pastry. A sniff of the producer. To make that possible, humans and computers must work much closer together.
Cyborganic film studio
How might you coax more organic movie materials from an artificial intelligence? You could begin by giving the AI robot sensors and appendages. Sit and play together with the clunkier and messier apparatus of the analogue film set. Motorised cameras, acoustic sound, air, fog juice, pastries, crepe paper, cardboard, flesh, and so on.
Never mind that the robot can’t feel the crepe paper in the same way as you. The robot must learn to manipulate the human’s playthings in its own way. Aping the human will only make the robot more robotic.
The AI’s naivety in mishandling these everyday substances has its own value. The intelligent robot is naive on its own terms but vastly more powerful. And so, the materials it makes (costumes, atmospheres, performances) will be powerfully more absurd. And/or powerfully inventive.
In this case, the AI’s sensors and appendages needn’t map onto the human form at all. They may be all sorts of shapes and materials and fit in all sorts of places.
Or, as Ashley Hans Scheirl suggests, “TERMINATE PRODUCTION OF COUNTLESS USELESS MACHINES AND BUILD USEFUL FUCKING ATTACHMENTS: CHROME-DILDO-MACHINES, RUBBERMUSCLES THAT GROW IN REACTION TO GUTTURAL NOISES. TOYS (BABY, MOTORBIKE, BOXER, BULL) REMOTE CONTROLLED BY FINGERS & OTHER BODYPARTS WORKING FROM THE SURFACE INTO THE INSIDES WITH RELENTLESS MOTORSTRENGTH. MICROCAMERAS! CUNT&INTESTINE CINEMA!”
The filmmaker and AI (or multiple AI departmentbots) may collaborate on designing bits and bobs in sympathy with the themes1 of the movie. These bits and bobs - sensors and appendages - needn’t form a single cohesive whole. And they may be:
free-roaming or
attached or integrated into
the human or
the location or
studio architecture or
harnessed across (or through) multiple humans with lesser or greater detachability or
modular (recombining when appropriate for coordinated or auto-antagonistic creative tasks).
You could keep them under the pastry table when not in use.
Please share your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.
“A hostile crystal jungle that sends individuals into a frenzy”
Dora Leu wrote a probing, passionate piece on a certain vein (and forking capillaries) of Japanese filmmaking for photogénie: movement through the city on or as a machine in the movies of Gakuryū (formerly Sogo) Ishii and Shinya Tsukamoto; the emergence of a gritty and situated cyber-punk that helped birth the genre’s more familiar forms.
The piece functions as both a thorough work of cinephilia and cinema history and an invigorating practical deconstruction/call to technique for the sedentary filmmaker.
It’s really, really good. A program in itself if you start digging out the films to watch. You’ll have to draw your own connections to the present syllabus at UPV. But read it! Read it!
Next week, we’ll look at some film departmental use cases. For real, this time! The electro-bird sense of the future cinematographer. The go-go-gadget arms of the ideal boom operator. Sending your editor into deep VR on a magical quest. “If you die in the game, you die in real life.” Hahaha.
Subscribe to get it, if you haven’t:
Class dismissed!
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
📹 Unfound Peoples Videotechnic | Cloud-based filmmaking thought. ☁️
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Or with the AI’s interpretation of the themes.