New tech companies such as Cinelytic, and Largo.ai are now providing Hollywood and European film companies with AI-powered solutions that will enable producers and studios to make data- supported decisions about which screenplays to green-light. Their machine learning (ML) algorithms assess the novelty and creativity of a film idea, breaks down a screenplay into its constituent data points, and revisualises the project in terms of a dashboard of metrics including character profiles and likeability, target audience, and predicted box office earnings, among others. Such platforms ultimately offer a recommendation to green-light a project or not. Industry and marketing discourses surrounding these new platforms position them as co-creators within a post-humanist understanding of creativity (Zylinska 2020). 

Drawing from the analytical framework of the ‘Lovelace Effect’ as proposed by Natalie and Henrickson (2021), which emphasises the discursive and material ways that the behaviour of computing systems is perceived by users to be original and creative, I take a relational materialist (Pajkovic 2021) approach to examine how the decision-support tools increasingly being used in the film business are framed to appear intelligent, reliable, and capable of producing creative insights that are useful to users and observers in the film industry. It is through representational and technical means where film practitioners, company founders, and institutional structures like film festivals, industry conferences, and press media attribute efficient and bias-free creativity to these tools. I also examine the claim that these tools are also framed as enhancingcreativity and argue that this is questionable insofar as such utterances obscure the fact that a significant degree of human labour is being automated. This paper argues for the necessity of film and media scholars to engage critically with the potential impacts that might arise from a non-critical reliance on such technologies in the pre-production stage to determine the viability of film projects. 

References 

Natale, Simone, and Leah Henrickson. 2022. “The Lovelace Effect: Perceptions of Creativity in Machines.” New Media & Society

. doi.org/10.1177/14614448221077278. 

Pajkovic, Niko. 2022. “Algorithms and Taste-Making: Exposing the Netflix Recommender System’s Operational Logics.” Convergence

28, no. 1: 214–35. doi.org 10.1177/13548565211014464. 

Zylinska, Joanna. 2020. AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams. London: Open Humanities Press. 

Biography 

Pei-Sze Chow is Assistant Professor of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam’s Department of Media Studies and a member of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). She co-directs the ASCA research group AI and Cultural Production and has published and given talks in London, Hong Kong, and Singapore on the emergence of AI tools used in film production.

This presentation discusses the emergent format of AR face filters and its implications in terms of the performance of the digital self and the definition of AI-driven art on social media. In particular, I will focus on the convergence of two Facebook-owned platforms: Instagram (where filters are mostly shared) and Spark AR (where they are created). 

Face filters are important because they constitute a key area of negotiation between users and digital subjects (Goriunova, 2019), but they also represent a critical strategic element within corporate investment in facial recognition, AI and AR, such as Facebook’s recent rebranding as Meta. 

The establishment of such an immersive socio-technical environment is worthy of critical inquiry for two reasons. The first is sociological: platforms like Facebook and Instagram are known to commodify user identities in several ways (Lim, 2020) and negatively impact self- image, especially for young women (Gayle, 2021); more generally, corporate platforms have a notoriously prescriptive attitude, pushing participatory ‘engagement’ as normative social behaviour (Docherty, 2020). The second reason is cultural: platforms promote AI and AR applications as creative and even artistic tools, with Facebook explicitly framing filter creators as artists and collaborating with institutions like Tate Modern. While much of so- called “AI art” is developed alongside big tech companies and is effectively already “platform art” (Zylinska, 2020), it remains crucial to investigate the everyday and artistic aestheticization of these technologies at the intersection of their strategic corporate promotion and potential socio-cultural impact. 

How is the socio-technical environment delineated through the convergence of AI and AR shaping the development of facial capture as a mediation of the self?

What type of new cultural forms emerge from face capture-powered platform art, and how are these tools used critically? 

My presentation will try to suggest answers to these questions by combining interface and cultural critique. 

Biography

Nicola Bozzi is a lecturer at King's College London. His main research interests are globalized identities and the role of art in society. He also has a newsletter about comedy, media, and culture titled Letdown Comedy. You can follow him on Twitter as @schizocities.

Visual perception as a complex phenomenon intrigues us to reveal the secret behind our understanding of the material world, toward things around us. artworks in visual arts are unique site of experimentation where we could explore the” visual perception”. In fact, it is about the way to conceive and to understand the ontological status of object in front of us, whether an artwork or an everyday object. It’s seems a challenging issue between visual arts and the perception as a complex phenomenon when it concerns artificial visual perception. In this sense perception took up a new perspective when it concern artificial field.

With the rise of new technology and it’s connection with artificial intelligence , contemporary artists are investing in this area with the variety of artistic experiences where digital, artificial and virtual reality are the main concern.

It seems important to question the intertwined relationship between visual perception and artificial intelligence in the context of contemporary art projects. How artists explore “artificial “as a field of investigation in visual perception? How “artificial” could affect our perception toward things and among artworks? In which way artworks could explore new territory about the artificial visual perception?

This paper aim to discuss through an analytical approach of contemporary artworks that invest in artificial intelligence in order to decipher the connection between the issues of visual perception and artificial one. Our paper suggests at first place that the common link between us and world is the sense of visual perception conceived as a powerful bridge between us and the world. In this meaning, we will try to trace a possible genealogy of the elements between visual perception and visual arts as an experimental area.

Key words: Artificial Intelligence, contemporary art, aesthetic, visual perception

Biography

Imen EL BEDOUI, Doctor in Sciences and Arts Techniques and Assistant Professor at Higher institute of Kasserine at University Of Kairouan since 2017, a member of Experience Research Society Finland, my research area include Bio Art and Aesthetics and Ethics issues and the question of limit.

I will talk about the role of creativity and its interpretation/misinterpretation and reception in a time strongly influenced by the "sortilege" of the Artificial Intelligence. How much AI emulates the "world of humans" and is orientated by their knowledge, mindset, history, output and behaviour? And viceversa, on which extent our technological addiction could evolve into a psychological and formal addiction?

I also aim to discuss the received idea of “nature of feelings” which stands in contrast to the AI presumed insensitivity. Qualitative characters of sensation and their anthropocentric implications such as qualia and human perception, win over the unknowable to us, noumenal entities and haecceitas (Ding an sich).

Last, I will focus on the "king of feeling": Music, specifically the composition of music. Music involves implementing a wealth of knowledge and skills including technique, craftsmanship, mathematics, auditory analysis and representation, historical awareness, abstraction from the present and intuition about the future... and much more. Notwithstanding this evidence, industry at different levels is powerfully governing the arts equalising them to the effects of algorithmic logics and big data.

Biography
Composer, organist, educator and researcher Carlo Forlivesi was born in Faenza (1971, Italy), near Bologna, and pursued studies throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s in the cities of Bologna, Milan and Rome, Paris, and Barcelona. In the realm of electroacoustic music, he has worked in Paris at IRCAM, INA-GRM (Radio France), and its Danish equivalent DIEM. His main pursuit in the years following, was traditional Japanese music and dance, including the ethnic music of the Ainu, which he has subsequently researched and practised while joining the faculty at the Tokyo Music College, the Kyoto City University of Arts, and Northwestern University. He has received a number of international academic awards (Japanese Ministry of Culture, Rohm Music Foundation, Danish Rectors’ Conference, Fulbright etc.), composition prizes and commissions (Yamaha Music Foundation, Huub Kerstens Prize at Gaudeamus, Gran Teatro La Fenice of Venice, etc.), contributing significantly to his success as one of the most interesting and appreciated artists of his generation. Over three decades, he has lectured extensively throughout four continents and pursued contrasting musical directions, composing for a fascinating diversity of ensembles, orchestras and choirs, across an impressive range of genres. He has been a Professor at the University of Sapporo, at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Stuttgart, and at the State Conservatory “Gioacchino Rossini” of Pesaro.

In the first chapter entitled “Even an AI could do that” in Emanuelle Arielli & Lev Manovich’s book Artificial Aesthetics: A Critical Guide to AI, Media and Design (2021-22), which is currently being published chapter by chapter on the latter’s homepage, Arielli notes that while some kinds of artworks with more traditional or classical characteristics seem particularly straightforward to (re-)produce for an AI, the oeuvre of Marcel Duchamp on the contrary poses a certain set of perhaps unresolvable problems. Taking its critical que from this proposition, the present paper will first discus how this on some levels might make good sense, whilst on others not—and what this tells us about how the project of artificial creativity and artificial art making currently is being perceived and pursued. With reference to Thierry de Duve (1996), Juliane Rebentisch (2013) and Andreas Reckwitz (2017), the primary argument will thus be that it is not, as Arielli claims, the heterogeneity of the oeuvre on the formalistic level, which would make Duchamp a tough case (leaving the AI with a very diffuse set of data to learn from). The problems would rather stem from the more fundamental philosophical, sociological and institutional issues that his oeuvre seminally raised concerning questions such as “what is art?”, and “what is creativity?” Building on this, I will next argue that artificial creativity/art-making does in fact raise a set of quite “Duchampian” question and speculate whether the project of forging an artificial creativity/art isn’t in fact fundamentally dependent upon the historical contribution of Marcel Duchamp (and/or those critics and academics who over the years have interpreted his oeuvre as dealing specifically with these issues).

Bio:

Jan Løhmann Stephensen is an associate professor at Dept. Of Aesthetics & Culture at Aarhus University. His research interests are cultures and practices of participation, democracy and the public sphere, creativity and its diffusion into non-art related spheres like work life, economics, policy-making, university research agendas, new media technologies, etc. He is co-editor and founder of Conjunctions — Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation.