Deep Learning (DL) processes are entering all human activities, including the cultural and creative industries. The traditional circuit in the audiovisual sector of production, distribution and consumption has been profoundly impacted by Deep Learning. Recent advancements are propelling the synthesis of images, audio, prose, and other forms of texts as “AI-generated media”.

We aim to discuss DL’s implications on the production side of the cinema and audiovisual sector to serve as a case study of the DL impact in the realm of creativity and creative work during the screenwriting process.

At the heart of this research is an artistic project: Within the scope of modern Natural Language Processing, we will use GPT-4 as a collaborative AI in order to produce an artistic output: A 3-part mini-series screenplay.

Within each of these productions, the participants, together with the AI will respond to a given theme that relates to our interactions with AI.

This project will present an interdisciplinary and artistic pilot project, congregating a team of filmmakers, film studies scholars, philosophers, and sociologists. We aim for an inclusive approach to develop different models of collaboration. In this project, the team aims to discuss the artistic, technical, pedagogical, social and political implications of using machine learning in the process of writing a screenplay beyond the opportunities that startup companies in the Silicon Valley are promising.

From this artistic project, a broader approach will unfold starting from the question, that emerging technologies always deal with the unknown and unforeseen. Accordingly, we propose to critically question and discover the creative potential of collaboration with machines. There is a constant reflective exchange between the artistic project and the critical approach, where we seek to understand how the role of the creator is changing. 

We consist of a variety of researchers from different disciplines and with distinct academic interests. We value this diversity and propose a methodology for working that allows for group debate and reflection in repeating stages during the research. We also decided on the three themes to allow our individual expertise to intersect in different, and hopefully surprising ways. This transdisciplinary approach will be framed as a type of co-creation which includes machines.

From the perspective of philosophical fields, such as “philosophy of art” as well as “philosophy of technology” our objective is to examine the nature of creativity, the differences between simulation of creativity and creativity itself, and what is it that is actually being created in a “natural language processing” (NLP) system.

From a sociological side, our objective is to re-think authorship and the way creativity is organized. In this respect, we also aim to consider the material and political implications of the use of A.I. for artistic production, considerations that go beyond questions of authorship in order to examine the ways in which the consumer also becomes producer.

From a pedagogical side, our objective is to study the creative potential of AI together with BA students from the different educational institutes affiliated to this research. Through LARPing workshops, we aim to generate cross-cultural input for the project, while also creating case-studies of this student-AI-collaboration.

Machine Acts – Creative Collaboration with GTP-3 will run 20 months from June 2022 till December 2023 under the Horizon Europe project FilmEU_RIT (H2020: 101035820).

people

Tobias Frühmorgen – UL
Head Researcher and Coordinator
Research areas: Storytelling, Artificial Intelligence

Kasper Jordaens – LUCA – KULeuven
Research areas: Artificial intelligence, sonic explorations

Veronica Romhany – LUCA – KULeuven
Research areas: Self-reflective collaborative art practice

Carina Erdmann – LUCA – KULeuven
Research areas: Game Design, Non-linear Narration, Metaphysical Worlding

Rita Grácio – UL
Research areas: Sociology of arts and culture

Liina Keevallik – BFM – Estonia
Research areas: Philosophy of Art; Philosophy of Technology

Frank Maet – LUCA – KULeuven
Research areas: Philosophy of Art; Philosophy of Technology

Vincent Thornhill – LUCA – KULeuven
Research areas: Computational photography, Automation

Dirk Hoyer – BFM – Estonia
Research areas: Screenwriting, Utopian studies, Artistic Research

CVs

TOBIAS FRÜHMORGEN is a filmmaker, researcher and film lecturer.

As a film lecturer, he teaches in Creative Production and European Film Heritage, and project tutoring and thesis supervision at Lusófona University Lisbon (PT) for the European Master Program KinoEyes (PT_UK_EE_IRL) as well as the Master Film Studies and Cinema Bachelors and Green Production / Green Consultant. He also works in exchange programs like Looking China (PT_CN_KOR_RU_HU_BRA) and research programs like Crescine (PT_LIT_BEL_CRO_IRL), Filmterm (EE_FI_DE_PT), future.film.education (DE_HU_PT), CAccelerate (FI_PT_BEL_EE), Cyanotypes (DK_PT_IRL_AUT_NL_CZ_DE), and FilmEU Research-Innovation-Transfer (EU). Since 2020 he is also part of the curriculum, pedagogy and artistic research development of the European Universities Alliance for Film and Media Arts – FilmEU  and FilmEU+ as well as project supervisor for a yearly pilot and coordinator for the joint research project (PT_BE_EE) on Screenwriting and GTP-4. From 2021 onwards, he is researching on his artistic based PhD at the Filmuniversity Babelsberg (DE) about “Artistic Artificial Intelligence – Writing a screenplay with AI“.

Tobias is and has been working as a film lecturer at many universities and academies, amongst them the RuhrUni Bochum, MetFilmschool Berlin, Dekra University for Applied Science, Schnitt-Akademie Berlin, and the Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität Munich. For 10 years he has been the leading lecturer of the film department at Athanor Akademie Germany.

His artistic works as a director and/or editor include a variety of feature films, short films, television, art and music videos. His film Menschenkörper (2004) was screened at more than 25 festivals worldwide. Among his editing works is the restoration and re-editing for Yilmaz Güney‘s YOL – The Full Version (2017) which premiered at Cannes Film Festival 2017, followed by screenings in many more cities like Ankara, Göteborg, Hong Kong, Lisbon, Berlin, Moscow and Yerevan.

Tobias also works a story analyst for international feature screenplays and is a certified Green Consultant for film productions.

ORCID: 0000-0001-6133-8302

RITA GRÁCIO is a researcher at Lusófona University, where she also teaches Organizational Behaviour, Organizational Communication, and Skills’ Management. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Exeter, on gendered socio-musical practices. Her MA in Sociology has looked at how web 2.0 changes the production and distribution of writing. Rita Grácio has been a researcher for several projects in the fields of arts and culture funded by the Portuguese National Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), such as muSEAum (Lusófona University); YouSound (NOVA University of Lisbon); New Poetics of Resistance (Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra); and The History of the Visual Culture of Medicine in Portugal (NOVA University of Lisbon). She is also a researcher for filmEU and filmEU_RIT.
ORCID: 0000-0003-4917-0353

VINCENT THORNHILL is a designer, educator at Design Academy Eindhoven (NL), and PhD student at LUCA School of Arts (BE). His design and research practice explores the ways in which emerging technological infrastructures re-shape our experience of the world, each other, and ourselves, with a focus on digital imaging technologies and AI systems. His work takes the form of visual and written narratives, including guided meditation of the virtuality of our senses (One with Representation, Salone del Mobile, Milan, 2017), short fictions on the autonomy of technology (The Bestiary of Autonomous Machines, 4th Istanbul Design Biennial, 2018), and the use of deepfakes to introduce notions of institutional doubt (Digital Dilemma – The Architecture of Trust, Bureau Europa, Maastricht, 2019). As a mentor in the Information Design Masters at the Design Academy Eindhoven, he helps students to challenge prescribed narratives about emerging digital technologies; opening space for alternative understandings of, and potentialities in this technology. His PhD research investigates how visual, and ideological ideals manifest within the programming of data-driven image optimisation processes.
ORCID: 0000-0003-3280-2203

VERONIKA ROMHÁNY is a multidisciplinary/media artist based in Brussels, Belgium. Her current doctorate research at LUCA-KULeuven(Belgium) aims to create a rhizomatic, gamified research catalog to visualize interdisciplinary, collaborative creations and monitor how do they shape the relation and interdependence between knowledge production and the production of subjectivity through their artistic practice. She is also an active member of a Hungarian DIY artist group and artist-run gallery, MŰTŐ, a member of KULeuven Digital Society Institue, and the Hungarian Studio of Young Artists’ Association. She has been working as a mentor at Game LAB, Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange between 2021 and 2022, and based on her research focus, as a Ph.D. junior researcher she is involved in three FilmEU pilots.
ORCID:0000-0002-3961-307X

KASPER JORDAENS is a  technology researcher at LUCA school of Arts. After his studies of civil engineer-architect at Ghent university, he was using his computer knowledge in the studio of Wim Delvoye to explore creative possibilities of technology in the processes of art creation. This was continued in the VRT Medialab, a research unit of the public broadcaster in Flanders where he pioneered in the research of internet technologies in mainstream media creation. Following some restructuring, from media and arts into software and  hardware research at iMinds and later imec. From there with a bag full of technology expertise, Kasper moved back into the field of the arts coming to LUCA school of arts where he focuses on researching Artificial intelligence and XR technologies and their creative applications. He tests these technologies in his own artistic practice ranging from graphical works to sonic explorations where he also questions the role of these technologies in society.
ORCID: 0000-0002-0936-6450

CARINA ERDMANN works as a multimedia artist, researcher and mentor in Game Design at LUCA School of Arts in affiliation with apass (advanced performance and scenography studies) and School of Commons. Her collaborative practice explores the hybridization of online gaming and performance, interactive, non-linear narration, and collective worlding as a tool for critical thought. She has founded 0ct0p0s.net, a research site for embodied and pervasive gameplay.

LIINA KEEVALLIK PhD has studied scenography at Estonian Academy of Arts and holds a PhD from the University Paris 8. She has done set and costume designs in Estonian theatres as well as abroad (France, Belgium, Spain, Norway, Lithuania), her works ranging from big operas to underground avant-garde. She has written and directed visual performances. Her latest creations merging art and scientific research are Cloud Opera (2019), juxtaposing data clouds and atmospheric clouds, and It’s Time To Fight Reality Once More. Sentimental Education for Robots (2021), written by AI and performed by robots. She has also worked for film – designed feature and puppet films and directed short films and documentaries – and written texts for theatre, song lyrics and film scripts. She currently works as a freelance in Paris and Tallinn, pursues her research in MEDIT, BFM (University of Tallinn) andteaches scenography at Estonian Academy of Arts. She has participated in the international media archaeological research project Deceptive Arts (Les Arts Trompeurs) and she has been curating the pre-cinema department of the Estonian Film Museum. She has just been nominated for the best Estonian stage designer 2021 for her latest opera design L’enfant et les sortilèges (Estonian National Opera).

DIRK HOYER is a screenwriter, researcher, filmmaker and Associate Professor at BFM in Tallinn. As a director of several documentaries, writer of award-winning screenplays and academic articles, Dirk’s expertise revolves around storytelling, political imaginaries, and film history. His latest book, “Retopia – Creating New Spaces of Possibility” was published by Routledge in 2023.

FRANK MAET is a lecturer in philosophy of art and philosophy of technology at LUCA-KULeuven (Belgium). Before specializing in philosophy, he followed a training in performing arts (‘acting’) and studied visual arts (‘moving image’). He published on contemporary art theory (Danto, de Duve, Fried), contemporary artists and designers (Sikander, Murakami, Snibbe), and philosophy of technology (McLuhan, Latour, Stiegler, Nancy, Verbeek). Currently his research focuses on the question how art and aesthetics can contribute to the understanding as well as the further development of the digitization. He supervises PhD’s in the arts, focused on the interaction between Philosophy, Art and Technology, and hereby art is used as a research-tool to explore the complexity of a technology. He was involved in the professional scientific research-project “Digital designers: co-creators of participatory democracy”. Furthermore, he holds public lectures on “Philosophy of the Internet”; “Artists as Educators of Robots” and “In Search of an Ethics for Human-Computer Interaction.” He is a member of the KULeuven Digital Society Institute.

contact

info@machineacts.com

FILMEU – The European University for Film and Media Arts
#Project: 101004047, EPP-EUR-UNIV-2020 – European Universities, EPLUS2020 Action Grant

FILMEU_RIT Research | Innovation | Transformation#H2020-IBA-SwafS-Support-2-2020, Ref: 101035820

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