Our path leads through the poetry of machines,
from the bungling citizen to the perfect electric man«
Dziga Vertov, We. Variant of a Manifesto, 1922

The term «artificial intelligence» was coined 68 years ago, but despite the rapid rise of neural networks today, it is safe to say we still do not fully understand what AI truly is. John McCarthy, who introduced the term, wrote in 1956: «The problem is that we cannot yet characterize in general what kinds of computational procedures we want to call intelligent. We understand some of the mechanisms of intelligence and not others. Intelligence is the computational part of the ability to achieve goals in the world.»

Since the film festival is primarily about cinema, we decided to explore the possibilities of AI as a “computational part”within our ability to solve artistic tasks. We sought to understand what artificial intelligence is capable of as our ally, collaborator, and creative competitor.

The CyberEye programme consists of three parts:

— The Neural Network Film Laboratory, named after Dziga Vertov, where directors and video artists will spend four days learning how to interact with neural networks, under the guidance of Andrea Gatopoulos, a tutor from the NOUVELLE BUG art residency in Italy;

— a series of lectures dedicated to AI;

— a section of films created using neural networks.

This last part features the following works: Maiko Endo’s Jizai offers a futuristic (or perhaps not-so-futuristic) story about a child and a neural network teach each other. St. Petersburg’s Vladislav Rumyantsev takes us back to the mythical 1976 with Leningrad 76. Year of the Dragon, while Miléna Trivier’s Algorithms of Beauty animates herbariums collected by an English botanist 300 years ago. Yana Cherkasova collaborates with artificial intelligence to write and create a fantastical (or perhaps not-so-fantastical) film titled ecocalypse, Coralie Gourdon, amidst the sleepy snores of dozing online gamers, explains the concept of time to a neural network in Time Sensitive Characters. The programme also includes two films by our Lab’s host Andrea Gatopoulos: Happy New Year, Jim, an existential drama in the ’machinima’ genre, and Eschaton Ad, where an apocalyptic film is interrupted by an unusual advertising integration. Finally, Jeppe Lange’s Abyss demonstrates a neural network in action, tasked with finding similarities between 10,000 random images.

Mikhail Zheleznikov, Katerina Parkhomenko,
Programme Curators