Computers Watching Movies, films seen from digital entities

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“Artificial” is a term whose meaning has evolved from defining non-natural things, to distinguishing things so close to nature that confusion ensues. This is leading to frequent cultural confrontations between humans and machines, as “Computers Watching Movies” by Benjamin Grosser proves. This artwork shows through a series of sketches how a computer-based vision system sees a famous movie scene. Questioning differences with us as humans driven by narrative, personal history and different pattern recognition abilities, the work also describes an uneasy scene: a movie purposely constructed to capture the imagination of a human audience being viewed by a silent other. Emotion, symbolism, metaphors and random associations are alien to the machine, which analyses on its own terms. Could film critics learn something new from this alternative methodology? We think they’d probably give it a try…

 

 

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