On November 19, André Graudreault, founder of Laboratoire CinéMédias and co-director of the cinEXmedia partnership, will be guest lecturing at Frankfurt's Goethe University as part of the "Kracauer Lectures in Film and Media Theory."
His talk, titled “Cinema’s Shifting Identities in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Or the birth of the cyborg-film,” will address the influence of artificial intelligence on the future of cinema, exploring how AI could transform or threaten methods of creation, editorial responsibility and audiovisual production, while questioning what might be lost or created in the age of the cyborg-film.
Lecture abstract:
Back when the digital wave was crashing on our shores at the turn of the century, shaking cinema’s foundations (in particular the movie theatre and the use of silver gelatin film stock), cinema was toppled from its pedestal and brought down to the same level as other audiovisual media. In the end this great equalizer, the digital, obliged the cinema to negotiate a place in the chorus of media it had hitherto dominated. We might have thought that this confrontation between what the French call the “seventh art” and these new technologies threatened cinema’s very survival. That was not the case. More recently, the massive arrival of artificial intelligence systems has posed the same question: will cinema survive and will it resist the new tsunami that the recent sudden appearance of AI, especially since its “second birth”, as I will describe it here? Hence a series of questions to which this talk will attempt to provide a response: should the quite recent arrival of « conversational text prompts » to generate audio and visual content be seen as heralding a change of paradigm and a break in the continuity of audiovisual media production? How might editorial responsibilities be divided up in the case of “human/machine” co-creation? To what extent will the future AI production chain upset habits and customs, professions and trades? To end on a high note, I will attempt to see what is being lost and what is being gained through the in a sense impromptu arrival of these AI systems, which are the most recent manifestation of a cultural series we might describe as that of the automaton and the robot, and which is in the process of giving birth to the cyborg-film.
