AI Film Screening: Critical & Creative Reckoning with Generative Cinematography | Seattle, WA

Public screening of student films made with generative artificial intelligence on 3.12.24

On Tuesday March 12, I am organizing a public screening of student films made with generative AI, as part of a research group on generative cinematography that I have been directing this quarter. Over the past few months, 20 students in the group have been making films that critically and creatively reckon with AI for film production.

The films investigate how AI is increasingly generating moving images, screenplays, and sounds, as well as supporting post-production. They grapple with how AI threatens to undermine artists and the humanistic craft of filmmaking (as recent Hollywood labor strikes have made clear). They also probe machine learning data ethics, as well as algorithmically-biased representations, narratives, and sounds. At the same time, however, they explore how AI might lower barriers to entry for low-resourced amateur and independent filmmakers. They also experiment with reappropriating AI to expose its harms and prefigure alternative futures. By situating AI in the historical context of prior technological shifts (ongoing crises of the image, alleged “deaths” of cinema, and associated labor struggles), they work through and against how it troubles film production today—examining who and what gets lost, invisibilized, and spectacularized in the AI filmmaking process.

If you’re in Seattle, join us at Suzzallo & Allen Library on March 12 from 2-4 pm for the screening, free and open to the public in Allen Auditorium. I hope to see you there!