A talk on artificial life in digital moving image Event
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- Time:
- 15:00 - 16:00
- Date:
- 17 March 2017
- Venue:
- Lecture Theatre A, Winchester School of Art
For more information regarding this event, please email Professor Jussi Parikka at J.Parikka@soton.ac.uk .
Event details
Artist-filmmaker Alex Anikina will speak about artificial life in digital moving image. Organized with the MA in Fine Art for their Talking Heads lecture series, this talk will address the cross-section of computational culture, gaming technologies and experimental film. Below an abstract for the talk and a bio.
Non-life of film: artificial life in digital moving image
In video games, we habitually perceive non-player characters (NPC) as agents, even if with limited capacity. They react, rather than act, but they do as programmed: they move. The majority of commercially successful role-playing games follow the narrative conventions inherited from Hollywood film industry; the NPS’s task, as supporting cast, is to give a believable performance in front of the human player. However, many artists and independent game-makers have used this latent agency of the automated image to suggest other scenarios, where the figure of the human player/viewer is reduced into the background, and where the image seems to have a life, or a non-life, of its own. What is the potential of moving image that has no fixed state and that, in its movement, is open to chance? This talk brings together artificial life, game AI and experimental film in order to see if this idea of liveness could enable other modes of engagement with the technological image and its affective power, as well as offer some insight into the entangling visual and computational genealogies of such works, from scientific and military simulations to rule-based art.
Bio:
Alex Anikina (b. Kolomna, Russia) is an artist-filmmaker and researcher, currently a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she is also an Assistant Lecturer in Film and the Audiovisual. She works with film, objects, software and lecture-performance. Alex participated in VI Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2015), IV and V Moscow International Biennales for Young Art (2014, 2016); her work has been shown internationally, including Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Gaîté Lyrique, Paris, Anthology Film Archives, New York, NCCA Moscow, Korean Film Archive, Seoul, and others. Recent notable shows include Will Nature Make a Man Out of Me? at Pi Artworks, London and Summer Exhibition in Royal Academy of Arts. Works are held in the collection of National Centre for Contemporary Arts, Moscow. Alex is a co-founder of Screen and Audiovisual Research Unit and a co-curator of November Film Festival. More information: http://red-in-blue.com/