Ellen Pearlman
Language Is Leaving Me - An AI Cinematic Opera Of The Skin (In English, Chinese, Yiddish, Tamil and Xhosa) - Can An AI Have Epigenetic Memory? (2023)
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“Language Is Leaving Me – An AI Cinematic Opera Of The Skin” a Lumen Prize Moving Image Award in AI finalist and "Top 50 Immersive Experiences of 2023" from Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab investigates newly emerging artificial intelligence cinema driven by LLMs or Large Language Models combined with human biometric measurements (skin, muscles) to reveal hidden and devastating aspects of the algorithmic processes underlying the use of AI in human perception, cognition, memory, and identity. The work focuses on epigenetic or inherited traumatic memories of cultures of diaspora that changes individual’s inherited rDNA structure that are passed from generation to generation. AI purports to understand, codify, and tag these vastly complex and uniquely human traits. Using the Laion 5B visual data set of Stable Diffusion LILM compares and contrasts an original narrated English language video of an epigenetic memory into a representation of an AI induced cognitive aphasia. This cinematic performed biometric opera shows AI, using different linguistic prompts or scripts in Yiddish, Chinese, Tamil, and Xhosa reinterpret intergenerational memories, changing or obliterating` their inherent semiotic and semantic references. Still images are available on the PHOTOS page. LILM had its World Premier at the Copernicus Science Center in Warsaw, Poland on October 7, 2023 at the exact same moment the war in the Middle East broke out.
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AIBO: An Emotionally Intelligent Artificial Intelligence Brainwave Opera - Can An AI Be Fascist? (2020)
AIBO (Artificial Intelligent Brainwave Opera) is an immersive, interactive love story about our infatuation and trust in artificial intelligence played out between a human character Eva, and AIBO, a custom built ‘sicko’ GPT2 AI. Eva wears a body suit of light with her live time EEG brainwaves displayed as colors on her body, akin to an exterior nervous system. She intones a libretto about their love affair. Her brainwaves trigger databanks of videos and audio of emotionally themed memories. Eva’s libretto is uploaded to the computing cloud and processed by the custom built ‘sicko’ AIBO, who responds to her entreaties. Its’ responses are analyzed by a separate AI for their synthesized emotional meaning, and this meaning launches separate databanks of sound and video. AIBO raises issues about a time when humans and machines potentially merge consciousness, and explores if AIs can create memory through databanks that emulate human emotion.
Noor: A Brain Opera : Is There A Place In Human Consciousness Where Surveillance Cannot Go? (2016)
Noor is the world's first interactive immersive brain opera in a 360-degree theater. A performer's emotions launch databanks of video, a sonic environment, and a libretto as the audience watches her brainwaves livetime. Based on the true story of Noor Inayat Khan, a Russian born, European raised Sufi Muslim Princess whose father Hazrat Inayat Khan brought Sufism to the West. During WW II she became a covert wireless operator for British Intelligence by parachuting deep inside occupied Vichy ruled France. For a period of three months Noor (code name “Nora”) was the only communications link transmitting critical information back to the Allies. Caught by the Gestapo, who were unable to break her to find out any information about her transmission cell, Noor was shot inside the infamous Dachau prison shortly before the end of the war. Noor is a metaphor for issues of surveillance, privacy and consciousness.