Unlinking Causal Chains: The Poetic Potential of AI Cinemawriting
Submission Type
Paper
Start Date/Time (EDT)
18-7-2024 2:15 PM
End Date/Time (EDT)
18-7-2024 3:15 PM
Location
Algorithms & Imaginaries
Abstract
The rise of AI cinema arts marks a significant moment in the evolution of narrative form and the expressive potential of cinema. This paper revisits 'cinemawriting', a concept with origins in the silent cinépoèmes of 1920s France, evolving through the avant-garde and auteur movements of the 1960s to 1980s, and into Net Art and contemporary electronic literature. The term cinemawriting denotes writing that blends human thought with machine processes. While “screenwriting” is an early industrial stage of this human-machine creative process, cinemawriting involves the dynamic of human poetic imagination with the improvisational nature of machine-human interaction. A shot of a tree swaying in the wind is a machine-facilitated contemplation of the world, creating signs from the interplay of light and sound. The art of cinemawriting lies in the combination of shots and their integration with other sign systems like language. Digital cinemawriting introduces nonlinearity, indeterminacy, and algorithmic manipulation. With networked digital devices, cinemawriting becomes a personal, embodied, and ritualistic act. AI cinema tools expand this technical fusion, enabling language to generate imagined audio-visual experiences. Writing with multimodal AI tools becomes both a cheap fantasy generator and a machine for navigating the imaginal: forms and archetypes drawn from a digitized and accessible collective cinematic unconscious.
This paper explores the poetic potentials of AI cinemawriting through the process of making "Posthuman Cinema," a collection of ten AI-generated cinépoèmes by Will Luers, Mark Amerika, and Chad Mossholder. The lineage of an experimental cinema art, one that embraces the machine’s contribution to the creative process, was the inspiration and backdrop for the creation of “Posthuman Cinema.” It is a contemporary reinvention of 'cinepoetics' where the combination of text, moving images, and sound creates a multimodal poetic narrative that does not depend on casual chains or the construction of an objective three-dimensional world. In this creative context, the power of AI tools offers a medium through which the audio-visual imagination can navigate beyond conventional storytelling toward a “rewilding “of cinematic form, creating experiences that are as spontaneous and unpredictable as nature itself.
Recommended Citation
Luers, Will, "Unlinking Causal Chains: The Poetic Potential of AI Cinemawriting" (2024). ELO (un)linked 2024. 4.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/elo2024/algorithmsandimaginaries/schedule/4
Unlinking Causal Chains: The Poetic Potential of AI Cinemawriting
Algorithms & Imaginaries
The rise of AI cinema arts marks a significant moment in the evolution of narrative form and the expressive potential of cinema. This paper revisits 'cinemawriting', a concept with origins in the silent cinépoèmes of 1920s France, evolving through the avant-garde and auteur movements of the 1960s to 1980s, and into Net Art and contemporary electronic literature. The term cinemawriting denotes writing that blends human thought with machine processes. While “screenwriting” is an early industrial stage of this human-machine creative process, cinemawriting involves the dynamic of human poetic imagination with the improvisational nature of machine-human interaction. A shot of a tree swaying in the wind is a machine-facilitated contemplation of the world, creating signs from the interplay of light and sound. The art of cinemawriting lies in the combination of shots and their integration with other sign systems like language. Digital cinemawriting introduces nonlinearity, indeterminacy, and algorithmic manipulation. With networked digital devices, cinemawriting becomes a personal, embodied, and ritualistic act. AI cinema tools expand this technical fusion, enabling language to generate imagined audio-visual experiences. Writing with multimodal AI tools becomes both a cheap fantasy generator and a machine for navigating the imaginal: forms and archetypes drawn from a digitized and accessible collective cinematic unconscious.
This paper explores the poetic potentials of AI cinemawriting through the process of making "Posthuman Cinema," a collection of ten AI-generated cinépoèmes by Will Luers, Mark Amerika, and Chad Mossholder. The lineage of an experimental cinema art, one that embraces the machine’s contribution to the creative process, was the inspiration and backdrop for the creation of “Posthuman Cinema.” It is a contemporary reinvention of 'cinepoetics' where the combination of text, moving images, and sound creates a multimodal poetic narrative that does not depend on casual chains or the construction of an objective three-dimensional world. In this creative context, the power of AI tools offers a medium through which the audio-visual imagination can navigate beyond conventional storytelling toward a “rewilding “of cinematic form, creating experiences that are as spontaneous and unpredictable as nature itself.
Bio
Will Luers is a digital artist, writer, and educator specializing in recombinant, computational, and AI cinema arts. His work and collaborations have garnered international recognition and been featured in festivals and conferences such as the Electronic Literature Organization, FILE(Brazil), and ISEA. "novelling," a generative work made in collaboration with poet Hazel Smith and sound artist Roger Dean, won the 2018 Robert Coover Award for Electronic Literature.
Luers holds an MFA in Film from Columbia University and has taught cinema history, theory and practice for over 20 years. He has maintained a particular research interest in web-based video and has published numerous essays about evolving forms of digital cinema. He was awarded Best Screenplay at the 2005 Nantucket Film Festival, and in 2010, a fellowship at the Vectors-NEH Summer Institute for the development of his database video documentary, "The Father Divine Project."
Luers teaches web development, digital cinema and multimodal publishing in the Creative Media & Digital Culture program at Washington State University Vancouver. He is the founder of the international online journal, The Digital Review, and will edit its 2024 issue on AI creativity. Luers is also the current Managing Editor at the electronic book review.