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ABSTRACT
This article analyses the frameworks of co-creation between artists and AI in the context of documentary studies. As a result of emerging AI-focused experiments in documentary and transdisciplinary arts practice, we examine the nature and scope of AI as a collaborator with a focus of documentary projects exhibited and showcased at international documentary festivals. An introduction to emergent creative possibilities is made in light of non-humanism and new materialism while presenting the implications for emerging documentary forms and formats. The AI-as-medium approach allows reflection on documentary genres through the limitations and possibilities of algorithms. With the experiential turn in arts, coding has become a means of producing novel experiences. This has led to the emergence of documentary projects at the intersection of human and machine collaboration. The article addresses how operating within AI has wider consequences for collective intelligence by going beyond the visible and locating itself in the ontological. Scholarship concerns are outlined when exploring algorithms in terms of agency and autonomy and consideration of how they have come to affect our socio-cultural fabric. Coding Reality: Implications of AI for Documentary Media further discusses documentaries which were created in close collaboration with AI.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Deep Learning refers to algorithms making adaptive changes and decisions independently like the human brain.
2 The book was released by the publisher Jean Boîte Editions in 2018 as 1 the Road where the team of Ross Goodwin, Kenric McDowell and Hélène Planquelle are credited as ‘contributors’.
3 Google’s open source research project Magenta invited musicians to generate music by using AI. Artists modified, performed, and tested the tracks to give feedback for evolving AI. This speaks to an iterative process of learning and collaboration. Claire Evans, lead singer of the American dance-pop band YACHT, who worked with AI to make songs reckoned how algorithms produced melody while the human collaborators were responsible for creating arrangement and performance of songs. However, writing a song with a cohesive structure is a focus of current experiments at Magenta.
4 Rodriguez (Citation2020) refers to cognitive scientist and political thinker Noam Chomsky as the foremost ‘digitised person’ of our times.
5 Intent analysis helps to understand the underlying intention of messages sent by the user in a conversation by focussing on predetermined keywords.
6 Timnit Gebru who was earlier working as Team Lead for Google’s ethical AI team has produced groundbreaking work on discrimination against women of colour in facial recognition systems. She postulates how feeding biased data sets to algorithms results in reinforcing human bias as prevalent in our socio-cultural systems.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Anandana Kapur
Anandana Kapur is founder-director Cinemad India, a media startup that focuses on media literacy and digital storytelling. As a documentary maker and researcher she focuses on gender, disruptive technology, social change and culture. Anandana has taught documentary making and ethical design in both formal (post-graduate programmes in media/communication) and non-formal (grassroots level) spaces. She has been a recipient of the Fulbright Fellowship and the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute doctoral grants for research on co-creation and interactive documentary media. Anandana curates non-fiction and has served as jury at the Japan Prize, Prix Italia and INPUT. Her current work as a recipient of the India Foundation for the Arts is an exploration of how AI backed AR/VR platforms inform and invigorate public art.
Nagma Sahi Ansari
Nagma Sahi Ansari is an Assistant Professor at the National Institute of Fashion Technology (Kolkata, India). Her work as a practiced-based researcher seeks to better understand how these images of self, which circulate instantaneously across a number of platforms, are received and understood by multiple audiences in local and global contexts. She has previously worked for the news organisation Times of India and the feminist literary journal and platform Manushi. Her interest in AR/VR and AI has led her to both create and curate scholarly and creative papers as well as experiential pieces on digital identities. Also a cinema enthusiast, her work as a script-writer for documentary films discovers various themes around gender, society and cultures. Nagma was also the recipient of the Shastri Indo-Canadian grant for doctoral research.