Techart Conference

Christine Reeh-Peters (Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf, Germany)   

■ Abstract

This talk is summarizes a recently published article article which considers film as a form of artificial intelligence (AI). This non-anthropocentric hypothesis was first formulated in 1946 by filmmaker and theorist Jean Epstein and regards film as the thinking performance of a technical apparatus, the cinematograph, which is a manifestation of machine thinking based on the holistic entanglement of thought and world, film and philosophy. The article pursues an enquiry into ‘thinking’: one of the most prominent and oldest topics considered in philosophy, and also essential to art and film. Thinking is not only characterised as a sense (like sight or taste) but as a creative and, ultimately, intra-active act. The possibility of film as AI is approached not only from a Deleuzian angle, long appraised by film-philosophy, but also through questions recently raised by theories of artistic research and the speculative-materialist turn in contemporary philosophy. The latter have as a common denominator a strong critique of anthropocentrism in Western philosophy; the article enquires into this criticism from different angles and applies it to the main hypothesis of this analysis – to regard film as a form of AI.

■ Bio

Christine Reeh-Peters is a German filmmaker and philosopher living between Berlin, Karlsruhe and Lisbon. She is Junior Professor for Theory and Practice of Artistic Research in Digital Media at Filmuniversity Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF, Potsdam, with a PhD in Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics from the University of Lisbon. She is also head of the IKF - Institute for Artistic Research at Filmuniversity Babelsberg. She is producer and filmmaker at C.R.I.M. in Lisbon as well as editor of several anthologies and one monograph on film-philosophy. Christine explores the complexity of narration, place and image as well as the links between philosophy, film and artistic research.