BLIND BIDDING

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  Blind Bidding | 2017

The ‘viewer’ has never been a neutral category, and in an era when large multinational corporations like Netflix derive not only actors but also themes from personalized data, this trend will only accelerate in the coming years. Blind Bidding is a project which uses a fictitious story to speculate on the exploitative use of big data, automation and prediction models which influence the form of mainstream visual culture. The project’s main, yet invisible, protagonist is the late director Victor Fleming (1889 - 1949) who was the author of blockbusters during the Golden Age of Hollywood, such as Gone with the Wind or The Wizard of OZ. Half a century after his death he becomes the main character in a lucrative experiment in which the film studio decided to have an AI create new films on the basis of his older works. The project includes a number of segments which develop on the individual aspects of the story of his digital exhumation. _____________________________________________________________________ Trailer(2016) _____________________________________________________________________ In collaboration with the programmer of machine learning Petr Švarný and scriptwriter Andrea Jaroušová we made a trailer for one of his potential films, the input being provided by the annotations of the director’s previous films. _____________________________________________________________________ Public presentation The Movies of Tomorrow(2017)_____________________________________________________________________ https://cs-cz.facebook.com/events/413620522354315/?active_tab=discussion _____________________________________________________________________ I organized and wrote a script for the staged presentation of this fictitious project detailing the use of artificial intelligence in Hollywood, which took place in Balling’s Hall (part of the National Technical Library). The event had two parts: Ian Mikyska in the role of developer presented a project about Victor Fleming. The second part featured a discussion between Ian Mikyska and Matěj Strnad (Head of Curators at National Film Archive in Prague) which dealt with the project’s ethical questions, for example interrogating whether V. F. would have supported the project. _____________________________________________________________________ Blind Bidding Film (2017) _____________________________________________________________________ The film Blind Bidding connects the previous work into a suggestive, almost dreamy narrative. Through a presentation format similar to a Ted Talk we are shown a story of the digitally exhumed V. F. and the resulting trailer. The whole video thus builds on the digital nether where the pixellated clouds of new forms of intelligence congeal and dissipate. As if we were bearing witness to a situation where the images cease to be representative but become a thought process in and of themselves. Can these be new forms of beings? And what, after all, is so artificial about intelligence? _____________________________________________________________________ Blind Bidding does not speculate about the form of the future but about its contemporary distribution and about those who have the right to manage it. Whether we consider them alive, dead, human or inhuman agents, they are constantly visible in thel field of our everyday existence.