Game Design

When: October 27th, 2018, 2:00 pm to 3:45 pm
Where: Toni Kino, ZHdK
*Free entry. No ticket needed. *

In 2016, a screenwriter called Benjamin arrived on the movie scene with a debut short film called Sunspring, featuring Thomas Middleditch (star of HBO's Silicon Valley). The film caused quite a stir. Not so much because of the mysterious storyline or the garish gold costumes. But because Benjamin is a machine. Specifically, a long short-term memory recurrent neural network Artificial Intelligence. We’ll explore what it took to build Benjamin, what we made next, and what it means to collaborate creatively with A.I..

Film Screenings of the short films «Sunspring» (2016), «It's No Game» (2017) & «Zone Out» (2018). TFollowed by a Q&A with the artists Ross Goodwin & Oscar Sharp. Special guest: AI Benjamin

Hosts: Christian Iseli & Maike Thies

This event is part of the conference Expanding Immersive Design. Find detailed information on the programme here.

Sunspring (2016): The first film ever written entirely by an artificial intelligence: Benjamin, an LSTM Recurrent Neural Network.

It’s No Game (2017): A film about Benjamin co-written by Benjamin. Featuring simulated Shakespeare, simulated Aaron Sorkin, and simulated David Hasselhoff (performed by David Hasselhoff). Also features machine-choreographed ballet.

Zone Out (2018): Benjamin’s third film, and our most adventurous experiment. Featuring the 3 actors from Sunspring (Thomas MIddleditch, Elisabeth Grey, & Humphrey Ker), who allowed us to upload their performances into public domain film scenes using a faceswapping AI. Also features a music generated by JukeDeck’s composer AI, created by reading Benjamin’s screenplay.