Gallery 15

AIDOL focuses on the dynamic between humans and artificial intelligence. The film reflects on a common fear provoked by new technology—the threat of human obsolescence. It stars Geomancer, or Geo, a former weather satellite that descends to Earth to pursue its dream of becoming the first AI-based artist. To advance its goal, Geo writes a song for Diva, a formerly successful pop star struggling to create new music with mass appeal. Using its advanced computational abilities, Geo scans Diva’s song catalog to create an amalgamated composition that listeners perceive as a hit.

They Took the Faces from the Accused and the Dead . . . (SD18) continues Trevor Paglen’s investigation into the political dimensions of artificial intelligence. Paglen is concerned with the data sets developed to train AI systems and the biases, errors, and ideological positions built into them. He is particularly interested in image sets that represent and interpret human beings, which have been used to train facial-recognition software.