IDFA DocLab - How creative is AI?

'This Is Not a Simulation' is this year's somewhat challenging theme of DocLab, IDFA's department dedicated to new media and digital storytelling. Say, everything from traditional VR to theatre, interactive audience sessions and artificial intelligence (AI) in the role of artist. The latter gets special attention this year, so that's what I want to limit myself to here. But there is, of course, much more to experience.

If that theme is meant to raise questions about real and fake, imagination and reality, and the influence and possibilities of AI, it has at least succeeded. Of the documentaries in IDFA's main programme, it is usually clear that they are not simulations.

But what about such an eye-catching DocLab title as Steye Hallema's Ancestors. In which, as a viewer/participant, you move several generations into the future until you come face-to-face with your great-great-grandchild. Isn't that a simulation then? I just see DocLab curator Caspar Sonnen passing by and ask him. That this time travel of Ancestors is in itself a simulation he cannot deny, but, he stresses, the experience is real.

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Just as, I conclude, all kinds of virtual worlds, digital technologies and AI are indeed realities that are increasingly claiming their place in our world. Not to mention the eccentric philosophical notion that our entire world is actually one big computer simulation. Think of The Matrix. And isn't it also true that while feature films tell a fictional story, that fiction is part of our perception of the world? And that it can also shape and colour our perspective?

About a Hero

Good, now back to down to earth. While AI is not a brand new phenomenon, it stands out in the programming of this eighteenth edition of DocLab. Just as AI is increasingly asserting itself in the world. AI has even made its way into IDFA's opening film, About a Hero by Piotr Winiewicz. A film with which the makers take up the challenge of acclaimed filmmaker Werner Herzog. Namely that 'No computer will make a film as good as one of mine in another 4500 years'.

Entertaining, then, that in About a Hero a deep fake by Herzog is the protagonist. A detective of sorts who must shed light on the mysterious death of a factory worker in the AI-conceived town of Getunkirchenburg. The makers added documentary interviews, including Stephen Fry.

The screenplay of the fictional part is said to have been devised by an AI system, which the makers christened Kaspar. A script that takes a somewhat confusing direction, with occasional comic effect and much presumably unintentional absurdism. Best AI find is a sex scene with a toaster. Too bad, though, that the relationship between the AI and the human creators remains very opaque. At the talk after a performance, one of the producers remarked that Kaspar sometimes produced pages of nonsense. So people will have intervened there after all. In other words, I would love to see a making of of About a Hero might well be more interesting than the film itself.

AI folk songs

The AI work shown by artists in the DocLab programme tends to be somewhat less pretentious and also brighter and therefore more engaging. An installation as austere as it is surprisingly endearing, for example, is You Can Sing Me on My Way, by Seán Hannan. A mysterious sphere from which traditional Gaelic-Irish singing sounds.

But take note: these songs may be a dying tradition, but what we hear here is brand new. In fact, the lyrics have been devised by an AI specially trained for this purpose. And visitors can see the English translation on their smartphones. As a closing line, for example, I read 'With the flowers of the duck, creating the lovely, the air is filled, with honey and blooms. And the city is rising with the love of the arts.' If that is not a brave attempt at poetry.

Other installations also show examples of AI-created work. If you put on the headphones at Drift by Dutch trio Nienke Huitenga, Hay Kranen and Lieven Heeremans, you will hear a future podcast created with the help of AI. Including news reports from a Netherlands almost vanished due to rising sea levels.

Gregor Petrikovic had authentic recordings from his own audio archive full of conversations with family and friends illustrated by AI. In Sincerely, Victor Pike, this produces wonderful, dreamlike images. Sometimes you can imagine that this might be how our own memory and imagination work too. Sometimes, too, it looks downright bizarre, with cars flying through the air, for example. Perhaps the way AI works comes close to the surrealists' imagination driven by free, automatic impulses.

AI sees you

But the most fun or intriguing experiences with AI are, of course, with more interactive productions. What is undoubtedly going to be a hit is AI & Me. A stunningly simple installation by artist duo Mots. You sit in a chair and allow yourself to be viewed by the camera-eye of an AI, which then produces a description of you based on your appearance. This can turn out rather provocative or uncomfortable, be suspicious of that. I myself had no complaints. The AI estimated me almost 30 years too young, and noted, based on my short-shaven beard, something about wisdom that typos can't prevent anyway.

The fact that this AI also called out TikTok to me made no sense, of course. You can see it as a joke, but what is going to happen when an, undoubtedly crammed with prejudice, AI in our society is given more and more roles like this?

Tips

Promising (not yet done myself) is Future Botanica by Dutch Polymorph and Studio Bleu (winner of the Filmfonds DocLab interactive prize 2024). A kind of augmented reality-app that lets you walk into the garden at the new DocLab location @droog and create new, virtual forms of nature. Starting from the idea that nature, human needs and technology are not separate systems.

For more interactivity, playful experiments and also conversations with makers, there is - new this year - the DocLab Playroom at De Brakke Grond. On Tuesday 19 November dedicated to AI.

Finally, I would also have liked to have tipped the partly AI-driven Ancestors, the new production by Steye Hallema's Smarthphone Orchestra. A surprising group experience in which audiences armed with their own smarthphones gradually become one big family and travel together into the future. However, all DocLab performances are already sold out. But it will undoubtedly pop up somewhere more often. Keep an eye on it.

One last tip then: I am very curious about the new show by the always sensational company Ontroerend Goed, specialising in a kind of mind games with the audience. Thanks for Being Here has nothing to do with AI, but with the illusion of a shared perspective. This combination of video and theatre forces the audience to face the fact that we all have our own perspective, background and measure of things.