I’ve been working in some aspect of the film business for far too long, but what brought me into it was my interest in where the future of art was going as the moving image blended with computers the web and new technologies. And that’s what’s been fascinating me more often as of late than anything in the traditional film world. What’s been happening in the past few months, weeks even, in AI and generative art, and how it overlaps with traditional arts and film in particular, has been pretty incredible to watch. I’ve been too busy in this older (dying, crumbling?) film world to participate in it directly – I haven’t taken the time to learn Midjourney or use Dall-E. And while I’ve been following what people are doing with virtual production or other technologies which will soon merge into this space, I haven’t had a chance to play around with them. Heck, I don’t even own a VR headset, and can’t barely bother to use Facebook, much less get into Mark’s version of the metaverse. But all these spaces, combined, consume my thoughts when I’m not on some Zoom with a client, or busy trying to help bring a little indie film to reality (as I’ve been doing lately, but that’s another post).

In brief, that’s because I got into all of this as a student of Greg Ulmer at the University of Florida, who was a theorist who proposed the idea of society moving from orality to literacy (Walter Ong) to what he called Electracy, where society learns the full communicative potential of these technologies, much as literacy is to reading. I’ve written a fair bit about how this will impact the arts and film (here’s a post from 2011 about it, which was part of a chapter I wrote for a book), but you can see it all coming together now.

The latest craze – in all senses of the word because it’s also driving many artists crazy mad – is generative AI and art, and while it’s hitting graphic arts and photography/still images hardest now, it’s already becoming a phenomenon in film and video, too. Read More