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    Misery Loves Company? Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair Hits a Nerve.

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    Movies that are major downers, it turns out, are a big film festival draw. “Sometimes the world is such that you just need to wallow a little bit.”The festival Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair started three years ago as a primal scream from a little Los Angeles nonprofit organization.What has happened since says a lot about the mood in at least one corner of American culture.The American Cinematheque, a nonprofit that brings classic art films to Los Angeles theaters, was struggling to sell tickets in 2022. Older cinephiles were still spooked by the Covid pandemic; younger ones were glued to Netflix.At the same time, some Cinematheque staff members were depressed about the direction the world seemed to be heading. It was the year Russia invaded Ukraine, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a gunman killed 19 children at a Texas elementary school and Big Tech rolled out artificial intelligence bots.Out of that somber stew came a programming idea called Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair. Over seven days, the Cinematheque screened 30 feel-bad movies. It called the selections “the greatest films from around the world that explore the darkest sides of humanity.” For the inaugural festival, one centerpiece film was Béla Tarr’s “Satantango” (1994), a seven-hour-and-19-minute contemplation of decay and misery.Gabriel Byrne in Joel Coen’s 1990 film “Miller’s Crossing.”20th Century Fox, via The American Cinematheque“‘Everyone was saying, ‘You should do comedies,’” Grant Moninger, the Cinematheque’s artistic director, said. “But we thought, ‘What if you did the exact opposite?’ We’re not in this to dangle keys at a baby.” (Now might be a good moment to mention that Moninger grew up with a mother, he said, who “only rented movies on VHS in two genres: the Holocaust and slavery.”)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      David Cope, Godfather of A.I. Music, Is Dead at 83

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      His EMI algorithm, an early form of artificial intelligence that he developed in the 1980s, prompted searching questions about the limits of human creativity.David Cope, a composer and pioneer in the field of algorithmic composition, who in the 1980s developed a computer program for writing music in the style of Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and other Classical masters, died on May 4 at his home in Santa Cruz, Calif. He was 83.The cause was congestive heart failure, his son Stephen Cope said.Before the proliferation of A.I. music generators, before the emergence of Spotify and the advent of the iPod, before Brian Eno had even coined the term “generative music,” Mr. Cope had already figured out how to program a computer to write classical music.It was 1981 and, struggling with writer’s block after being commissioned to compose an opera, he was desperate for a compositional partner. He found one in a floppy disk.The process was straightforward but tedious. Mr. Cope started by quantifying musical passages from his own work, rendering them as numbers in a database that could be analyzed by a pattern-identifying algorithm he created. The algorithm would then reassemble the “signatures” — Mr. Cope’s name for the patterns it found — into new combinations, and he would convert those combinations into a score.It wasn’t the first time someone had used a computer to create music. In 1957, Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson had employed a five-ton supercomputer at the University of Illinois to compose “Illiac Suite,” widely considered to be the first computer-generated score. But Mr. Cope’s program took things a step further: By scanning and reproducing unique signatures, his algorithm could essentially replicate style.After years of troubleshooting and fine-tuning, the program, known as Experiments in Musical Intelligence, was able to produce a full opera in a matter of hours. EMI, or Emmy, as Mr. Cope affectionately called it, was officially born. It was one of the earliest computer algorithms used to generate classical music.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      It’s Still South by Southwest, but This Time It’s in London

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      The music, tech and film festival, long known for being in Austin, Texas, expands to Europe for the first time.The artist known as Beeple set a record in 2021 when a work of his — a collage of 5,000 images that existed only as a digital file — sold for $69.3 million in a Christie’s auction.Beeple, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, is one of the artists participating in the inaugural edition of South by Southwest London, the music, film and tech festival. This time, he is presenting “The Tree of Knowledge,” a critique of the human addiction to smartphones.“People don’t fully recognize how much their phone is stressing them out,” and how much they’re “dialing up the noise,” Beeple said in a phone interview. “They could make the choice to dial down the noise, and just put their phone down, and exist in a much more calm state in which technology still exists.”The work is a refrigerator-size box containing a giant tree (recreated via projection mapping), with screens on all sides, and a large dial. When viewers turn the dial, the box is covered with live news, stock prices and data, illustrating the information overload faced by humanity.“The Tree of Knowledge” by Beeple (Mike Winklemann) is designed to address humans’ addiction to smart phones. It features four video screens arranged in rectangular pillars with imagery generated from a variety of real-time data.Tree of Knowledge/Beeple Studios The owner of the Tree of Knowledge can control the work further by pressing a “choose violence” button, which initiates a violent state for several minutes before destroying the tree. The tree regenerates when the violence ends.Beeple Studios“The Tree of Knowledge” encapsulates the spirit of South by Southwest London, which begins on Monday and runs through June 7. The event will feature a diverse group of speakers, including the ABBA singer-songwriter Bjorn Ulvaeus, the actor Idris Elba, the wellness and meditation expert Deepak Chopra, the primatologist Jane Goodall and the comedian Katherine Ryan. There will also be voices from the technology world, including Demis Hassabis, co-founder of Google’s DeepMind lab and co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry; and Alex Kendall, the chief executive of Wayve, a developer of artificial intelligence systems for self-driving cars.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      What if Making Cartoons Becomes 90% Cheaper?

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      “Fear not! For I shall lead ye to riches beyond your wildest dreams!”Inside a tiny recording booth in downtown Los Angeles, John Peck waited for a verdict from the voice-over engineer: Did the line sound pirate-y enough?Try again, the engineer suggested, perhaps with more throaty emphasis on “wildest.” It might make the animated character Mr. Peck was voicing — a buccaneer with a peg leg — a tiny bit funnier.Mr. Peck, 33, cleared his throat and gave it a whirl, prompting chuckles from the production team. A couple of clicks on a laptop later, and an artificial intelligence tool synced Mr. Peck’s voice with a cartoon pirate’s mouth movements. The character was destined for an episode of “StEvEn & Parker,” a YouTube series about rapscallion brothers that attracts 30 million unique viewers weekly.Just a few years ago, lip-syncing a minute of animation could take up to four hours. An animator would listen to an audio track and laboriously adjust character mouths frame by frame. But Mr. Peck’s one-minute scene took 15 minutes for the A.I. tool to sync, including time spent by an artist to refine a few spots by hand.Toonstar, the start-up behind “StEvEn & Parker,” uses A.I. throughout the production process — from honing story lines to generating imagery to dubbing dialogue for overseas audiences. “By leaning into the technology, we can make full episodes 80 percent faster and 90 percent cheaper than industry norms,” said John Attanasio, a Toonstar founder.“This is how you build the next generation of hot intellectual property,” Mr. Attanasio added excitedly.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      ‘Black Mirror’ Showed Us a Future. Some of It Is Here Now.

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      The long-running tech drama always felt as if it took place in a dystopian near future. How much of that future has come to pass?Since “Black Mirror” debuted in 2011, the dystopian sci-fi anthology series has taken seeds of nascent technology and expanded them to absurd and disturbing proportions.In doing so, it has become a commentary on defining issues of the 21st-century: surveillance, consumerism, artificial intelligence, social media, data privacy, virtual reality and more. Every episode serves in part as a warning about how technological advancement run rampant will lead us, often willingly, toward a lonely, disorienting and dangerous future.Season 7, newly available on Netflix (the streamer acquired the show from Britain’s Channel 4 after its first two seasons), explores ideas around memory alteration, the fickleness of subscription services and, per usual, the validity of A.I. consciousness.Here’s a look back at a few themes from past episodes that seemed futuristic at the time but are now upon us, in some form or another. Down the rabbit hole we go:‘Be Right Back’Season 2, Episode 1Not long after “Be Right Back” came out, services that digitally resurrect people via recordings and social feeds began to be introduced.NetflixA.I. imitations, companion chatbots and humanoid robotsWhen Martha’s partner, Ash, dies in a car accident, she’s plunged into grief. At his funeral, she hears about an online service that can help soften the blow by essentially creating an A.I. imitation of him built from his social media posts, online communications, videos and voice messages.At first she’s skeptical, but when she finds out she’s pregnant, she goes through with it. She enjoys the companionship she finds by talking with “him” on the phone and starts neglecting her real-life relationships. She soon decides to take the next step: having a physical android of Ash created in his likeness. But as she gets to know “him,” a sense of uncanny valley quickly sets in.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      ChatGPT’s Studio Ghibli Style Animations Are Almost Too Good

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      An update to ChatGPT made it easy to simulate Hayao Miyazaki’s style of animation, which has flooded social media with memes.Animated movies, like those from the famed Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, are not made in a hurry. The intricate hand drawings and attention paid to every single detail can make for a slow, potentially yearslong process.Or, you could simply ask ChatGPT to turn any old photo into a facsimile of Mr. Miyazaki’s work in just a few seconds.Many people did precisely that this week after OpenAI released an update to ChatGPT on Tuesday that improved its image-generation technology. Now, a user who asks the platform to render an image in the style of Studio Ghibli could be shown a picture that would not look out of place in the films “My Neighbor Totoro” or “Spirited Away.”On social media, users quickly began posting Ghibli-style images. They ranged from selfies and family photos to memes. Some used ChatGPT’s new feature to create renderings of violent or dark images, like the World Trade Center towers falling on Sept. 11 and the murder of George Floyd.Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, changed his profile picture on X to a Ghiblified image of himself and posted a joke about the filter’s sudden popularity and how it had overtaken his previous, seemingly more important work.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Mercedes’s Most Affordable Sedan Will Be Electric

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      The German luxury carmaker said its latest compact sedan solved problems that had kept people from buying electric vehicles.Mercedes-Benz said on Thursday that the latest version of its least expensive sedan would be available first as an all-electric car and then as a hybrid. And the company will no longer sell a gasoline-only version of the car.That’s a big break from how Mercedes and other established carmakers have typically operated. Until recently, most automakers adapted vehicles designed for fossil fuels to be powered by batteries. The Mercedes sedan, the CLA, which the company unveiled in Rome with the rapper will.i.am, is an example of how at least some established carmakers are developing electric cars first, then adapting them for customers who still want a gasoline engine.The CLA, the first of more than two dozen Mercedes vehicles that will use the same basic technology, is a sign that many global carmakers are placing a priority on electric vehicles even as Republicans in the United States try to roll back Biden-era legislation that was intended to promote battery technology.Yet faced with uncertain demand for electric vehicles and unpredictable government policies, Mercedes is tempering its bets by offering hybrids, which pair traditional gasoline engines with relatively small batteries and electric motors.“If the world is not dominant electric by 2030, we as Mercedes-Benz, as an established manufacturer, we cannot walk away from a significant part of our revenues,” Ola Källenius, the chief executive of Mercedes, said in an interview in Rome. “So indeed, you could call it a hedge.”Mercedes did not disclose a price for the new CLA, but said it would be affordable for owners of the current version, which starts at $45,000 in the United States. Eventually some of the components from the car will be used in sport utility vehicles and a station wagon.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      At the Serpentine, Holly Herndon Taught A.I. to Sing

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      Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst are presenting their first large-scale solo museum show. It sounds gorgeous, even if its visual elements are lacking.Although it’s easy to feel alienated by the opaque processes behind artificial intelligence and fearful that the technology isn’t regulated, the artists Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst want you to know that A.I. can be beautiful.Their exhibition “The Call,” at the Serpentine Galleries in London through Feb. 2, is the first large-scale solo museum show for the artist duo, who have long been at the forefront of A.I.’s creative possibilities.Herndon — who was born in Tennessee, grew up singing in church choirs and later received a Ph.D. in music composition from Stanford — has made cutting-edge, A.I.-inflected pop music for over a decade. With Dryhurst, a British artist who is also her husband, she has branched out to make tools that help creatives monitor the use of their data online, and recently, into the visual arts.The couple’s work “xhairymutantx,” commissioned for this year’s Whitney Biennial, uses A.I. text prompts to produce an infinite series of Herndon portraits that highlight the playful nature of digital identities.The Serpentine show combines musical and visual elements. With the varied a cappella choral traditions of Britain in mind, Herndon and Dryhurst worked with diverse choirs across the country, from classical to contemporary groups of assorted sizes, to produce training data for an A.I. model. In a wall text, the artists explain that “The Call” consists of more than just the A.I.’s output. They also consider the collection of the data and the training of the machine as works of art.“We’re offering a beautiful way to make A.I.,” the artists’ statement adds. Their utopian take is that A.I. is collectively made: It learns from whatever it is exposed to and can therefore be shaped for good.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Tales of 19th-Century A.I.: Don’t Fall in Love With a Singing Robot

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      Love me, love me, pretend that you love me.One of today’s most popular artificial intelligence apps is Replika, a chatbot service whose users — many millions of them — converse with virtual companions through their phones or on VR headsets. Visually, the avatars are rudimentary. But each Replika offers personal attention and words of encouragement, and gets better at it with each update. There are dozens of A.I. services like this now: imitation humans who promise, via text or voice, to console, to understand, to adore.Many users (men and boys, mostly) are developing long-term bonds with these simulated lovers (“women,” mostly). Some fall into ruin. A young man in Britain tried to assassinate the former queen after plotting with a Replika avatar; and last month a mother filed a lawsuit against Character.AI, another of these apps, after her son killed himself with the encouragement of his virtual “girlfriend.”It all sounds new. It all sounds alarming. Yet these online lonely-hearts are brushing against anxieties at the core of modern art and philosophy — anxieties, as Sigmund Freud wrote more than a century ago, that things not alive may yet have spirits, and that our animistic ancestors were onto something.One of the most famous musical automatons of Enlightenment Europe: a female organist, designed by the Swiss inventor Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz in 1774.Grisel/RDB/ullstein bild, via Getty ImagesIntricate gearwork drives the automaton’s fingers, which play the organ’s keys. Her eyes move back and forth, and her chest rises and falls as if breathing.Grisel/RDB/ullstein bild, via Getty ImagesThis fall I’ve been thinking about lovers and robots, erotics and mechanics — ever since seeing two performances, both at Lincoln Center, that resonated with all our contemporary worries about art, sex and technology. One was Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” (1881) at the Metropolitan Opera, which puts an android musician at center stage: the automaton Olympia, whose song and dance captivate and then devastate her human paramour. The other, next door at New York City Ballet, was “Coppélia” (1870), a merry comedy featuring not only dancing machines but also, more troublingly, humans pretending to dance like machines.Is our projection of life onto technology a sign of derangement? Or is it more like wish fulfillment? In both “Hoffmann” and “Coppélia,” grown men fall hard for female contraptions, only to discover the gears and grease that power their music and movement. Singing and dancing, in particular, seem to awaken these men’s archaic passions and juvenile needs, and shatter their rational skepticism about gadgets.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More