Digital Day

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.

Ross Goodwin is not a poet. Artist, Creative Technologist for AMI at Google Arts & Culture, hacker, gonzo data scientist, writer of writers. Graduate of NYU ITP & MIT; former Obama administration ghostwriter. Employs machine learning, natural language processing, other computational tools to realize new forms & interfaces for written language. From Sunspring (the first film created from a computer-generated screenplay) with Oscar Sharp, to word.camera (the first instant poetry-writing camera), to 1 the Road (the first novel written with a car), Goodwin’s creative AI experiments have earned international acclaim.

Oscar Sharp is a BAFTA-nominated filmmaker, called «a huge talent, masterly with tone and style» by The New Yorker.