Machine Learning Nature Documentary
screened at Sheffield Documentary Film Festival, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, and in the BBC’s Blue Room research lab; shown at the BBC’s annual BBC Academy event on AI and Creativity at Radio Theatre; broadcast in Timothy Morton’s The End of the World Has Already Happened on BBC4; exhibited in Forging the Gods, Transfer Gallery, New York, and in TBCTV (mock television studio), Somerset House, London.
Cutler’s film All Her Beautiful Green Remains in Tears consists of re-edited footage from Walt Disney's Nature's Half Acre (1951), with its sexist parables about domesticated post-war suburbia: nest building, chick rearing, mother love, industrious insects, and traditional gender roles. In this case, the new voiceover - replacing the paternal voice of Winston Hibler - also focuses on romantic anthropomorphism. The difference is this voiceover has been generated by a neural network in collaboration with filmmaker Amy Cutler, using an A.I. which has learned its existence entirely from reading the female protagonist voice in 14 million passages of romance novels. Using image recognition/ closed captioning, it tells an entirely different story of the “birds and the bees” of nature documentary: one of female desire, trauma, masochism, and emotional fantasy. The soundtrack is by the musician Leafcutter John, who specialises in creating natural landscapes and ecologies from generated noise, often using DIY gadgets. The software was run by Anna Ridler.
This 11 minute film is available for screenings (please contact amycutler1985@gmail.com to view online), and is a prototype of ongoing work on machine learning, posthuman tools, and the extended artificial lives of nature documentary.