On August 9th 2023, “A long night of dreaming about The Future of Intelligence” took place at the Basecamp as part of the Locarno Film Festival. The event was curated by Rafael Dernbach & hosted by Devika Girish & SOFF. From sunset to sunrise, we talked, learned and dreamed together about possible futures of intelligence. Together with artists, researchers and cinephiles, we explored how different forms of intelligence manifest themselves today, how they might change in the future and which role cinema can play in rendering them visible. The long night of dreaming consisted of conversations, workshops and performances. https://thefutureofintelligence.ch/ 

I gave the second lecture-performance of the evening, Roland Barthes among the machines, discussing AI companions and automated care work through the examples of the chatbot Replika and Blush, the latest dating app developed the same parent company. Jumping from the archives of the early chatbot Eliza and the related ‘Eliza effect’ to Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse and Tiqqun’s Theory of the Young Girl, the performance critically explored gendered historical and contemporary visual representations of AI addressing fundamental questions about the future of our intimate relationship with machines.

“Our image of intelligence has become a feverish dream, lately. Generative AI platforms have opened a wondrous world of images, texts and sounds. We are astonished, amused or disturbed by these creations and by their noisy promise of a radically different future. At the same time, ecological critiques challenge what we consider as intelligent behavior: have we neglected non-human forms of intelligence? Might fungi or forests be more capable of solving complex problems than human minds? For one long night, we approach intelligence by the means of dreaming together. Inspired by cinema’s deep relation to dreams, we want to learn together about intelligence: its manifestations, its hallucinations and its possible futures. We start our journey on August 9th at sunset, 20:44. And we end our journey on August 10th at sunrise, 6:17. We gather at Basecamp Instituto Sant’Eugenio and go through a series of learning experiences that invite, both, collective dreaming and critical thinking.”