IDFA DocLab and the Netherlands Film Fund have announced the recipients of the 2023 Film Fund DocLab Interactive Grant. These are Nirit Peled for (this conversation is) Off the record’ and Constant Dullaart and Piotr Winiewicz for William Quail’s Pyramid.
“With a total commissioning budget of €20,000, the Film Fund DocLab Interactive Grant supports the development of immersive storytelling in the Netherlands. With this grant, The Netherlands Film Fund and IDFA DocLab aim to promote groundbreaking and experimental use of emerging media and narratives,” say organisers.
Yiu-loon Lee, Film Consultant at The Netherlands Film Fund further comments: “The committee has decided unanimously. These makers know how to explore socially pressing issues within their projects and bring these investigations to the public in engaging ways. Tantalizing topics brought to the audience in an exciting way: a potentially perfect storm.”
The two projects, see descriptions below, will world premiere at the 36th edition IDFA, running November 8 to 19, 2023.
this conversation is) Off The Record
Nirit Peled’s (this conversation is) Off The Record investigates the profound impact crime prevention algorithms have on the lives of people. This interactive performance lecture builds on Peled’s decade-long research on the consequences of risk-based profiling by the Dutch police, including her documentary Mothers which premiered at IDFA last year. Within the global discourse surrounding algorithmic justice, this latest work delves even deeper into the predictive systems that assess and profile inner city youth, to determine who is likely to commit crimes. In front of a live audience, Peled simulates these algorithm’s workings, as she imagines the city as a collection of streets and buildings, but also as data sets of relationships of people. Can anyone’s life truly be captured by data? Who is writing the script that dictates our lives?
William Quail’s Pyramid
While our systems are full of faults, Artificial Intelligence has become exponentially better at imitating our language—becoming more articulate and ‘natural’. AI’s capacity to effortlessly create original content has been met with awe, as an emissary for an intelligence beyond ours. In the multi-channel video William Quail’s Pyramid, Constant Dullaart and Piotr Winiewicz reverse this process and regress language, looking for the glitch and error in language processing. In William Quail’s Pyramid you witness an uncanny séance, birthing the film About a Hero entirely created by an AI that was trained to emulate the mind of documentary filmmaker Werner Herzog. Herzog famously declared that no computer could rival his filmmaking. What is this telling us?
