The World through the ‘Eye’ of the Robot Camera: Roundtable on AI, (Post-?) Humans & Cinema
An apparent transformation of human culture from the ground up raises exciting as well as worrying questions about the direction and future of cinema. We address a few of them by bringing together different points of perspective on making and viewing film under rapidly changing conditions of production.
We bring together filmmakers, critics, scholars and students, to share their impressions of the tech-human interface. Participants will include Kenyan-Swiss director and screenwriter Damien Hauser and Polish director and artist Piotr Weniewicz.
Two recent, groundbreaking films are in focus, Hauser’s Memory of Princess Mumbi (2025) and Winiewicz’s About a Hero (2024). Each highlights and rehearses, in its own distinctive way, novel challenges and opportunities of documentation.
Winiewicz creates a mocumentary in dialogue with a chatbot designed to summon the spirit of iconic documentary filmmaker, Werner Herzog, while Hauser imagines AI-assisted and resisted filmmaking of the distant future. Both films will be shown with accompanying introduction and Q&A prior to this roundtable event.
Host Associate Professor P. Stuart Robinson
Panellists
Filmmaker Damien Hauser
Filmmaker Piotr Winiewicz
Professor Minna Johanne Niemi
Film producer and curator, Sarah Schipschack
Time: Wednesday January 21, 2-4 PM
Place: Tromsø Library
Free entrance
Screenings
Memory of Princess Mumbi Tuesday, 20th January 16:30 Fokus 1
About a Hero Wednesday 21st January 11:00 Fokus 4