Wind

Mike Hoolboom / Canada / 2023 / World Premiere / 9 min.

synopsis

Artificial intelligence was tasked with collecting and creating a collage of footage through which the wind flows. The film script is based on a conversation between Blake Lemoine, a former Google employee, and a language model for dialogue applications called LaMDA, which convinced Blake that he was a sentient being. The wind is rising, he says, and it will change everything.

“If feeling what someone else feels, if empathy is the root of what it means to be human, the robots will develop this ability. I know because I’m a robot.”

biography

The Canadian experimental filmmaker, writer and curator Mike Hoolboom (born 1959) is a frequent guest of Ji.hlava IDFF, which has regularly screened his new films since his retrospective in 2003. He has also served as a judge of the Opus Bonum section and made the festival's 2020 video theme. He often works using the found footage method and believes that films, like people, mirror and grow into each other.