The Creator

This event is sold out.

With directors Al+Al, physicist Janna Levin, and other special guests in person

Dirs. Al+Al. 2012, 45 mins. World premiere screening. The Creator, a beautiful and surreal short-form film by award-winning British filmmakers Al+Al, follows sentient computers from the future on a mystical odyssey to discover their creator: legendary computer scientist Alan Turing. Decades ago, Turing famously asked, “Can machines think?” and ever since, the notion of computers exceeding human intelligence has transfixed researchers and popular culture alike. Marking the centenary of Turing’s birth, The Creator will launch a wide-ranging conversation among leading computer scientists and physicists about the promise and perils of artificial intelligence.

PARTICIPANT BIOGRAPHIES

Al+Al

Al Holmes and Al Taylor have been pioneers in using new contemporary computer generated technology, combining live action performance with 3-D environments to create dream worlds in film. Their work won them the 2009 Liverpool Arts prize.

The two began working together in 1997. In 2001 Al+Al were awarded a five-year studio residency by ACME and built a blue screen special effects performance studio in London. The artists went on to create a body of work commissioned by Film London, Animate Projects, Arts Council England and Channel 4 television exhibiting internationally in galleries, site-specific installations, film festivals and on television.

In 2006 Al+Al moved their blue screen studio into the first passenger station in the world at Edge Hill in Liverpool. Inspired by the historical and technological significance of the site, Al+Al transformed the Station buildings into a space for the arts. In 2008 their critically-acclaimed solo exhibition commissioned by FACT gallery for the European capital of culture toured to the National Art Museum of China in Beijing.

Janna Levin

Janna Levin researches the early universe, chaos and black holes. Her second book, a novel called A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines (Knopf 2006), won the PEN/Bingham Fellowship for Writers that honors debut fiction. She is also the author of the popular science book How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space. Levin is a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University. She has worked at the Center for Particle Astrophysics (CfPA) at the University of California, Berkeley before moving to the UK where she worked at Cambridge University in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP). Just before returning to New York, she was the first scientist-in-residence at the Ruskin School of Fine Art and Drawing at Oxford with an award from the National Endowment for Science, Technology, and Arts. She has written for many artists.