AI

In his autobiography, the heroic whistleblower Edward Snowden warns that “the greatest danger still lies ahead, with the refinement of artificial intelligence capabilities, such as facial and pattern recognition”. Lucrecia Martel mimics a typical automated process of pattern recognition in her trailer for the Viennale – but renders it strange, surreal and disquieting. What central piece of “found footage” does she hurl against this machine? It is the famous “Psychiatric Interview” with an anonymous “Patient no. 18” filmed at UCLA in 1961, today viewed by 85 million people on YouTube. A young man (whose subsequent fate remains a secret) speaks deliberately and thoughtfully about his desire to “play the piano for people”; he is duly classified as a case of “negativism in a catatonic schizophrenic”. Martel combines the man and his interviewer, loops eye movement and blurs mouth movement; she introduces flashes of other, associative images and underscores everything with an ever-changing collage of musical selections that sits on the edge of our aural comprehension. The will of AI to control, sort, and label everyone in the world is countered by a sublime act of audiovisual subversion. (Adrian Martin)