Me, Myself & AI – How robots reflect humans and humans reflect on robots
A ciné-club meeting with Yves Gellie, director of "Year of the Robot", and AI philosopher Aleksandra Przegalińska.
Objects with souls. Robots with emotions. Humans and their artificial counterparts. An event dedicated to the intertwining of human nature and technology.
The meeting is centred around the film "Year of the Robot". Triggering a range of emotions from awe to solitude, Yves Gellie’s "Year of the Robot" is an aesthetic, intimate portrait of elderly people building relationships with childlike robots. The documentary follows nursing-home patients, often suffering from Alzheimer’s, and underlines the fragility of ageing, technocratic societies.
During the event, director Yves Gellie will discuss the making of the film and the delicate relationship that humans can form with technology. Can magic happen when people and machines meet?
Yves Gellie will be joined by AI philosopher Aleksandra Przegalińska. In her talk, she will look at the emotions of machines: in the future, should they (and will they) be able to feel?
The session will be followed by a Q&A with the audience.
After the session, Year of the Robot will be available online for 48 hours at Ninateka, from October 22, 9.00 pm to October 24, 8.59 pm. The film will only be accessible to viewers in Poland.
The meeting with its director provides an opportunity for international audiences to get a unique glimpse of the project.
Anna Desponds
Responsible for curating the digital storytelling and immersive media programme at the Digital Cultures conference. She co-hosts "the Odbiornik” podcast for dwutygodnik.com magazine, covering art, technology, and the art of living with technology. For over a decade, she has been designing and organising international events to bring together audiovisual and digital media creators and enthusiasts. She provides consultations and devises strategies on interactive projects for Polish and foreign institutions.
Co-founder of the Total Immersion Foundation, she received a scholarship from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, and currently has a residency on the ArtHouse programme. As a child, she wanted to be an anthropologist and her dream came true. She is based between Warsaw, Sokołowsko, and Berlin, where she works for the Creatives’ Catalysts agency.
Yves Gellie
He began a career in photo-journalism with a feature about cocaine production in Colombia, followed by a story about war refugees in Ogaden, Somalia. His work has been published by magazines and newspapers like Geo, National Geographic, Sunday Time Magazine, Le Monde...
From 1999, he has developed a work being between Documentary and Contemporary Art, with a style described as an iconographic selection of the reality underlying the day-to-day life and its trivial aspects. His work has been exhibited in various museums, galleries and institutions across the world.
From 2007, he undertakes a project on world of major scientific research laboratories dedicated to the development of humanoid robots and social robots.
In 2016, he started his new movie project Year of the robot. He joined Professor Anne- Sophie Rigaud’s team at the Lusage lab of the Broca hospital (Paris), which carried out a study on the insertion of social robots in the healthcare sector. With his groundbreaking working protocol supported by the scientific community, Yves Gellie gives the opportunity to grasp the fantasized relationships between the human being and the machine.
This work foreshadows a future world in which mankind will grow closer to humanoid robots, making their dreams come true. By enabling this little robot to reach a kind of autonomy, the artist introduces Nao as a pioneer, and as the first humanoïd to have established an intimate dialogue with the human being.
Aleksandra Przegalińska
Prof. Aleksandra Przegalińska received her doctorate in humanities in the field of artificial intelligence from the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Warsaw, followed by habilitation (higher doctorate) in social sciences (management) at Leon Koźmiński Academy, where she is currently Vice-Rector Associate Professor at the Department of Management in Digital and Networked Societies and one of the Leaders of the AI in Management Programme.
Until recently, she conducted research at the Center for Collective Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. She graduated from The New School for Social Research in New York.
In Autumn 2020 she will start research in the American Institute for Economic Research on the automation of work, and then join the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard University. She is interested in the development of new technologies, natural language processing, humanoid artificial intelligence, social robots and wearable technologies. She is the author of Collaborative Society (The MIT Press) , published together with Dariusz Jemielniak
