20 July, 2023
The relation between human and Artificial Intelligence is at the center of this year’s theme of DokuFest. Following on last year’s existential examination of humanity in crisis, the festival is returning with yet another grand dilemma worth of exploration and the one that many of us still don’t have a clear idea how good or how bad it is and what will its consequences be in the future.
Human consciousness, an intangible heritage of the known universe and evolution, may be nearing extinction not because artificial intelligences will claim agency and take over the world but, more likely because of the climate crisis created together by human intelligences. "I AM AI AM I" is a prompt for the inquiry into the fundamental nature of both artificial intelligence and human existence. Can an AI entity truly claim the statement "I AM AI” and evolve as an intelligence of its kind? If AI is a container and interpreter of human stories can it enlighten us about the characteristics and qualities that constitute our own human identity?
Through number of films dealing in one way or another with artificial intelligence, including the opening and closing films of the festival, through a full day of programme dedicated to AI, and through the visual identity of the campaign partly created with the help of AI and ChatGPT, the festival aims to initiate debate and spark interest in yet another far reaching issue concerning us humans and our ever growing relation with technology.
The visual identity of the campaign is developed by Ali Cindoruk of the Khora Office. The riddle-like character-encoded "I AM AI AM I" is a symmetrical interplay between a literary existential expression and the binary nature of the AI’s computational habitat, both of which are language-based human creations. The visual vocabulary of multi-layered patterns based on glyphs and alphanumeric characters lends historical and futuristic depth to the design by paying tribute to the early graphic tools of computation and reflecting the multitude of possibilities that the future of AI holds.
