Event Detail

On Thursday, January 23, the Qualcomm Institute’s IDEAS series continues its season with “Latent Visions”, presenting three short films by Emily Greenberg.

Emily Greenberg is a media artist, filmmaker, and writer whose work examines the fictions we mistake for realities and the realities we mistake for fictions. Her work has shown at the Sie Film Center, Screener Short Films, SIGGRAPH, ISEA, Columbus International Film & Animation Festival, The New Film Underground, The Comeback Festival, and Festival ECRA. She holds an MFA from UC San Diego.

Deep Drew:

During the summer and fall of 2023, screenwriters went on strike to protest, among other concerns, the use of generative AI in the commercial film and television industry. In September 2023, when Drew Barrymore announced her talk show would resume production during the ongoing strike, she was heavily criticized by Writers Guild of America members. In response, Barrymore posted an Instagram video “deeply” apologizing that was also widely derided on social media. Deep Drew uses deepfakes to offer a speculative and satirical continuation of this story. Surprisingly philosophical and vulnerable, this “deep” version of Drew confronts her own complicities and traumas while reflecting on the harms generative AI poses to writers, actors, and one’s own sense of self.

In the summer of 1895, Freud had a dream about a former patient, now known as “Irma’s Injection,” that helped him understand the role of the unconscious in dreaming. According to Freud, our unconscious constructs dreams to express our deepest wishes and then distorts those expressions to protect us. By this logic, a dream is therefore a form of wish fulfillment and suppression.

Fulfillment of a Wish:

Although Freud’s theories have long since been rejected by clinicians, they provide a useful framework for thinking about dreaming and the often psychedelic, biased imagery produced by artificial neural networks. In the same way that one never fully understands a dream’s latent content, artificial neural network architects do not fully understand why neural networks make the decisions they do. Does this lack of understanding act as a form of dream distortion, shielding us from our deepest wishes? When we build technologies that “dream,” what wishes are we trying to fulfill, and why must we protect ourselves from fully expressing those wishes? Artificial neural networks are modeled after our own and trained on the internet of images we have produced. Given that these models “see” with the same biases of mainstream culture, what are so-called “neural net dreams” telling us about our own dreams and unconscious desires? Are generative AI images the “disguised fulfillment of a suppressed, repressed wish”?

On Exactitude in Science:

Filmed almost entirely in Google Earth, On Exactitude in Science is a three-part video work melding fact and fiction, archive and allegory into a speculative documentary about the rise of digital mapmaking among technology companies.

The series is named after Jorge Luis Borges’s famed short story about an empire’s failed attempt to build a perfect 1:1 map and picks up where the story ended. A new, tech-savvy generation stumbles upon the map’s ruins and begins piecing them back together, confident they can rebuild and even improve upon the perfect map without also recreating the empire. Narrated by an AI speech synthesizer whose style and tone match that of Borges’s fictional chronicler, the video revives the classic map-territory fable for the digital age.

Part I: On Exactitude in Science” follows the new generation as they develop Street View-esque surveillance technologies (“new Eyes that saw further and in more detail than mere Human Eyes”) and smart phones (“portable Curios”) while “Part II: On Exactitude in Business & Government”) chronicles the map’s commercialization and subsequent involvement in diplomacy, trade relations, policing, and surveillance. Finally, in “Part III: A Most Unfortunate Incident,” the mapmakers thoughtlessly shift a border, inadvertently causing a territorial dispute.

In staging fantastical, darkly comic scenes within Google Earth, the work fractures Google’s hegemonic cartography, inviting audiences to imagine new scales of resistance.

Content warning: Deep Drew contains discussions of suicide and domestic violence.

Acknowledgment: The films in this program received financial support from the Qualcomm Institute, Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Arts, and the Russell Foundation.