Your computer is watching movies. Just not the way you do!

Can you imagine a world without any movies? I don’t know about you, but to me movies are an inherent part of our lives. They fill a void that the stress of living life in a world full of complicated relations, responsibilities, shortcomings and expectations. We laugh, we cry, we empathize, and we get frightened, excited, angry, disillusioned…oh, I could go on.  The fact of the matter is that movies matter.

For us humans, it’s easy to switch on the friendly telly in our cozy living room, or walk into a dark theatre, or simply click on a YouTube or Vimeo link and enjoy the vibrant colors, locations, and characters presented to us. However, have you ever wondered, if the machines and devices – we rely on so much – cringe or get amused – watching a movie? Sounds like a bizarre question from a four-year-old kid, right? But it’s now entirely possible to know how a computer watched a movie. Yes, it is.

Thanks to artist and composer Benjamin Grosser we can now experience what a computational system sees when it watches the same films that we do. Benjamin’s recent project “Computers Watching Movies” illustrates computers’ vision of movies as a series of temporal sketches, where the sketching process is presented in synchronized time with the audio from the original clip.

Benjamin describes on his website: “Viewers are provoked to ask how computer vision differs from their own human vision, and what that difference reveals about our culturally-developed ways of looking. Why do we watch what we watch when we watch it? Will a system without our sense of narrative or historical patterns of vision watch the same things?” And here’s the clip, you’ve been waiting for:

Benjamin is probably right because this is not the first time, he’s done this. His previous projects include:

• Interactive Robotic Painting Machine
• Flexible Pixels
• Remote and Virtual Instrumentation
• Speed of Reality
• Personal Depersonalization System
• Third Person

And many more interesting topics.

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Post By Anirudh Sharma (38 Posts)

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