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A Filmmaking Robot Written by Luke Munn With his Filmmaking Robot, Wellington artist Douglas Bagnall replaces the director with a series of algorithms, a computer which shifts through numeric representations of frames, selecting its favourites and compiling them into short clips. Bagnall, frustrated with his inability to see film as simply ‘changing fields of colour’1, decided a computer would be much better at the task. With help from Stagecoach and CityLink, he directed cameras on the cities buses to transmit video footage back to his robot whenever they passed through a wireless hotspot. The robot assigns each frame a series of numbers based on aspects like brightness, saturation, and detail. Each frame is placed into a matrices-like ‘space’ based on these numbers – similar images and scenes cluster together, though imperfectly. Throughout the day, the robot weaves through this ‘space’, selecting it’s favourite images based on a broad set of criteria, including being 'trained' with fine art paintings2, by other artists, and favouring images it hasn't encountered before. The robot’s unawareness of imagery aspects like location and time (i.e. if this frame is before or after any other) mean the resulting montage is dislocative and dreamlike. Fragments of a monotone rain sequence are shattered by hyper-coloured frames deemed to be better. Cars reverse-park and bus routes are played backwards. Indeed, the only space that the robot is aware of is it’s own. Stationary and isolated in the dark machine-room of CityLink, with a range of cameras as its eyes, the robot eschews ‘real’ locative information about Wellington, instead drifting through a self-derived terrain of pure numbers. While in this state which Bagnall refers to as ‘dream’ or ‘stream of consciousness’, the robot floats through waypoints in the smoothest way possible, producing a long series of frames which will become the day’s ‘best of’ short film. Deckard: …You remember the spider that lived in a bush outside your window? Orange body, green legs? Watched her build a web all summer. Then one day there was a big egg in it. The egg hatched... One of Bagnalls learning algorithms (neural networks) emphasises novelty in frames. If the frames numbers are very different from the majority, they are given heavier weighting. As Bagnall notes, this creates a version of artificial confabulation, wherein the 'robot tries to fill holes in its memory space, allowing freer drift of attention'. With hours of rainy, monochrome footage of Wellington, these ‘holes’ seem to be any images containing vibrant colour. The robot overcompensates by hyper-saturating frames, then preferring them over the originals. The common, drab frame is replaced by the more exciting, vibrant one in a desperate attempt to create a novel, unique series of memories. A major characteristic of Bagnalls other work, the decision-making process the robot undergoes appears both wildly enthusiastic and incredibly enigmatic. Favourite scenes are repeated endlessly, at times seeming to cut into or interrupt other sequences. At other points, objects like advertising or dirty windshields will dominate the frame and scene times. The fine arts training via neural networks mentioned above isn’t obvious. Do glitchy neon-lit cityscapes come closer to a Kandinsky when reduced to numbers? Which algorithm inspired the robot to include this frame? Like DontVoteMeOffPigeon, FilmMaking Robot responds to and frames space in foreign terms, unfamiliar and alien.
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