All those interested in +RAIN Film Fest, Europe’s first AI film festival, can register as of Thursday 8 May. Registrations for the festival, which will be held throughout the day on Wednesday 14 June on the UPF Poblenou campus, can be made at upf.edu/web/rainfilmfest/rain.

+RAIN Film Fest will offer a variety of activities to approach narratives generated using artificial intelligence and their possibilities as well as the ethical, aesthetic and political implications.

From the experimentation of the processes of creation and research of an emerging technology as is generative AI, +RAIN is an opportunity for discussing with experts, talking to authors, watching films and experiencing audiovisual and musical performances generated with artificial intelligence.

There are three sections open to all interested persons registering in advance: RESEARCH (a morning of conferences and round tables), FEST (an afternoon of cinema), and LIVE (an evening of concerts). Registrations can be made on the website: https://www.upf.edu/web/rainfilmfest/.

+RAIN Film Fest is a transdisciplinary project organized by the Department of Communication, the Department of Information and Communication Technologies and the Arsenal ecosystem, all of Pompeu Fabra University. On the part of the University, the festival also enjoys the financial support and collaboration of the UPF Board of Trustees and the collaboration of UPF Ventures.

Over the next few days, the films selected from the 48 nominations submitted from 15 different countries and the names of the international jury that will award the prizes will be announced.

The programme of +RAIN Film Fest

Below, the main contents of each of the sections of the festival are set out along with the times they will take place on Wednesday 14 June.

RESEARCH 

From 9 am to 1:30 pm: talks on AI in content creation

It will contain talks and round tables on the future of AI in the creation of digital content and its impact on the media sector. It will deal with aspects such as the storytelling capacity of AI tools, the ethical use of AI, creativity, copyright, and the redefinition of the actual concept of author.

Recognized experts in the study of the impact of AI in the field of art and communication will be taking part, such as Joanna Zylinska, who will talk about non-human images and address issues such as the following: Are machines creative? Another of the participants is Andrea Guzman, an expert in the human-machine relationship, who will reflect on how we talk about AI and communication challenges in this area. She will focus especially on the metaphors that are used to refer to this topic. There will be experts in the field of ethics as well as developers of film creation and editing tools such as Cristóbal Valenzuela, co-founder of Runway, a generative video startup, and Víctor Pérez, a UPF alumni, co-founder of Krea, a generative image platform for creatives.

FEST

From 4:30 pm to 8 pm: films generated with AI and discussions with their authors

Films generated with artificial intelligence will be screened and discussions will be held with their authors to explain the creative process, the generative applications used, and to identify aesthetic possibilities of the experimental use of an emerging technology and the implications for the future of cinematographic language.

The selected films of the international call of the festival will be shown. You will also be able to see a selection of the films presented at the first edition of the AI Film Festival that Runway organized in February this year in New York. The short films of the two sections, the participating authors and the members of the international jury will be announced shortly.

LIVE

From 8 pm to 11 pm: an evening of music and audiovisuals generated with AI

The processes of research and experimentation with artificial intelligence to generate music and audiovisual products are the starting point of the performances of LIVE. The boundaries between disciplines, languages, genres and identities are blurred in projects dealing with human-machine relations such as “Slowly fading into Data” by Albert Barqué-Duran, or the live-coding by Anna Xambó who, inspired by the space of the Poblenou campus (located in an old factory), reflects on the evolutionary construction of history through the generation of sounds. Also noteworthy is the premiere of the Transformer, created by the UPF Music Technology Group (MTG), which will be played by Raül Refree; or the proposals of Jennifer Walshe or Nao Tokui, who will bring the festival to a close after its winning films have been awarded.

Further details of the programme at:

www.upf.edu/web/rainfilmfest/rain

@rainfilmfest (TW, IG i YT)