Film and Electronic Arts

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Professor Joshua Glick Talks about AI in Hollywood on Marketplace Tech

Visiting Associate Professor of Film and Electronic Arts Joshua Glick spoke with Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino about the manifold ways Hollywood employs artificial intelligence including de-aging star characters, creating synthetic voices, generating digital faces and imagery of crowds, and even using deepfake technology in documentaries to protect vulnerable onscreen subjects. AI’s entree into filmmaking spurs anxiety that it could supplant human creative labor like screenwriting, designing, and directing. “New tools and new technologies have always sustained a productive tension or creative tension with the status quo of the industry. But I’d say that the idea of complete replacement is not something I foresee happening, at least in the near future. Some of the most promising or interesting areas is how these tools have become part of the toolbox,” Glick said. He also discusses what is at stake in Hollywood’s business side using AI analytics to maximize profits by informing filmmakers and studios “what films might make the most money depending on what happens in the plot and depending on who is cast. It leads to this attempt to slow down and challenge risk, which I think is a problem,” notes Glick.

Post Date: 03-14-2023

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Bard College Conservatory and Film and Electronic Arts Alumnus Luke Haaksma ’21 Awarded Charles Ives Scholarship by the American Academy of Arts

The American Academy of Arts and Letters has announced the 16 recipients of this year’s awards in music. Among the winners, Bard College Conservatory and Bard Film and Electronic Arts alumnus Luke Haaksma BA/BM ’21 was awarded a Charles Ives Scholarship. Charles Ives Scholarships are $7,500 each and awarded to composers for continued study in composition, either at institutions of their choice or privately with distinguished composers. Harmony Ives, the widow of Charles Ives, bequeathed to the Academy the royalties of Charles Ives’s music, which has enabled the Academy to give awards in composition since 1970. The award winners were selected by a committee of Academy members: Julia Wolfe (chair), Annea Lockwood, David Sanford, Christopher Theofanidis, Augusta Read Thomas, Chinary Ung, and Melinda Wagner. The awards will be presented at the Academy’s Ceremonial on May 24, 2023. Candidates for music awards are nominated by the 300 members of the Academy.

Luke Haaksma is a composer and filmmaker currently based in New Haven, Connecticut. His work has been performed at various festivals, universities, and venues throughout the United States and abroad. Haaksma is a past winner of both the Diana Wortham Emerging Artist Scholarship and the Ione M. Allen scholarship for the performing arts. His piano etude “Crystal Murk” was selected by Jihye Chang to be toured internationally as part of her multi-year solo recital project, “Continuum 88.” While an undergraduate at Bard College and the Conservatory, Haaksma studied composition with Joan Tower, George Tsontakis, and Lera Auerbach, piano with Blair McMillen, and Hammered Dulcimer with David Degge. He was the Conservatory’s  Joan Tower Composition Scholar. He was awarded the Sidney Peterson prize in experimental film, “Best Original Score” by the Dreamachine international film festival, and Official Selections from other Montreal and Los Angeles based festivals. Luke was honored as a 2021 National Hammered Dulcimer Championship finalist at the Walnut Valley music festival in Winfield, Kansas. His most recent string quartet, “talking” piece, was premiered in New York by The Rhythm Method as part of the Lake George Composers Institute. This past summer he was a fellow at the Brandeis Composers Conference. Luke began graduate studies at the Yale School of Music this past fall.

The American Academy of Arts and Letters was founded in 1898 as an honor society of the country’s leading architects, artists, composers, and writers. Early members include William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, Julia Ward Howe, Henry James, Edward MacDowell, Theodore Roosevelt, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, John Singer Sargent, Mark Twain, and Edith Wharton. The Academy’s 300 members are elected for life and pay no dues. In addition to electing new members as vacancies occur, the Academy seeks to foster and sustain an interest in Literature, Music, and the Fine Arts by administering over 70 awards and prizes totaling more than $1 million, exhibiting art and manuscripts, funding performances of new works of musical theater, purchasing artwork for donation to museums across the country, and presenting talks and concerts.

Post Date: 02-28-2023

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“AI Isn’t Hollywood’s Villain—It’s a Flawed Hero,” Writes Joshua Glick for Wired

Technological disruption is nothing new to cinema, writes Visiting Associate Professor of Film and Electronic Arts Joshua Glick for Wired. “Early film theorists considered silent cinema a universal language until ‘talkies’ transformed storytelling for the big screen,” he writes. Still, the advent and proliferation of audiovisual content created entirely by artificial intelligence “elicits a special kind of anxiety for the film and TV industry’s creative classes.” Concerns regarding the use of these technologies are merited, Glick writes, especially with respect to “synthetic resurrection,” where the likeness of a deceased actor is used posthumously in a film. Still, positive uses of the technologies abound, including in human rights documentaries, where powerful testimony can be portrayed without sacrificing the anonymity of the subject. Text-to-video, wherein a user inputs a textual prompt from which an AI produces visuals, can result in projects that are exciting in their “strangeness and messiness,” he writes. Most appealing to Glick are those works which combine the human element with the artificial in a kind of collaboration between man and machine: “These projects point to the productive frictions of mixed-media and cross-platform practices.”

Post Date: 01-31-2023