2025 – Rise of the Machines

5th Spiral Film and Philosophy Conference

Toronto, Canada, May 23-24, 2025

Keynote Speaker: Shane Denson

Recent breakthroughs in generative AI technology have once again drawn attention to cinema’s ongoing identity crisis. In the digital epoch, under what Davide Panagia calls the algorithm dispositif or what Shane Denson refers to as post-cinema, we increasingly encounter moving images that are preformatted for our consumption by artificial metabolic processes beyond human understanding. Where once computers seemed to serve as tools of communication, information processing and entertainment, ushering in an era of liberation for humanity from needless toil, some now fear the overtaking of human intellect by autonomous artificial thought. Critics of AI contend that with the rise of “intelligent” machines that mediate our view of the world we become interpassive subjects (Robert Pfaller) that delegate our cognitive and emotional labour: AI driven algorithms shape the social and political sphere in our staid. Without the ability to experience the world for ourselves, these algorithms and machines are poised to carry the burden of our former humanity.

There are some resonances in such concerns with earlier arguments in film theory about the ways that the cinematographic apparatus (Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz) constructs and positions spectators as passive viewing subjects within the dominant ideology. On the other hand, classical film theorists like André Bazin and Stanley Cavell once praised the cinema precisely for its ability to reproduce the world automatically, showing us a proof of the reality outside our mind’s biased projections – a necessary condition for any democratic society. Similarly, Walter Benjamin believed in the power of cinema’s machinery to reveal the optical unconscious of modern mass societies and thereby counter the alienation and atomization produced by industrial capitalism.

A question emerges: Is AI-mediated post-cinema still for a human audience or is the target of its uncanny images the machine vision of what Daniel Chavez Heras calls computational spectatorship?

Similarly, are Silicon Valley technocrats dreaming of total digital surveillance in the metaverse the extenders of democracy, or they the harbingers of a techno-feudalism that subjugates connectively mutated neuro-workers (Franco Berardi)?

In the end, are human beings the authors, actors and agents of the post-cinematic age or are they losing their autonomy to the automatic subjectivity of capital (Karl Marx) taking a cinematic form?

Confirmed Keynote Speaker: Shane Denson

The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada at CineCycle on Friday, May 23 and Saturday, May 24, 2025. CineCycle, in the old coach house down the lane behind 129 Spadina Ave., on the east side between Richmond St. W. and Adelaide St. W., Toronto: map.

Conference Registration Link: Eventbrite
Conference Attendance: $120 (Canadian)
Graduate Students and Underemployed: $60 (Canadian)

Conference website: spiralfilmphilosophy.ca
Facebook: @spiralphilosophy

For inquiries contact: spiralfilmphilosophy[at]gmail[dot]com

Organized by:
The Spiral Collective
in collaboration with
Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, York University