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Herzog in the Machine: Piotr Winiewicz and Finding the Humanity in an AI-Generated Documentary

Spotlight In this unmissable spotlight session, filmmaker Piotr Winiewicz takes us inside his AI-assisted documentary About a Hero, which opened IDFA 2024. Trained on the works of Werner Herzog, the film is a reality-bending, self-reflexive exploration of our relationship to the real.

“A computer will not make a film as good as mine in 4,500 years” – Werner Herzog. Such was the roguish declaration that led to artist and filmmaker Piotr Winiewicz feeding an AI all of Herzog’s works, and adapting its output into the hybrid documentary About a Hero.

Opening the prestigious International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2024, the thoroughly reality-bending (but transparently so) About a Hero unfolds as a mystery. In a small town, a factory worker Dorem Clery dies under mysterious circumstances. Our generated Werner Herzog travels to Getunkirchenburg to investigate his perplexing death.

Ironically self-reflexive, as AI Herzog investigates, the documentary is intertwined with a series of interviews with artists, philosophers and scientists reflecting on the notion of originality, authenticity, immortality, and the soul in the age of AI.

For his documentary debut, Piotr Winiewicz and his collaborators have crafted one of the most fascinating reflections on how we find humanity in the machine, and how we redefine our relationship to the real in an AI-age. Winiewicz joins moderator Julia Scott-Stevenson (UTS) for an unmissable spotlight session, where he will take us through the long journey from 2018 to develop the AI software Kaspar, train it on Herzog’s oeuvre and finally bring his hybrid documentary to the screen.

 

Image credit: About a Hero (Film Constellation, 2024)

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