Olimpia (2024)

‘Olimpia’ is a short film inspired by E.T.A. Hoffmann’s celebrated short-story ‘Der Sandmann’ (c.1816-17)  - re-imagined from the point of view of Olimpia, the automaton that becomes the love-object of the protagonist.

Hoffman’s story prefigures the genre of ‘weird fiction’ in literature, an early example that explores the psychological effects and epistemology of artificial beings. Emerging from the Romantic movement in European aesthetics and the emergence of the Gothic novel, it is contemporaneous with Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’. 

The theme of artificial beings - and its cognate ‘artificial intelligence’ - can be traced across nineteenth-century and twentieth-century literature and film, finding its apotheosis as HAL in Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. The motif of AI can be seen as a kind of emergent literary meme that has developed over the last 200 years or more, and no more topical than it is today, as AI finally emerges blinking into the light of reality.

Much of the film was created in 2023 using a variety of generative-AI tools (SDXL, Deforum, SadTalker) including text-to-speech (XTTS) for the spoken word parts. Prompt-engineering, video edit by Peter Morse. The music was created by another human, the composer Glenn Rogers. This release version, December, 2024.

Soundtrack available at editioncrepuscule.com

https://editioncrepuscule.bandcamp.com/track/olimpia-soundtrack

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