One of the challenges of radical reciprocity between computation and aesthetics is the configuration of shared vocabularies and the design of common instruments and methods. In this ninth chapter I will outline one possible configuration that synthesises previous discussions and is driven by interactionist AI and computational aesthetics at their encounter with film and its theoretical frameworks. This will in turn lead to a broader reflection on the future of technical and analytical work in the humanities and lay the case for aesthetic thought to be integrated in the design of AI systems.

Elsewhere (2019) I made the argument that this moment of rapid technological intensification in AI, during which its various reasoning and technical regimes are deployed and spill into wider culture, deeply echoes the early years of the twentieth century, when electricity and new technologies of vision were repurposed by artists and entrepreneurs to configure the technical milieu of what was later going to become cinema. These early years are of especial interest to film historians because neither the technical nor the aesthetic conventions of the medium were yet fixed; there was still a lot of experimentation with equipment, styles, and formats of exhibition and distribution. Films were seen at the time as technical demonstrations rather than narrative vehicles, ‘the cinema itself was an attraction’ argues Tom Gunning (1990, p. 383); a spectacle in which audiences went to screenings to see the cinematographer in operation rather than the films.