Cineosis Lab · the films, written up
Cineosis Papers
Each film in the series as a short paper. Each one covers the questions the film puts to the archive, where those questions came from (a poem line, a treatment, a chapter's moods, a sign), what was measured, what it found, and what we are unsure of. The films show; these say what was shown and how far to trust it.
What runs through all of them
- The archive answers questions; it does not volunteer. Everything a film shows was first a question, written by a person, a treatment, or a language model. A film inherits the vocabulary of whoever asked.
- The asker's words are not the poet's. In Where You Go When You Leave, a literal question shares 17% of its words with the line it was written for. The model added night 56 times; the poet said it 8 times.
- Feelings do not survive the search. Of 121 feelings listed in the poem's own suite data, 120 never reached a question. Symbols can be pictured, so they can be searched; feelings cannot.
- Machine closeness is compressed. For a typical moment the forty best matches differ by about 0.045. What decides between them is usually not the picture's meaning.
- A machine's sign is not a reading. 253 shots were read by a person; the rest carry a machine's guess, and a reader's sign is in the machine's top five only about half the time.
- The archive has a shape. It is mostly American educational, industrial and amateur film from the 1930s to the 1960s, mostly 4:3, and its voices are mostly men's: in the census of six lab films, character voices are 51 men to 9 women.