Not sure how I ended up on a National Film Board of Canada (NFB) list but this morning (August 14, 2023) their latest emailed newsletter provided a thrill. From the August 11, 2023 NFB newsletter,

Montreal premiere: Ask Noam Chomsky anything in this interactive VR experience

CHOM5KY vs CHOMSKY is an interactive virtual reality installation created by Sandra Rodriguez, that lets you have a whole conversation with an AI-generated version of public intellectual Noam Chomsky. Be one of the first people to experience it at the NFB Space in Montreal.

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Before getting to ticket purchases, here’s more detail about the experience and the creative team bringing it to the public, from the NFB webpage devoted to CHOM5KY vs CHOMSKY: A playful conversation on AI,

Artificial intelligence is everywhere—from the photo enhancer in your smartphone to self-parking cars and the virtual assistant in your kitchen. But what is it exactly?

CHOM5KY vs CHOMSKY: A playful conversation on AI is an engaging and collaborative virtual reality experience that invites us to examine the promises and pitfalls of AI. If machine intelligence is promoted as an inevitable future, we should all be able to ask: What are we hoping to achieve with it? And at what cost?

Visitors use VR headsets to enter the AI world, where they are greeted by CHOM5KY—an artificial entity inspired by and built from the vast array of digital traces of renowned professor Noam Chomsky. CHOM5KY is a friend and serves as a guide, inviting us to peek under the hood of machine-learning systems, and offering thought-provoking takes on how artificial intelligence intersects with human life.

Why Noam Chomsky? [emphasis mine] Professor Chomsky is a philosopher, social critic, historian and political activist, but is perhaps best known for his work in linguistics and cognitive science, the study of the mind. As one of the most recorded and digitized living intellectuals, he has left behind an extensive wake of data traces, enough to create an AI system based on his legacy. Chomsky is also skeptical about the pompous promises made of AI. Which makes him the perfect guide to encourage visitors to question everything they see—and help demystify AI.

I think this is the ‘sizzle’ reel or trailer,

The creative team, from the NFB webpage devoted to CHOM5KY vs CHOMSKY: A playful conversation on AI,

Sandra Rodriguez
Creator

Sandra Rodriguez, Ph.D., is a director/producer and sociologist of new media technology. She has written and directed documentary features, web docs and VR, XR and AI experiences that have garnered multiple awards (including a Peabody, best VR awards at DOK Leipzig and the PRIX NUMIX, and the prestigious Golden Nica at the Prix Ars Electronica). She has served as UX lead and consultant for esteemed institutions such as CBC/Radio-Canada and the United Nations. Fascinated by storytelling and emergent technology’s potential for social change, Sandra has created a body of work that spans AI-dance performance, multi-user VR and large-scale XR installations. She is a Sundance Story Lab Fellow and MacArthur Grantee. She is also a Scholar and Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she leads “Hacking XR,” MIT’s first official class in immersive media creation. [Note: XR is Extended Reality]

SCHNELLE BUNTE BILDER
Co-producers

The media art collective SCHNELLE BUNTE BILDER was founded in Berlin in 2011. Technically on the cutting edge, their hearts beat for art, culture and science. Together with curators, musicians and other artists, they develop productions for exhibitions and cultural events. Somewhere between art and technology, they combine classical and generative animation with creative coding and critical design to create extraordinary media scenography. Since then, the studio has grown organically and currently consists of a solid core of designers, artists and developers: Michael Burk, Ann-Katrin Krenz, Felix Worseck, Niklas Söder and Johannes Lemke.

Marie-Pier Gauthier
Producer

Marie-Pier Gauthier is a producer at the NFB’s Montreal Interactive Studio and has been contributing to this storytelling laboratory for the past 12 years. Whether it’s digital creations on mobile devices or the web, interactive installations, or virtual or augmented reality experiences, she guides and supervises projects by innovative creators working at the crossroads of disciplines, who use a range of storytelling tools, including social networks, code, design, artificial intelligence and conversational robots. Marie-Pier Gauthier has collaborated on more than 100 interactive works (The Enemy, Do Not Track, Way To Go, Motto) that have received over 100 awards in Canada and abroad.

Laurence Dolbec
Producer

Laurence Dolbec is a producer in the interactive studio at the National Film Board of Canada. She has more than 12 years of experience working in production, notably for some of Quebec’s most creative institutions including Place des Arts, TOHU and C2 Montréal. Laurence started her career in New York City working for Livestream, which is now part of Vimeo. Her most recent productions explores the spheres of artificial intelligence and knowledge.

Louis-Richard Tremblay
Executive Producer

Louis-Richard Tremblay has been an executive producer with the French Program’s Interactive Studio since 2019. He first stepped into a producer role with the NFB in 2013, after a dozen or so years at CBC/Radio-Canada. Fascinated by the power of interactive experiences and media of all kinds, he has guided numerous international co-productions at the NFB, helped produce dozens of award-winning works in Canada and internationally, and regularly participates in panels, conferences and master classes.

CREDITS

Created by Sandra Rodriguez, CHOM5KY vs. CHOMSKY is a co-production by the National Film Board of Canada and SCHNELLE BUNTE BILDER, with support from the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg.

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Two Oddities: Berlin and Moov AI and tickets for the Canadian premiere

I was a little surprised to see that the project’s world premiere was in November 2022 during Berlin Science Week (November 1 – 10, 2022),

CHOM5KY vs CHOMSKY: A Playful Conversation on AI

SCHNELLE BUNTE BILDER

World Premiere in Berlin on 4 Nov 2022 at Berlin Science Week

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CHOM5KY vs CHOMSKY is a Co-production between the National Film Board of Canada and the Studio SCHNELLE BUNTE BILDER based in Berlin, supported by Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg.

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Oh well, it’s going to premiere in Canada almost a year later, from the NFB webpage devoted to CHOM5KY vs CHOMSKY: A playful conversation on AI,

CHOM5KY VS CHOMSKY

Starting September 6 [2023] in Montreal. Buy your tickets! Explore the world of artificial intelligence with an engaging and collaborative virtual reality experience by Sandra Rodriguez that examines the promises and pitfalls of AI.

NFB Space, 1500 Rue Balmoral

Montréal
Canada

BUY TICKETS

A few more details, from the project’s ticket page,

Sep 06, 2023 – Oct 01, 2023 | 10:00 AM EDT

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Frequently asked questions

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How long does the experience last?

The virtual reality experience takes about 25 minutes, but each timeslot runs 45 minutes, to take into account the introduction and getting set up. Please arrive 5 minutes early.

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How much does a ticket cost?

We offer a general admission ticket, for $26 + applicable taxes.

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I found this CHOM5KY VS CHOMSKY teaser quite appealing,

I’m not sure why Moov AI (based in Montreal, Canada) doesn’t appear in the most recent credits for the project but they host that teaser as an example from one of their projects,

Replicate Noam Chomsky’s persona

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Chomsky vs. Chomsky is a virtual reality and artificial intelligence immersive experience that showcases an interaction guided by CHOMSKY_AI, the virtual host built from digital traces of Noam Chomsky.

Sandra Rodriguez is the director of this project, which was realized in collaboration with the NFB, the MIT Open Documentary Lab, Schnellebuntebilder, and Moov AI.

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Using the digital traces left by Noam Chomsky and archives of his interviews, our team built an AI conversational agent that replicates his personality and cynical humor.

This chatbot is at the heart of the technical solution we developed and deployed to support the experience and link the creative vision of the project’s director to the technical requirements to ensure a fluid and immersive experience.

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AI to power a chatbot.

After the immense success of the prototype at Sundance 2020, the teams involved in the project are hard at work completing the final phase of production of Chomsky vs. Chomsky.

The project team is equipped with a CHOMSKY_AI conversational device that is true to the director’s artistic vision and allows thousands of people worldwide to chat with the digital doppelgänger of such a significant figure in contemporary history.

What a privilege!

Canadians and Noam Chomsky

“Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media” was one of the most successful feature documentaries in Canadian history. From the Manufacturing Consent (film) Wikipedia entry, Note: Links have been removed,

Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media^[1] is a 1992 documentary film that explores the political life and ideas of linguist, intellectual, and political activist Noam Chomsky. Canadian filmmakers Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick expand the analysis of political economy and mass media presented in Manufacturing Consent, a 1988 book Chomsky wrote with Edward S. Herman.

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[from the sidebar]

Running time:
167 minutes

Countries:

Australia
Finland
Norway
Canada

Language :

English

I believe it can be downloaded from the Internet Archive’s Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media webpage,

Funny, provocative and surprisingly accessible, MANUFACTURING CONSENT explores the political life and ideas of world-renowned linguist, intellectual and political activist Noam Chomsky. Through a dynamic collage of biography, archival gems, imaginative graphics and outrageous illustrations, Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick’s award-winning documentary highlights Chomsky’s probing analysis of mass media and his critique of the forces at work behind the daily news. Available for the first time anywhere on DVD, MANUFACTURING CONSENT features appearances by journalists Bill Moyers and Peter Jennings, pundit William F. Buckley Jr., novelist Tom Wolfe and philosopher Michel Foucault. This Edition features an exclusive ten-years-after video interview with Chomsky.

Enjoy!