Entangling Umwelten: Towards a New Ecology of Machine Learning, Moving Images and Nonhuman Worlds

纠缠环境：迈向机器学习、移动图像和非人类世界的新生态

• 批准号: 2637003
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Kingston University
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2021 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2637003
• 关键词: Entangling; Umwelten; Towards; New; Ecology

This practice-based PhD will be the first extended academic study to explore applications of the biologist Jakob von Uexkull's concept of Umwelt to the theory and practice of contemporary film and moving images. In his work A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans (1934), Uexkull defines Umwelt as the 'surround-world' of each animal's and human's perceptual and meaningful environment, emphasising that each living being determines the meanings in their own surroundings. I will follow Inga Pollmann's previously under-theorised argument in Cinematic Vitalism (2018) that Umwelt theory grew out of Uexkull's experiments with early cinematography, and that it can stand as a way of complicating conventional discourses of cinema as a milieu which acts upon rather than with being. I will explore how Umwelt theory can be politically and intellectually radical if we consider how thinkers and artists after Uexkull have used it to create openings for new ways of altering the anthropocentric gaze and being with nonhumans in their environments. This will be done through the production of machine learning installations and films alongside an extended thesis.The thesis will explore a selection of contemporary film and moving image works through the lens of critical fields which build upon Umwelt theory across the later 20th century and into the 21st. For the PhD's practical dimension, I will produce a collection of videos under the title Metabolisms using cutting-edge machine learning models 'trained' on archives of animal locomotion photography, and which create nonhuman moving image 'interpretations' of those archives which I call 'posthuman locomotion'. This practical strand will be enhanced by a series of short essay films about human-animal encounters which employ various machine learning methodologies, such as 'upscaling' algorithms, as new, experimental and radical forms of cinematic grammar.

这个以实践为基础的博士学位将是第一个扩展的学术研究，探索生物学家雅各布·冯·于克斯库尔的Umwelt概念在当代电影和运动图像的理论和实践中的应用。在他的作品《动物和人类的世界》（1934）中，Uexkull将Umwelt定义为每个动物和人类感知和有意义的环境的“周围世界”，强调每个生物都决定自己周围环境的意义。我将遵循Inga Pollmann之前在《电影活力论》（2018）中提出的理论不足的论点，即Umwelt理论源于Uexkull对早期电影摄影的实验，它可以作为一种使传统电影话语复杂化的方式，作为一种作用于而不是存在的环境。如果我们考虑乌克斯库尔之后的思想家和艺术家是如何利用这个理论为改变人类中心主义的目光和在他们的环境中与非人类相处的新方法打开了大门，我将探讨人类世界理论在政治上和智力上是如何激进的。这将通过制作机器学习装置和电影以及扩展论文来完成。本论文将探讨当代电影和运动图像作品的选择，通过关键领域的镜头，建立在Umwelt理论跨越20世纪后期和进入21世纪。在博士学位的实践方面，我将制作一组题为“代谢”的视频，使用尖端的机器学习模型“训练”动物运动摄影档案，并对这些档案进行非人类运动图像的“解释”，我称之为“后人类运动”。一系列关于人与动物相遇的短文电影将加强这一实践链，这些短片采用了各种机器学习方法，如“升级”算法，作为新的、实验性的和激进的电影语法形式。