Let Me Dream Again
April 2021 | By Anna Ridler in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture and Artists + Machine Intelligence Grant
An endlessly generating film and soundtrack trained on the audio and visuals of early Hollywood and European Cinema.
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Let Me Dream Again is a series of experiments that use machine learning to try to recreate lost films from the fragments of early Hollywood and Western cinema that still exist. These experiments include an endlessly evolving, algorithmically generated film which exists only on this website. Alongside this is the research that sits behind the film, documented as an interactive cutting room floor and covering the dataset used to create the artwork, the artwork’s use of generative adversarial networks (GANs), and more about Hollywood’s missing films.
In contrast to Anna Ridler’s previous work, which uses machine learning as a disintegration loop, destroying what was there until no meaning was left, Let Me Dream Again explores whether it is possible to do the opposite: to remake something that has disappeared.