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Evolution of the Stars

Ewolucja gwiazd · dir. Bracia Bartos
Poland 2016, 45’

19 October, 17:00 · CKK Jordanki

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We are proud to announce that all those attending Tofifest 2016 will have an opportunity to see the result of a cooperation between an international team of Facebook software developers and a creative team from B61 Institute in Toruń. The „Evolution of the Stars” project features a creative use of Facebook bots, the first one of this kind ever presented in Poland. Consequently, Tofifest has become a platform for demonstrating the latest technologies.

And it fills us with pride, since our partners from B61 Institute have decided that Tofifest would be the best place to present their project. In the near future, bots installed in the Messenger app will completely change the way Facebook communicates with its users. B61 Institute, as one of the first institutions in Central and Eastern Europe, has been authorised by the company run by Mark Zuckerberg to test one of such bots.

During Tofifest, you will have an opportunity to see a series of films used to create the bot, while the bot of B61 Institute — named after Professor Joseph Brewster — will be made available to everybody who would like to test it.

The Evolution of the Stars is an innovative audio-visual project created by Jan Świerkowski and the Bartos brothers, based on a play of the same title, written by B61 Institute. The artists spent a couple of months in Toruń, in order to create a series of films comprised of metaphorical presentations of remote astronomical phenomena and objects, such as a red giant, supernova, or blue straggler.

When working on a script, they cooperated with Dominik Smużny, Dagmara Pochyła, and Maciej Cegłowski, in an effort to capture things that are remote and unknown on Earth in a manner understandable to people, i.e. to let audiences experience the destructive power of a black hole, or see the indescribable beauty of a planetary nebula, even if only for a short while.

The series is composed of between ten and twenty films, and they form a logical whole — from the birth of a star that is formed from gas and dust of interstellar matter, through its peaceful existence on the main sequence, until its death, determined by the initial mass of the star. The following people have made guest appearances in the project: Wojciech Mecwaldowski, Mirosław Zbrojewicz, Marcelina, Łukasz L.U.C Rostkowski, Organek, Mariusz Lubomski, and Antoni „Ziut” Gralak, to name a few. The text read in the films was written by Tomek Tryzna, and music to the project composed by Bartek Staszkiewicz.

The series of films will be presented in a special way, using state-of-the-art IT solutions, since it offers a unique combination of the world of science and art. The Evolution of the Stars will take the audience through each successive stage of the process, guided by a mysterious Professor Joseph Brewster from B61 Institute, who was created in the image of HAL 9000 from Space Odyssey.

The audience will have an opportunity to talk with him using Facebook — they will be able to send messages to the fanpage of B61 Institute. From that moment, a viewer can start a dialogue with the Professor. Each new film and piece of information is sent back to the recipient, as an element of the conversation in Facebook Messenger. It is the viewer who controls and “requests” successive content directly from the Professor.

“Facebook has got down to business and laid their cards on the table. It is history happening in front of our eyes — there is a new form of interacting with services and devices coming (although it is not that innovative). A natural language, bots, and speech — it is all yet another step to make interacting with devices more natural,” Antyweb.pl portal wrote a month ago.

What will the “bot revolution” really consist in? The Torun incarnation of the revolution constitutes its noble face, which enables promoting science and art, including film art. However, the majority of such bots (chatbots) will be put to a much more practical use. By using Facebook Messenger, we will be able to order pizza, flowers, a courier, or check the latest news from all around the world... and virtually do anything we want. The times of dull talks with a consultant offering a bunch of predictable and artificial clichés will be gone. And our Professor is certainly not of that kind...

“The bot imitating Professor Joseph Brewster is a tool designed in cooperation with Facebook, and we are still testing it,” says Janek Świerkowski. Should it be impossible to use the tool, for whatever technical reason, all people attending Tofifest will have access to an Internet platform dedicated to the film project, and to a mobile app.

Director:Bracia Bartos

2016 Programme

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