The eighth annual CHATS Film Festival and Lecture Series is presented by UAlbany’s Center for Humanities, Arts, and the Technosciences (CHATS), The UAlbany Libraries, and The New York State Writers Institute, with help from the Writing and Critical Inquiry AI Committee, and the Alumni Association. It is an interdisciplinary, student-and community-centered public humanities program that aims to generate conversations and cultivate community relationships through a selection of culturally diverse films and lectures that expand academic discourse beyond the classroom and foster critical inquiry into real-world concerns through the arts.

Our theme for 2023 is derived from the current discussions of Artificial Intelligence in culture and the arts. While academics reel and tech companies celebrate, the CHATS Film Festival and Lecture Series explores the shifting and significant place of AI in the arts, not just in the products of AI or the production technologies they bring to the film set, but also the cinematic thrillers, mysteries, romances, and horror that are inspired by living and learning with AI. The lectures and films screened and discussed at the 2023 festival raise questions about loving, learning, working, and living with AI in both extraordinary and mundane circumstances.

Artificial Intelligence represents the capacity for humankind to imagine a future augmented by machines, a merger of the intrinsically human with the emphatically artificial so that the boundaries between them become blurred. This year’s festival explores these rich, liminal spaces for the fears and fantasies that they represent, all the while celebrating what it is that makes humanity unable to be replicated.

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS:
**UAlbany Students are free for all events.
Full Festival Pass: $50
Saturday Pass: $25
Metropolis (Nov. 3) – $15
Single Film Ticket – $10

Friday, November 3—The Linda

6:30-10:30 pm: Metropolis with live music accompaniment by Order of the Illusive

Saturday, November 4—The Linda

1-3 pm: Her (Spike Jonze, 2013)

3-5 pm: Chappie (Neill Blomkamp, 2015)

7-10pm: The Matrix (Lana and Lilly Wachowski, 1999)

Sunday, November 5—The Linda

1-3 pm: Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2014)

5-8 pm: Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)