Ellen Pearlman: Language Is Leaving Me - An AI Cinematic Opera Of The Skin (Dny AI 2015)

7 November 2025 4pm - 6pm

Café Husovka, Husova 9, Prague 1
Free entry.

Lecture and film screening by American AI artist and theorist Ellen Pearlman.

The lecture will be preceded by an interactive installation of an art project PumpGPT that Ellen Pearlman created together with participants in her workshops during her stay in CETE-P as a Fulbright Specialist in Prague in September 2025.

The event is part of Dny AI (Days of AI).

Language Is Leaving Me – An AI Cinematic Opera Of The Skin is a Lumen Prize Moving Image Award in AI and Top 50 Immersive Experiences of 2023 from Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab. It investigates newly emerging artificial intelligence cinema driven by LLMs or Large Language Models combined with human biometric measurements (skin, muscles) to reveal hidden and devastating aspects of the algorithmic processes underlying the use of AI in human perception, cognition, memory, and identity.

The work focuses on epigenetic or inherited traumatic memories of cultures of diaspora that change an individual's inherited rDNA structure that are passed from generation to generation. AI purports to understand, codify, and tag these vastly complex and uniquely human traits. LILM compares and contrasts an original narrated English language video of an epigenetic memory into a representation of an AI induced dementia. This cinematic performed biometric opera shows AI, using different linguistic prompts or scripts in Yiddish, Chinese, Tamil, and Xhosa reinterpret intergenerational memories, changing or obliterating` their meaning. LILM had its World Premier at the Copernicus Science Center in Warsaw, Poland on October 7, 2023 at the exact same moment the war in the Middle East broke out.

PumpGPT

Generative AI makes things that are time-consuming and difficult for people – research, coding, translation or making image and videos – incredibly quick and easy, so much so it can seem almost magical. This is possible due to the hugely energy-, resource- and labour-intensive processes needed for AI's training and operation. The expensive hardware that powers AI needs vast amounts of electricity and water, but AI also needs human knowledge and creativity as its inputs, and people to test and correct its outputs. 

PumpGPT is an AI interface made of several connected parts – a camera, computer and projector, a water pump, microphones and sound – that participants interact with through physical handwriting and pumping. It uses the same powerful technologies that are behind OpenAI's ChatGPT but changes the way we access them. Hand-written prompts invite us to consider ours questions more carefully, and the physical pumping needed to get and answer makes us share some of the work of generating the output, giving participants time to think about their own possible answers to their question.

Generative AI is a machine. It is vastly more complex technically than a water pump, but the principle isn't so different. Work needs to be done to make something accessible and useful, whether it's water or information. This installation aims to make the similarities more obvious. If we slow the process down, and give ourselves time to think for ourselves, the AI generated answer might not seem so magical after all. 

Ellen Pearlman, was a Fulbright Specialist with CETE-P in September 2025. Her workshop has been funded by J. W. Fulbright Commission in the Czech Republic. She is a new media artist, critic, curator and writer. Ellen has a PhD from the School of Creative Media, Hong Kong City University, where her thesis was awarded Highest Honours Internationally by Leonardo LABS Abstracts. She is Visiting Research Scholar at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and a Senior Researcher, Assistant Professor at RISEBA University in Riga, Latvia. A Fulbright World Learning Specialist in Art, New Media and Technology she is also an EU Vertigo STARTS Horizon 2020 Laureate, a Zero1 American Arts Incubator Fellow in Kyiv, Ukraine, and a contributing editor to Performance Arts Journal (PAJ) MIT Press. Ellen is also President of Art-A-Hack™ and Director and Curator of the New York Volumetric Society. You can find out more about Ellen’s work here.