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Radio 3’s flagship arts programme until 2013. Over 350 editions available in the archive.

Radio 3’s flagship arts programme until 2013. Search the extensive archive for interviews, debates and reviews. Go to Free Thinking for the new home of arts and ideas on Radio 3.

Night Waves: The Celluloid Curtain, Brian Christian, Kutlug Ataman

The Celluloid Curtain, Brian Christian, Kutlug Ataman

05/05/2011

BBC Radio 3 - Night Waves, The Celluloid Curtain, Brian Christian, Kutlug Ataman

Presented by Matthew Sweet. With a festival celebrating Cold War European spy films.

Presented by Matthew Sweet. With a festival celebrating European spy films in the Cold War, a discussion about artificial intelligence, and artist and film maker Kutlug Ataman.

Matthew Sweet steps into the shady and sometimes surreal world of the East European spy-film as a new festival in London and Berlin celebrates the genre cinema of the Cold War. Unlike the James Bond films of fast cars, smooth cocktails and disposable women, filmmakers on the other side of the Iron Curtain showed the good communist spy fighting Western decadence and never being seduced by a stiff Martini.

He meets Brian Christian, author of the book, The Most Human Human, which is based on the experience of being a confederate in the 2009 Loebner Prize, the annual event where computers compete with humans to demonstrate the reaches of artificial intelligence and gain the award of "most human computer". The prize is a version of the British mathematician Alan Turing's Turing Test where a panel of human judges attempt to distinguish between the responses of a machine and a human being: if they cannnot then the machine should be deemed intelligent. The humans also compete to be awarded the status of Most Human Human based on their responses and Brian Christian, the winner of this award in 2009, argues that the tests of artificial intelligence offer us a chance to think hard about what makes us human.

Joining Brian in the studio are Raymond Tallis and Steve Connor to explore the idea of the human self.

Turkish artist and filmmaker Kutlug Ataman who won the Carnegie Prize in 2004 and has been shortlisted for the Turner Prize is going to be at this year's Brighton festival with two pieces about the man-made construction of geography and history. 'Su' is a composition of images of the Bosphorus in all seasons, while 'Mayhem', uses images of Mesopotamia, a waterfall in Argentina. Matthew Sweet will be finding out how the name 'Mesopotamia' found its way from East to West.

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