Daniel Chávez Hera is lecturer in Digital Culture and Creative Computing in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. His research combines critical frameworks in the history and theories of cinema, television, and photography, with advanced technical practice in creative and scientific computing, including applied machine learning technologies. He works with cultural institutions such as the British Film Institute, the British Council and the BBC, and is the author of Cinema and Machine Vision: Artificial Intelligence, Aesthetics and Spectatorship (Edinburgh University Press).
Topic summary
When moving image archives purchase AI services, they receive outputs —automated transcription, object detection, metadata generation — but the knowledge of how those outputs were produced remains with the vendor. Each token bought is capacity not built. The Intelligent Systems for Screen Archives (ISSA) project, funded by the BFI through the National Lottery, explores an alternative: five UK regional and national archives collaborating on open-source, modular prototypes. This is a longer path, but the returns are different in kind: shared infrastructure, methods and skills that build collective understanding of what AI can and cannot do for moving image collections. In this panel, the principal investigator of ISSA reflects on early lessons from the first phase of the project and shares its direction of travel going forward.
