backpropagation

Mutineer’s Manifesto

film stil

insurgent replication of copyrighted crops through the process of growing, scanning and hybrid intelligence.

short film

backpropagation: a short film for Lucy McRae's design studio
Music: Big Bad Wolf (Live @ Philly Folk Fest) - Shakey Graves
Shot on location @fleurishlavenderoflostmountain

In the mid 21st century a small mushroom farmer can no longer afford to pay the licensing fees to grow their crop, this is their story. In 1999 the Monsanto agrochemical company sued a small farmer who had unknowingly purchased and planted copyrighted GMO seeds for copyright infringement. The case reached the US Supreme Court in 2013 and was a unanimous decision in favor of Monsanto. At that time Monsanto had already won over 27 Million dollars in patent enforcement lawsuits on GMO plants. A few years after the Monsanto case in 2015 the FDA cleared Crispr-CAS9 edited White Button Mushrooms for sale in the United States without health and nutrition regulation. Meanwhile computer scientist Ian Goodfellow and his colleagues were developing the first Generative Adversarial Network or GAN, published in 2014. A GAN is a method of machine learning designed to generate result cases that, at least superficially, appear to be authentic. By 2017 Cornell scientists had proposed GAN’s as a method of creating synthetic DNA sequences saying that they believed these neural networks could “allow us to generate new sequences whose properties are estimated to be superior to those found in the training data.”

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In collaboration with Hans Steffes
Lucy McRae

backpropagation

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