Experiencing Interruptions?

The Sentient Thespian

A 21st Century take on Midsummers Night Dream- A "sentient" robot tries to imbue sentience on a human and an industrial robot by casting a love spell only to suffer disappointment that his powers simulate, but not really imbue, sentience.

  • Adrianne Wortzel
    Director
    Orginator, Author, Director
  • Adrianne Wortzel
    Writer
  • Andrew McWilliams
    Producer
  • Ellen Pearlman
    Producer
  • Kira Davies
    Key Cast
    "Helena"
  • Wen Industrial Robot
    Key Cast
    "Lysander"
  • Reach Robotics Mekamon
    Key Cast
    "Puck"
  • Kevin Barry
    Editors
  • Josh Tuthill
    Editors
  • Keetak Dhiman
    Crew
    Cinematography
  • David Yarnell
    Crew
    Puck Motion Documentation
  • Nick Burtmiller
    Crew
    Still Photography
  • Justin Olson
    Crew
    Programming
  • Project Type:
    Short
  • Genres:
    Fiction, Fable, Futuristic, SciFi
  • Runtime:
    5 minutes 16 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    April 10, 2019
  • Production Budget:
    12,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:0
  • Film Color:
    Black & White and Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Second Sunday Pioneer Works
    NEW YORK
    United States
    April 14, 2019
    None
    N/A
  • New Filmmakers NY - Anthology Film Archives
    New York
    United States
    July 17, 2019
    None
    N/A
Director Biography - Adrianne Wortzel

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Adrianne Wortzel is a New York artist who studied with Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Jimmy Ernst, Louise Bourgeois, among others. Support for her work has been forthcoming from the National Science Foundation; Eyebeam Art and Technology Center; the Swiss Artists-in-Labs Program; the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Zurich; Dora Maar Foundation-administered by the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, Greenwall Foundation; New York Foundation for the Arts, Brooklyn Museum, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Her writings are published in national and international publications. Selected exhibition venues include the Whitney Museum of American Art, Asheville Art Museum, Imagine Science Film Festival, Electronica, Creative Time, MIT Vera List Center; Orlando Museum of Art; Moderna Museet-Stockholm. She is a retired Professor of Emerging Media Technologies at Citytech, CUNY, and Founding Director of StudioBlueLab, an interdisciplinary collaborative facility at Cooper Union for Advancement of Science and Art.

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Director Statement

Adrianne Wortzel's work manifests in both tangible and networked environments. Through fictive and dramatic scenarios, in films, theatrical installations, stories and scripts; her work renders aspects of how humans relate to machines and how the arc of technological advances emerges, becomes pervasive, spawns the next invention and eventually, is rendered obsolete. Her work engages a palimpsest of technologies layered over the environments in which they have developed. By juxtaposing a past reality with the present, and extolling both the beauty and the beastliness of invention, her work engages in a narrative of the human condition by framing individual moments in the limelight of technological invention over time.