Join us for a screening of the film “The Bit Player” (2018). This film was commissioned by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Information Theory Society and directed by Mark Levinson, director of the award winning film “Particle Fever”, which our audience loved seeing three years ago.

The film will be shown Friday Nov 1 at 7:30PM, Saturday Nov 2 at 7:30PM and Sunday Nov 3 at 2PM, in Ryan auditorium Room LR2 of Technological Institute (just inside the Technological Institute entrance, 2145 Sheridan Rd, Evanston IL).

After each screening, you are welcome to stay to hear a panel discussion of faculty experts if you are curious about the science behind the film.

Admission is free, but please reserve in advance at http://etopia.northwestern.edu or call (847) 920-8327.

Film details:

In a blockbuster paper in 1948, Claude Shannon introduced the notion of a “bit” and laid the foundation for the information age. His ideas ripple through nearly every aspect of modern life, influencing such diverse fields as communication, computing, cryptography, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, cosmology, linguistics, and genetics. But when interviewed in the 1980s, Shannon was more interested in showing off the gadgets he’d constructed — juggling robots, a Rubik’s Cube solving machine, a wearable computer to win at roulette, a unicycle without pedals, a flame-throwing trumpet — than rehashing the past. Mixing contemporary interviews, archival film, animation and dialogue drawn from interviews conducted with Shannon himself, The Bit Player tells the story of an overlooked genius who revolutionized the world, but never lost his childlike curiosity.