time machine // database // travel guide
spacetime coordinates: 1945 Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, Upper Austria
The Photographer of Mauthausen (Spanish: El fotógrafo de Mauthausen) is a 2018 Spanish biography drama / historical film starring Mario Casas as photographer Francisco Boix during his life in the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp complex. (wiki)
imdb / rottentomatoes / comics
The Bookmaker by filmmaker Girum Berehanetsehay unfolds in the mists of the high Ankober Mountains of Ethiopia.
The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. It is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input. One interacts with the Game of Life by creating an initial configuration and observing how it evolves. It is Turing complete and can simulate a universal constructor or any other Turing machine. (wiki)
The Beta Test is a 2021 dark comedy thriller film written and directed by Jim Cummings (Thnder Road and Wolf of Snow Hollow) and PJ McCabe. It follows a talent agent whose life is turned upside-down after taking part in a secret sex pact; Cummings and McCabe star alongside Virginia Newcomb and Jessie Barr.
The film premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival on March 1, 2021 and was released in the United States on November 5, 2021. (wiki)
I am grateful to Robert Schilling to have recommended this one. Jim Cummings is one of those actors you will love or hate, depending. I consider him one of the most incredible phenomena of today. He has come out of the indie movie scene as a director, writer, and director. This particular movie that he co-directs and also stars is one of my favorite movies of the 21st century I think.
It stands together with David Cronenberg Map to the Stars as a dark side tour de force of Hollywood. And that said, it is still not putting it on the map, since I think it is not an ‘exposure’ horror-comedy, showing us the ‘real life’ behind the scenes, the underbelly of the pop-up agency hell that grows around Hollywood, but something else altogether. This is the first movie – to somehow include (by design, by lucky inspired creative mistake? who cares) today’s ‘male’ hetero experiential world full-on. Maybe this is not interesting to you at all, because it is already a dying animal. And maybe better so, and as the movie unwinds we get more and more convinced of that slow ride into extinction. Certainly picking out this collapsing story, or translating on-screen a jagged (if unsurprising) and incongruous experience is also the virtue of post-continuity cinema.
The main character – the soon-to-be-married white US Hollywood agent is the usual run-of-the-mill corporate male asshole of today’s company lot. Yes, he is a complete failure to himself and others, but also some sort of ‘useful idiot‘, a fairly rich (but not insanely rich) member of a hustler culture that transforms himself into his own prey. Increasingly more and more of the world’s wealth is a measure of the rapaciousness and ability of platform capitalism (Google, Facebook, Uber, and most Big Tech nowadays) to scam the economy and feed off not just from low-paid non-unionized jobs, let’s say the invisible work of troll farms or click farms as such – but also, more importantly I think, of the tendencies, affinities, preferences or even discrepancies, dislikes, aesthetics, moral codes, racialized profiles (transformed into algorithmic biases) of the super-rich.
I think what appears to be a frantic, chopped up, hallucinatory, deranged, and hysterical filming and acting – is what this particular experiential world feels like from the lived inside. It almost feels like the main character’s hustling is turned inside out. One feels he’s is being offered his own medicine spoonful. We suddenly have the pulse on a world where everything runs on a particular kind of fuel – of privatized repackaged affects; on actualization algorithms that monetize unspoken potentialities, targeting people’s imaginations, needs, insatisfactions, pre-packaged ‘personality types. In fact, it does not matter how stupid or bland these sexual fantasies are (meeting a stranger in a hotel room let’s say) because in the end, they will all look the same, you will pay the price and they will encourage you to do more of the same. Acts of brutality seem disconnected as dotting a soon to be revealed conspiracy, yet there is no conspiracy, there are just agencies and apps.
The question of agency is again completely lost. It is not like in Kafka’s trial where the actual crime is never clear or a classical whodunit. The ‘crime’ or infringement is clear from the beginning, so clear in fact that it can be guessed by machines, by algorithms that bet against your so-called correctness. Even the crime’s victims know it from the start since they call the cops beforehand.
It becomes clear that the majority of low employees (like the immigrant class that cleans after the crimes or delivers the scarlet anonymous letters with sexual menus) is in fact precariously oblivious to the fact that there is bloody rich people’s pillow fight going on. It is not rich people as monsters (Society 1989) and the lower classes as Darwinistic dark vitalist parasites (Parasite 2019), but as participants in a sort of economy that manages to take into account only their wishes, their fetish phantasies (no matter how bland or stereotypical). There is only the primary needs (no matter how made-up, artificial or corny) of the luxury class. The fact that most of the movie’s scenes decay either into dark horrific scenes of brutal domestic violence in perfect apartments or into bizarre non-sensical spectacles of potential faux pas inside restaurants and pretentious dinners, transforms the camera eye perspective into a moving, jumping nudging theory (for us and the main character). At the same time there is this horrendous exploitation and sexual harassment potential – what should we call systemic – at the very heart of the modern work corporate clean spotless smart bureau environment.
Again, this is not the classic – Madison avenue 1960s casual traditional male-preserve abuse, but a sort of embedded, ready-to-happen, constant diffuse potential of future abuse. Even under current PC standards (what the movie protagonists call ‘current climate’) and after #MeeToo, sexism is rampant and inequality is stacked sky-high, stemming from inequality of pay btw men and women, but also stacked against the inexperienced and the youngest employees and their CVs. All of this is never straight fwd in the movie and always there is an absurdist, self-defeating angle. Every discussion has the potential to offer even more darkly comic condemning data points to us and the database. Every false step, discussion, get aggregated because the ‘agent’ is all the time outed as not a mask, not an agent, but a sort of bad actor early on, always pushing for fat contracts. He is from the beginning on somebody that is completely and systematically trained to be as unsincere as possible as a measure of his success in life.
[Metmorphoses of Science Fiction was first published by Yale University Press in 1979]
by Darko Suvin
Since I had the pleasure to be a small part of the Science Fiction & Communism congress in the month of May at the American University in Blagoevgrad Bulgaria with Ion Dumitrescu (Pre, Fractalia 2019). I am thankful to Dr. Emilia Karaboeva, Ralitsa Konstantinova, and Prof. Emilia Zankina to have made it all possible. In retrospect, that year presented me with an interesting parallax (to use Karatani’s Marxist twist), before my cancer diagnosis and surgery and just after co-curating Cozzzmonautica in Yogyakarta at Lifepatch I took part in this Science Fiction congress. On one busy and tremendously (for us newcomers at least) dense Congress day, there came a moment where the voice of Darko Suvin disembodied (via Skype) spoke to us. Altough there was no sight of him, he encouragingly spurned us to keep on look ahead, to help built a healthy SF in Eastern Europe and keep wading the dark, heavy clouds of destructo-capitalism. He, as one of the foremost scholars of science fiction studies and research into utopia and utopianism – has influenced the field as no other, giving the genre critical purpose and focus. This voice was what I remembered. Welcoming words and the whole prepping up that followed. Here are Darko Suvin’s transcribed “Theses”. A testament to his lucidity and sharpness. I managed to read them only these wintery days.
>>Here they are published by the Mediations Journal.
In a scathing indictment of today’s ontological supremacy (things are as they are) and for a more humble epistemology (evolving critical knowledge), one can read his “theses” that supply many paths including Disneyfication, ‘Time is Money’, Eastern Europe, anti-utopia and a thourough reworking and further criticism of this notion of novum – as well as of cognitive estrangement that he derived from Brecht’s theatrical (German) Verfremdungseffekt and Shlovsky’s more literary formalist perceptual-aesthetic ostranenie. Especially noteworthy are his mythical vs critical estrangment as follows:
However, epistemologically, which today means also politically, estrangement has two poles, the mythical and the critical.
Brecht provides one “ideal type” of the critical method. In it plotting proceeds by fits and starts, akin to what Eisenstein called a montage of attractions. The intervals tend to destroy illusion and to paralyze the audience’s readiness to empathize. Their purpose is to enable the spectator to adopt a critical attitude both towards the represented behavior of the play’s agents and towards the way in which this behavior is represented. It is therefore also a permanent self-criticism. This means there is in Brecht’s plays no suspense as to whether and how a goal will be reached, but instead a convergence towards increased clarification as to the nature and causes of the conditions uncovered and seen afresh; the goal is implicitly presupposed and subtending the events. To the suspense of illusionistic theatre or media this opposes astonishment at many ensuing events and the human condition they delineate, differing from the humanizing goal and ideal.
The other pole is best represented in fascist ideologies: Knut Hamsun, Ernst Jünger or Ezra Pound practiced an estrangement wedded to various proto-fascist myths, rightly identifying liberal ideologies as hypocritical and wrongly arguing for a return to simplified brutality. To take a poetically pertinent example, Ezra Pound’s powerful invocation and condemnation of usura in the Pisan Cantos is a major semantic shift or estrangement of those aspects of capitalism that the “Left” fascists were sincerely (though quite inconsequentially) spurning. However, as all such fixations on a supposed hierarchical Gemeinschaft [Community, Gr. a term that has a tradition and is generally a counterpart to Gesselschaft Gr Society] it is a cognitively sterile — or even actively misleading — estrangement: It does not make for a permanent critique and renewal but leads back to as dogmatic and pernicious certainties as in the most hidebound epochs, in a way worse than the conservative certainties it was rejecting. It spurns self-criticism as bloodless intellectualism; protofascism or full fascism is always dead certain.
Since cca 1997 Prof Darki Suvin has radically revised and revisited both his take on the history of science and of the complicit role of the novum in technoscience – which he suspects is maybe involved in labour exploitation at the core, strip-mining humans reduced (reified) to ‘human resources’ and new ways of surplus extraction:
Further, perhaps a labor-saving and nature-saving eutopian society would also need novums, but just how many? Might we not rather wish, as William Morris did, for the true novum of “an epoch of rest”? Philosophically speaking, should we not take another look at the despised Aristotelian final cause? Politically speaking, what if science is a more and more powerful engine in the irrational system of cars and highways with capitalism in the driving seat heading for a crash with all of us unwilling passengers — what are then the novums in car power and design? How can we focus on anti-gravity, or at least rolling roads, or at the very least electrical and communally shared cars —which could have existed in 1918 if the patents had not been bought up and suppressed by the automotive industry? How can we constitute a power system able to decide that there can be no freedom for suppressing people’s freedom?
He also helps one to better distinguish, in today’s “Copernican Counter-Revolution” what eutopia means, and what separates dystopia from anti-utopia:
Eventually they slopped over also into narrative form as the subgenre of anti-utopia, written to warn against utopias, not (as in dystopia) against the existing status quo, and culminating perhaps in Ayn Rand’s [book] Anthem. Anti-utopianism is an embattled adoption of the point of view and value-system of globally ruling capitalism and the class — or congeries of classes — supporting it. The anti-utopia is a targeted and openly political use of a closed horizon to refute, ridicule, and render unthinkable both the eutopia of a better possible world and the dystopia as awful warning about the writer’s and readers’ present situation, to stifle the right to dream and the right to dissent, to dismantle any possibility of plebeian democracy.
[….]
To generalize: the ideal-type eutopia does not know the categories of profit or servitude, dystopia shows them as crazy and inhuman, anti-utopia argues how to get more profit through servitude.
And there follow a listing of traits that further define anti-utopia as almost a lack or absence and a differing genealogy of thinkers. There is an active desertification of options and possibilities enacted by mathematical instruments of financial speculation. Imagination is precluded and pre-empted (see Brian Massumi’s definition preemption) by an automated, operative logic ‘self-driven’ and feeding off conflicts:
This is an all-pervasive absence, it determines all defining traits of anti-utopia: not only the usual fake novums foreclosing radical ones, but also quantity instead of quality, closure instead of openness, fake ontology instead of modest epistemology, point-like inescapability instead of fertile traffic between past present and future, monologism instead of contradictoriness, impotent horror instead of intervening hope and indignation, cynicism instead of belief, vertical leadership and horizontal identities instead of polymorphic diversity with recall democracy, Mussolini, Carl Schmitt, and Ludwig von Mises as great ancestors instead of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, J.S. Mill, and Marx.
Gloss: as seen above, the Blagoevgrad theses of Darko Suvin from 2018 require both a missing more “humble epistemology” as well as belief. He equates epistemology with politics, pointing out to what he terms the slide from (human?) critical understanding, i.e. and the conditions of this knowledge (critical philosophy) towards an ontology that looks more and more like a social darwinist ‘just-so’, reducing everything (including understand) to matter of survival. In this situation eutopias and dystopias become a matter of “life and death”.
I agree, and yet I think this happens also because both cognition, criticism and the human bodily unknown (say your own eye movements while reading this text, etc.) are being scraped by algorithms into data points enriching “information profiteers”. Surveillance capitalism is not just what in the 1990s was called “knowledge economy” (scientific papers, patents including patenting organisms and medicine etc.), but all these unknowns tat get datafied and mathematised into (financial) models that strive to encompass the unknowable. Estrangement itself like a lot of the modernist arsenal is defanged in the current weaponized climate of right-wing trolling. Of course, there is the “mythical pole” of estrangement (liberal hypocrisy being stripped down by the right wing realist capitalism), but somehow all modernist devices (beside good old catharsis) are now part of the shock troops of consumerism. They do not produce detachment but more and more reattachments to the ontological. This scarcity of reflexivity or the absence of analytical thinking in our 21st c actuality is actively produced using these same modernist devices it seems. The present moment of fragility points toward larger extinction fears – Darko Suvin’s comparison btw the complete novum of the Yucatan dinosaur extinction to the dark linings of an utterly predictable and knowable anti-utopia produced by fake novums. X-Risk opens the possibility of irremediable disappearance – both a thermodynamic as well as a socio-political way to frame why both ’emancipation and cognition’ suddenly appear as pockets to be nurtured during cooling and increasingly unfriendly global conditions, especially in the face of how financial capital completely denies uncertainty while acting with total impunity and deadly certitude. At the same time risk should not be defined solely as uncertainty repackaged as risk (financial capitalism), but also as how Lucien Goldmann (originator of “genetic structuralism”) does in a more humanistic strain, as a “possibility of failure, hope of success, and the synthesis of the three in a faith which is a wager are the essential constituent elements of the human condition”. Uncertainty was so important for John Maynard Keynes, the originator of the modern Western welfare state, in large part as a buffer response to the 1917 revolution and with a rising belief in pacifism after post-Imperial WWI conflagrations. In the meantime, welfare has disappeared and militarism and warmongering and speculative finance has almost triumphed.
Yet, not to minimize or deviate from the Blagoevgrad these, I want to point out that science fiction has been able to explore recently venues that have been closed to ‘mere’ cognition or that rare bird called human intelligence or sapience. In this movement of emancipation, there are perhaps larger and larger stakes because we are just an insular mode of thought, part of a larger more-than-cognitive solidarity. I take my hints from a variety of sources (pop science to even recent Star Trek series) and not just from the Super Intelligence revolution (fears) which is mostly renewd Cold War hype and fake novum. Most interesting autors or critical works take into account a more ‘general intellect’ grades into a more plebeian and democratic view of mental processes from the entire spectrum of possibilities. This could mean either – speculating or fabulating about non-human intelligence (see Discognition by Steven Shaviro) or thinking machines that lack consciousness, raising questions about brainless organisms such as humble slime molds or research was done under the guise of unconventional computing. Yes, we suffer under dwindling (under the current capitalist enclosure and ecocidal surge) cosmic pockets (islands or refuges) of cognition – yet SF is currently busy exploring an extended multiplicity of various modes of thought and sensoria, from extraterrestrial versions of speculative thinking bamboo species on other planets (Semiosis by Sue Burke) to the most bizarre and most horrifying instrumental use of certain cognitive technologies that enable one to test theories or enact what they preach using living (definitely unwilling) thinking subjects (such as in Neuropath by Scott R Baker).
spacetime coordinates: late 2010’s Iceland
Lamb (Icelandic: Dýrið, “The animal”) is a 2021 Icelandic drama film directed by Valdimar Jóhannsson, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Sjón. The film stars Noomi Rapace, and marks Valdimar Jóhannsson’s feature-length directorial debut. Rapace and Béla Tarr act as executive producers. (wiki)
imdb / rottentomatoes / trivia
I am very glad to be able to post something on Alexander R Galloway right here. He needs no introduction I am afraid, and I think he is unavoidable if one wants to dig a little deeper into how online-offline entanglements that affect more of us by the day intersect and interplay. Alexander continues to be one of the most important theoreticians of the digital, having published in the 2000s several key books on Internet protocols, algorithmic culture, unconventional computing, digital humanities and posthumanities, network theory and gaming : Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks(with Eugene Thacker) and recently (2021) – Uncomputable: Play and Digital Politics in the Digital Age from Verso.
As a starter, here are some of his free articles:
Radical Illusion (A Game Against)
This keynote lecture brings together research and books by other authors, be it cyber-feminist or digital culture – a different history of computing, biding carefully and imaginatively together old and new material practices that subtend computation (by XX women artists let’s say or adopted from specific work done by indigenous people) as a common weave of ‘uncomputable’ computer history.
In a sense he is just tying together several knots and threads, adding more to wider web of inclusive and non-reductionist histories of (unconventional) computing. There is an incredible visible and tangible built-up that made computing happen starting from down below. One that allows us to better feel and understand that it could not exist without this processual practices. An instantiated (and mostly underrated and unwaged) work specific to all sorts of weaving process – from childhood games such as Cat’s Cradle (Donna Haraway) to DNA molecular folding. Textile art and textile production for a long time considered ‘minor’ arts and ‘decorative’ (even inside men preserves such as Bauhaus) – are taken as better examples of parsing both industrial history and understanding mathification in various other ways than just visiting your local computer museum or technical museum. Here are a few rapid notes on it:
-on the way it discusses both the work of early industrial weavers, the worker’s own resistance and distraction of machines as boycott against automation and the ‘intellectual’ aesthetic critic against pieces (observations by Lord Byron) made in the new factories as opposed to the previous handicraft work. New lower quality work coming out of these early factories was disconsidered and called in the day’s cant: ‘spider work’.
-early employers preferring married women as workers since they would be more docile, and more ready to give everything in order to provide for their families (a quote from Marx that quotes an early social reformer.
-the way Ada Lovelace largely considered the first programmer – at the same time (as Sadie Plant has pointed out in 1997) the context of her ground braking mathematical work is as telling as the work itself (if not more for non-mathematical minds as mine), it is an addenda to a proto-vapourware, an annex written by a women to a footnote of a translated review from Italian about the first “computer” – a machine thought by Charles Babbage (the Analytical engine in his words), but that did not yet exist!
-a very nice example of fraying of margins, of falling apart. This is no smooth or continuous and unaltered history. It follows the same way carpets or woven products get most intense friction or use at the margins. There is I think a long-standing interest of AR Galloway in the role of error, of the glitch in programming and the way all these proto-computers were always incredibly noisy, clunky and prone to failure all the time and had to be always rebooted or debugged from early on.
-the way spiders interpret or percieve any improvement to their work (as in the work of the artist Nina Katchadourian was mending damaged spider webs) as something unwanted, an event that actually made them come and extract the ‘repaired part’ and continue with their own work
“Narrating a series of lesser-known historical episodes, Alexander R. Galloway’s keynote lecture addresses the computable and uncomputable. These stories are drawn from the archives of computation and digital media, broadly conceived. The goal is to show how computation emerges or fails to emerge, how the digital thrives but also atrophies, how networks interconnect while also fraying and falling apart. Such alternations–something done something undone, something computed, something uncomputed–constitute the real history of digital machines, from cybernetics and networks to cellular automata and beyond. And while computers have colonized the globe in recent years they also excel at various practices of exclusion. Since the 1970s “protocol” technologies have played a key role in this transformation. Galloway concludes with an interrogation of the concept of protocol in 2020, revisiting his groundbreaking 2004 book Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization.”(VLC Forum 2020 description)
TimeSpace Warps 