I am indebted to Rusty Foster to these incredible pastiches of Adam Curtis.
“Silvia Dal Dosso predicts that The Future Ahead Will Be Weird AFbut the present is already in the past and the weird future ahead is here right now.”
SCAM FACTORIES
Yes, magicians, managers, and PR agents have always multiplied illusions to our disadvantage, but what if technology and innovation do not enhance reality but make scams even easier? Can one detach AI from what is happening in the actual geopolitical ‘shatter belt’ – like Myanmar (which is completely overshadowed by the ongoing genocide committed by Israel in Palestine). Nobody even talks about this region that used to be associated just with the Golden Triangle drug trafficking. From the Rohingyamassacre to the Myanmar civil war, there is increasing instability and organized crime spilling over into China – but also fake gambling towns built overnight posing as “fake” part of the Road & Belt Initiative BRI – China’s and currently the world’s most ambitious infrastructure project. Also, fake job offers are becoming more and more sophisticated. It would be uncomplete to ignore how hustle culture online scamming and human trafficking have transformed into an industry since COVID. The Chinese movie “No More Bets” – was turned into an unlikely diplomatic success. While initially banned by several SE Asian countries the movie managed to bring about cooperation in “combating transnational crime and promoting cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region”.
It is weird as fuck already, and tomfoolery is the order of the day. AI hype boosterism combined with a good dose of deep fake scare is making things feel irrecoverable and irretrievable fucked. How to build up a coherent video of all the AI rampage and hyperbolic BS out there? Well, Silvia Dal Dosso demonstrates just that. Documentarists seem relegated to the trashbin of history because even Hypernormalisation sounds passé. Well, let us see what morphings and monstrous becomings entice and grab our attention. Who then will also offer us a fluctuating lifeboat through AI sludge and is this really unprecedented? As the YT video shows, animals were always cheating, fooling around and with each other. Octopi are masters at camouflaging themselves. Game theorists were always trying to find how cooperation developed, how animals (or plants, or viruses) evolved, and found ways to counter cheating, and the reality is that both mutualism and cheating promote multifarious complexity and deception is always a sign of intelligence no? (check Frans de Waal) At the same, there is a need for a broader genealogy of decision-making, the reconceptualization of reason, decision-making, and “freedom” – that for Orit Halpern “underpins contemporary relations between machine learning, reactionary politics, and neoliberal economics“. A change that he locates between 1950 – 1970 and that “systems might change and adapt nonconsciously”.
Play is everywhere, but today’s neoliberal regime has made it very easy for cheaters by deregulating (“desire for unsupervised learning in nets and the agglomeration of ever larger data sets” – Orit Halpern). Everything was a bet on industries and corporations that would self-regulate and self-organize. Well, that almost never happens. When things get so tragic it is hard not to feel we’re at the butt of the AI jokes. We are hunted down by constant doppelganger effects, and it feels like Techgnosis and High Weirdness researchers Erik Davis and Naomi Klein critics of shock therapy and destruction capitalism meet on the same page of irreducible weirdness and farce.
Mimicking Adam Curtis does the trick but also completely outperforms Curtis at his best game – The Future Ahead will Be Weird is as weird as Fuck and dangerous as Fuck (to quote Whitehead) is a rare good addition, building up on all the online fake deluge and even historicizing it. Watch it laugh and despair!
The Beta Test is a 2021 dark comedythriller 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 CronenbergMap 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.
everything is made up, the almost vampiric whitenes of the agent (Jim Cummings) are as fake as the leased cars, his marriage intentions, or private dick tryouts
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.
bureau space is completely drenched in systemic inequality and potential hustling
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.
sleeping in a mailbox
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.
the anonymous letter almost looks as written by a serial killer, some automatic writing or a tag clous of your own preferences
Sorry for the long post – PNEA just pointed out that the majority of our readers is non-Romanian speaking. Well, below there is an introduction – the exhibition statement in English, maybe a bit abstract but I think it sets the mood for the show. The show itself is has various elements including and Out Of Place artefact discovered in Romania during the 1970s that I got enamored during my youth. It is the so-called Robot Foot from Aiud and was initially dated as being 300.000 yr old being due to the way it was found next to some wooly rhino fossil bones. It was sent to be dated at both the Atomic Energy Institute in Magurele Romania and somewhere in Switzerland and the analysis came as being mostly aluminum. Well, this is one of the those anachronic object that can disturb the smooth succession of the time-space continuum, so we took it as the centerpiece for the show and the logo. We also had a special alien script font developed by Alexandru Pisica Patrata Ciubatariu. We also included a lot of SF zines, we did an entire collage of them with the whole panorama of various publications, DIY zines, SF comics, all produced during the Socialist era and after 1989. We wanted to highlight the diversity and the richness of expression to be found in the SF fandom in Romania in particular, but for the whole East bloc in general. We had a famous documentary by Andrei Ujica included in the show about the last citizen of the Soviet Union, left in space during the days of the collapse of the CCCP. There is much to be talked about – hopefully we will have soon an article by Paula Erizeanu in Calvert Journal in EN about the show. For now here is the statement:
New Temporealities: The Xenogeneses of SF
The objective of „The Xenogeneses of SF” exhibition is to explore novel non-linear temporalities by proposing an imagination exercise in time about time. It is an open invitation to traverse various timelines of newly imagined histories, brimming with speculative worlds. We can imagine and explore together the modalities and material conditions that allowed such worlds to thrive, multiply, support each other, become permanent and eventually get ruined.
We will partially try and follow such aspirations, consequences, deviations, specific to the Sci-Fi phenomenon, while highlighting accumulated side-effects that tend to spill over well beyond such speculative world building sites.
We will invite you to have a deeper look at the role of Sci-Fi, outside of its solely anticipatory or predictive function, as a method of un-predicting, of dis-anticipating and non-actualizing. At the limit, SF takes as a given the fact that exteriority permeates the now and the here.
This exhibition probes something else as well, acknowledging that the known is never fully known, ordinary or matter-of-fact, if we start question the very inevitability of our current world via a specific pop inflected situational SF. It argues that the most banal reality is already an extraterrestrial one, arrived from elsewhere, distorted and ready to be revisited by a SF intensely animated by varieties of never-ever, of nowhere and not yet. We intend to open up a portal or several portals that mediate these two aspects of SF.
The improbability of these worlds may be only improbable and unimaginable under the current circumstance or from the perspective of current scientific consensus, or it can take this state of things as a starting point and push it towards its outermost consequences.
We want to gather such speculative worlds that are made impossible under current economic, technological and social conditions. A techno-scientific worldview that is largely dissociated from the common good and severely hampered by economic and political imperatives as well as having to face unprecedented planetary, climacteric and ecological challenges. A worldview that has been always been co-dependent and constrained in its scope and vision.
The exhibition presents various dynamics and trajectories that have started from the initial SF core communities, from a primary SF fandom, but never remained there, becoming a common concern to us all.
The SF fandom is most probably the oldest organized fandom in Romania and other East European countries, and should be understood as a polymorphic encounter of common interests and transformative passions, clusters of fans, amateurs, artists, engineers,cenaclu club members, game designers, VFX artists, all spread out in time, all speculatively engaged in a imaginative effort and multifarious group-play. Involved in exchanging collective worlds that have well since crossed over beyond their initial place of origin and elaboration.
We start from the idea that wherever you are, even in the most isolated imaginable place, the very extremity of today’s contemporary world will carry you straight into SF, with third kind encounters at every step. We consider that our current reality is closely innervated by these vectors of SF, especially if we just consider those very ways in which SF might help us think and solve unsolvable contradictions, while living and inhabiting in the churn of irreversible mutations that were never tailor-made for us.
Below is a recent interview we gave as a joint curatorial crew to the IQadds online mag.
Practic am luat copypaste de pe site-ul IQads. Dacă se sesizează dăm jos, însă pe de alta parte nu am semnat cu ei nici un contract si aproape toata informatia furnizată aici, în afara strict de intrebarile trimise initial e de la noi, furnizată de mine si Vasile Leac si legată de expoziţia Timpuri Noi. Afland ca miscarea lor e sa fie free câteva zile, dupa care intra dupa paywall, m-am gandit sa salvez aci si sa ramana accesibil mai mult timp. Plus erau nevoie si de niste hyperlinks.
E cumva tipic pentru zilele astea – tu faci research, tu strangi informatii, trimiti raspunsul si la sfârsit ajungi sa platesti pentru propria ta informatie pentru ca e detinuta de platformele altora :)) care au backup juridic etc intorc pe degete legea drepturilor intelectuale etc. Poate gresesc, poate nu, chiar aş vrea să greşesc… Dar Aaron Swartz saracu stia mai bine lucrurile astea.
În acel moment s-a coagulat, în momentul în care unele scriitoare de SF au remarcat că nimic din filmele SF nu ne-au pregătit pentru ce se întâmplă și că de fapt nu era nevoie de bărbăţi brutali mînjiţi cu motorină, ci mai curând de îngrijitori, îngrijitoare transpiraţi și disperaţi, o forţă de muncă supra solicitată şi lipsită de mijloace, povestesc ei.
Este o expoziţie despre timp, care necesită timp. Cum a luat ea formă explică mai bine în rândurile de mai jos Ștefan Tiron și Vasile Leac. Cei doi vorbesc despre viitorul amanetat, speranțe colective, cum spune SF-ul istoria din România, dar și despre Alien și Dune, Colectia Romanelor SF scoasă de Univers sau amintiri cu oseminte imaginare de giganți din anii 80.
Prima întâlnire cu SF-ul
E greu cu primele – tind să zic că e vorba de lucruri transmise, mediate de altcineva și de altceva. Un punct important – notat ca atare în expozitie, când am folosit SF în titlul ei, am păstrat ambiguitatea dintre termenii ficţiune speculativa (speculative fiction) și science fiction (ambele prescurtate ca SF) care e doar un subset am putea zice din prima.
Una din cele mai pregnante amintiri este filmulAlien de Ridley Scott (1979) povestit înainte să fie văzut de către tatăl unui prieten care fusese în SUA și văzuse acolo filmul în perioada când nu era accesibil la noi. Trebuia să-ți imaginezi totul fără imagini, fără referinţe, exact ca în piesa radiofonicăExpediţie în Crocobauritania (1984), inclusă în expoziţia asta.
Deci tot, inclusiv mediul de pe navă, inclusiv fiinţa aia care îţi ieşea din piept afară şi avea acid în loc de sânge. Apoi importante au fost desigur ecranizărările astea după Lem și Fraţii Strugatski de Tarkovski pe muzică de Eduard Artemiev (chiar dacă autorul Stanislav Lem nu prea era mulţumit), important e de reţinut că e vorba de un SF est-vestic, includ aici și Futureworld (1976), văzut la Favorit și Soylent Green tot din același an, vizionat în anii 1980.
Unul dintre noi a descoperit SF-ul în complet alt context, săpând împreună cu fratele său într-un deal prin anii 85, încercând să dezgroape oseminte de giganţi, cum se zvonea pe atunci, mai în glumă mai în serios, că stau îngropate într-un tumulus din apropierea satului unde a copilărit.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului, postere proiect Laika se intoarce. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
Referințe personale și riscul unui joc plicticos
Aș răspunde cumva în raport cu expoziţia curatoriată, căci este foarte uşor să alunecăm pe panta personalului, şi am încercat cât putem să ne ferim de o perspectivă din asta personală, chiar dacă e imposibil să eviţi parcursul individual poţi să încerci asta. Importante au fost în acest sens şi texte teoretice şi critice începând cu Darko Suvin, Florin Manolescu şi Frederic Jameson, şi continuând cuSeo-Young J. Chu, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Mircea Opriţă,Steven ShavirosauSherryl Vint.
Înscriindu-ne într-o largă zonă de studii SF am mers mai mult pe trans-personal și colectiv, căci SF-ul ca fenomen nu credem că poate fi detaşat de aceste legături, sinteze, medii și relaţii sociale uneori aiurizante. Punct important e ultimul an de liceu 1994, petrecut în Alaska la Steller High School când un coleg a organizat o seară de anime unde au rulat Gundam și Akira.
Cred că e mult prea ușor să arunci cu referinţe în dreapta şi în stânga, impunând o referenţialitate geek arogantă de insider, care buclează și nu face decât să confirme lucruri deja aparent para-ştiute și canonizate. Totul riscă astfel să devină joc plicticos de băieţei și rachetuţele lor (şi poate asta și e).
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Planuri si patente OSIM de obiecte zburatoare,OZN din comuna Perişor (Dolj). Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
Asta fiind zise, pe lângă turnanta publicaţiilor Nemira din anii 1990, importantă a fost lumea eminamente vizuală a comics-urilor, pe partea de bandă desenată cu subiecte SF, mai ales metamorfoza Image Comics de după 2012, dacă nu greşesc, cu Prophet no 21, apoi mai vechi, binenţeles Incal de la Metal Hurlant, iar pe partea japoneză tot ce a făcut Masamune Shirow, Katsuhiro Otomo (inclusiv chestii mai puțin cunoscute precum Domu, The Legend of Mother Sarah etc) și mai ales Tsutomu Nihei cu Blame!, Biomega etc. în jurul lui 2000.
Nu mai menționez aici diferite anime și filme pt că nu ne ajunge interviul ăsta. Înainte de 1989, tind să menționez numerele revistei ORION, publicată la Craiova în format mare cu benzi desenate pe ultima pagină de neîntrecutul Victor Pîrligras (Mutanţii se chemă parcă și era o bandă desenată serializată), în două culori (negru, roşu, parcă) care îl cumpăram de la chioşcul de ziare și căruia i-am oferit un loc special în expoziţie.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Print dupa desen original de Walter Riess coperta la Almanah Anticipatia. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
Dacă viitorul poate fi amanetat
Importantă în acestă expoziţie considerăm că este și a doua funcție – cea propriu zis speculativă a SF-ului, una care nu e neapărat viitorologică, de predicţie, cât cea de anti-predicţie, cea care nu lasă cele mai negre predicţii, deja operative, deja parte din strategiile militare și privat-corporate să fie singura variantă de posibil. Deci vedem toate mecanismele de anticipare azi ca fiind extrem de problematice, în măsura în care însăşi viitorul educativ așa cum e el jalonat de Venture Capital (în viitoarea ta carieră, să zicem) aproape că buclează şi activează ceea ce prezice.
Astea fiind spuse, merită repetat din când în când – că noul în capitalismul global este mai multe feluri de la fel. Dacă viitorul poate fi amanetat ca risc calculabil, el este eminamente vandabil şi profitabil, când nu nu, chiar şi în măsura în care aproape toate generaţiile ulterioare (cu Greta în frunte și o bună parte din populaţia planetei) și-au dat seama că au fost excluşi din propriul lor viitor. Fie ei sunt înhămaţi la datorii şi rate de plată care nici în milioane (de ani?) și generaţii întregi viitoare nu vor putea fi plătite. Fie tot ei, generaţia asta doomer-ilor, au realizat că generaţia precedentă, cea cinică a părinţilor, care este şi generaţia celor care deţin mijloacele de producţie de pe Terra și conturi neimpozabile, nu vor face nimic ca să preîntâmpine catastrofa climaterică care va afecta viitorul celor mai mulţi dintre urmaşii noştri. Pentru asta a curs destulă cerneală deja în romane și antologii de climate-fiction recente care nici nu mai sună a SF pentru că deja vedem cu ochii noştrii ce se întâmplă.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Synth si tape loops de Mitos Micleusean. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
Ce spune SF-ul românesc despre istoria românească
O foarte bună întrebare, şi aș vrea să răspund la întrebarea asta cu o imagine foarte importantă de pe coperta 4 a revistei ORION nr 3 din 1989, cu un desen făcut de Victor Pîrligras semnat ca fiind din 1983, aflat în studioul SFTV din expoziţie.
issue of the ORION SF zine first published at the end of the 1980s in Craiova by the local Theatre. It was one of the most important and lavish Romanian SF zines offering comics, SF studies criticism, both translations and original works of science fiction literature all in one.
Las pe cele și cei interesaţi să caute să răspundă şi să discute acest desen. Pot da aici un spoiler și spune că este un desen extrem de puternic, ca o gravură alb negru, cu un personaj imobil care cerşeşte. E vroba de un cyborg sau un robot umanoid care stă la marginea străzii cu capul picat, deşurubat din umeri. Este un robot omul străzii, un clochard robotic, sărăcit și aparent abandonat de sistemul social şi sistemul de producţie care l-a creat.
Nu vreau să dăm prea multe hint-uri în acest sens, important e că el arată spre social și spre societate sau lipsa de social în post 1989, şi într-un fel constuie una din cele mai puternice și vizionare, chiar dacă stranii și neliniştitoare mărturii ale SF-ului și societăţii romanâneşti postdecembriste. Ba chiar am putea adăuga globale, sub spectrul unei post-automatizări inegale care nu îndeplineşte promisiunile post-muncii și unde orele de muncă cresc și salariile scad. Un loc unde majoritatea joburilor sunt parte dintr-un gig economy, unde ajungi să dai la pedală fără nici un fel de drepturi şi unde majoritatea nu își mai permit asigurări de sănătate (depanare!) și unde atât roboţii cât și oamenii sunt tratataţi ca fiind obsolescenţi.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
Povestea expoziției
Procesul ei a fost visare, și apoi muncă și iarăşi muncă.
Ea a început poate în copilărie dar s-a conturat acum 2 ani, înainte de pandemie, în momentul în care toată lumea în plină pandemie începea să zică, trăim vremuri SF, totul e SF. Deci în acel moment s-a coagulat ea, în momentul în care unele scriitoare de SF au remarcat că nimic din filmele SF nu ne-au pregătit pentru ce se întâmplă și că de fapt nu era nevoie de bărbăţi brutali mînjiţi cu motorină ci mai curând de îngrijitori, îngrijitoare transpiraţi și disperaţi, o forţă de muncă supra solicitată şi lipsită de mijloace. E vorba de SF-ul aşa ziselor servicii esenţiale, de cele mai periclictate joburi invizibile, ale oamenilor de sacrificiu de pe altarul economiei.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. SFTV #1 -show cu Irina Gheorghe
Pregătirea a constat în multe intâlniri și contacte directe sau la distanţă cu participanţi, susţinătoare şi susţinatori. Nici nu ştim de unde să începem. Că e vorba de vizită de lucru la Muzeul Henri Coandă la localitatea Perişor (Dolj) la OZN-ul montat în faţă de ing. Nicolae Stăncioiu în 2015 şi până la contactul cu cinemateca germană și RBB pentru obţinerea drepturilor de difuzare a documentarului Utopie în Babelsberg despre SF-ul est german cu ajutorul Institutului Goethe. Întâlnirea de la Avanpost în Bucureşti, studio de efecte speciale de sunet, cu sound designer-ul Marius Lefterache care a lucrat la SF-ul Blood Machines.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
Am putea spune că ăsta e un alt SF de azi, munca asta de colaborare și susţinere din toate părţile care a devenit imposibilă și greu de conceput.
Inclusiv subtitrat și tradus aceste materiale cu ajutor de unde s-a putut. Am avut sugestii de parcurs cum a fost Out of the Present despre ultimul cetăţean al Uniunii Sovietice rămas în spaţiu abandonat de cei de la sol, documentar de Andrei Ujica, pe care l-am inclus la sugestia Andreianei Mihail. Apoi contactarea grupului de aeronautică prezent în expozitie cu macheta care o vor lansa cât de curând în spăţiu, în Portugalia. Nu mai menționez munca la infografice cu filogeneza și taxonomia meme-lor cu extratereştri, aceasta din urmă realizată de cei de la Trepantsii sau de harta migraţiilor X aliene făcută de Alin Răuţoiu, sau de harta incompletă a cenaclurilor SF facută de Suzana Dan la indicaţiile noastre şi de cronologia (vădit şi ea incompletă) a contactelor extraterestre din Ţarile Române făcută cu ajutorul istoricului Cătălin Ghercioiu.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
S-au putem vorbi despre video eseul Ad Astra Per Aspera făcut de Cristian Drăgan comisionat special pentru acest show, o primă trecere în revistă a istoriei filmului de SF românesc. Sau poate arhivele de reviste şi fanzine sau poveștile de cenaclu SF ale lui Alexandru Ciubotariu, munca de selecţie și xeroxare a acestor materiale.
Sau poate cărţile donate de Ambasada Chinei despre robotica chineză sau Istoria ştiinţei și tehnologiei din China, din trecut până în prezent, misiuni spaţiale chinezeşti şi contactul fructuos avut cu ei în acest sens şi în scopul evidenţierii unei explorări pacifice și non militariste a spaţiului cosmic.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
Premisele
Două lucruri care nu cred că decurg din textele aferente expoziţiei şi ar merita menţionate, anume faptul că asociaţia Ephemair – conţine termenul de air, aer, văzduh și că la origini, din câte ştim era visul unui festival dedicat aerului, dedicat baloanelor și diferitelor modalităţi de a pluti și explora văzduhul. Poate nici ei nu ştiu asta, dar asta a fost un posibil punct de decolare, pt ca să nu uităm că primele pioniere și pionieri ai vazduhului, înainte de avioane și de nave au fost cei care au mers în dirijabile, baloane, deci astronautica și explorarea cosmosului este anticipată de etapa baloanelor plutitoare umplute cu aer.
Altă sursă importantă ascunsă o consider ideea lui Miklos Szilard care a și curatoriat împreună cu Mircea Nicolae un show la Rezidenta BRD Scena 9 despre Matthis-Teutsch, la rândul lui o punte interesantă dintre avangarda clasică și viitorologie de tip realism constructiv (cum o numea Teutsch). Szilard zicea mai în glumă mai în serios că dacă nu ar fi făcut expo cu Teutsch ar fi făcut un call pentru o navă spaţială construită de free lanceri ca să le trezească conştiinţa de clasă.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
O expoziție despre timp care are nevoie de timp
Repet, cel mai important este să o vadă şi să îsi lase timp pentru ea, căci este o expoziţie şi despre timp… care necesită timp. Tangenţial este și despre schimbarea percepţiei referitoare la timp, la timpul rămas dacă a mai rămas, şi despre o temporalitate nouă, specifică banilor și lichidităţii capitalului, am putea zice, cum precizează un text important semnat de Bogdan Popaîn ziarul expoziţiei de Centrul Dialectic și alăturat lucrării lor Bani Gheaţă, instalată în camera 5.
Altfel putem ruga publicul să nu se aștepte la o expoziţie care arhivează sau face o arheologie a fenomenului SF, ci una care se vrea speculativă ca atare, care lucrează chestionând cu mijloacele specifice SF-ului, starea de fapt actuală. Nu are sens să predicăm sau să pretindem o expertiză în acest sens, ci mai curând să oferim publicului și neiniţiatilor o cale de acces, îndemnându-i să îsi compună și construiască împreună o expertiză într-un domeniu vast, cu milioane de publicaţii și expresii.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
Trebuie să fim critici dar nu condescendenţi faţă de modul în care alţii îşi imaginau viitorul, şi mai important e să vedem care sunt constrângerile azi, de ce nu ne mai putem azi imagina anumite lucruri.
În cuvintele lui Quentin Skinner, nu e cazul să căutăm superioritatea imaginarului actual faţă de ce și-a imaginat umanitatea în timp şi față de aşa zisele naivităţi de altă dată, ci mai curând să vedem „ce constrângeri invizibile și nerecunoscute plasează societatea noastră asupra capacităţii noastre de a imagina” o altfel de lume am adăuga noi.
E nevoie de pozitivism pesimist
Haideţi să trecem rapid peste ultimele doua produse mari și somptuoase ale acestui an, Dune de Villeneuve, și Fundaţia produsă de Apple+. NU sunt pe lista de favorite, şi de aceea vrem şi noi să vedem alte lucruri decât clasici de acum 60 de ani, pentru că există o puzderie de romane SF fenomenale, la care nu mai ajungem din cauza marilor epopei din trecut care culeg toată atenţia şi bugetele. Mă refer aici la revoluția genului SF de operă spaţială – că e vorba de Elizabeth Bear, Iain M Banks, Peter Watts, Cixin Liu, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Kamerun Hurley, Tade Thompson, Nicky Drayden etc.
Aș putea spune că invariabil astăzi e nevoie de un anume pozitivism pesimist, adică pesimism în gândire, optimism în acţiune, un pic altceva decât pozitivismul logic, filozofia care s-a dorit hegemonică în ce priveşte ştiinţa. Atunci când avem de-a face cu ceva implicabil, ştiind ce ne aşteaptă în următoarul secol, SF-ul ne trafichează cu generozitate instrumente care ne situează în inima unor procese care par că ne depăşesc capacitatea de acţiune, gândire și simţire, făncându-ne părtăşi la o lume mai mare, şi participanţi în tot ce se întâmplă, până şi în felul sau tipul de SF pe care vom decide să îl actualizăm în comun.
Predicţia o situez tot ca o anti-predicţie pentru 2071, aș vrea să avem un Minister Întru Viitor cum sună titlul cărţii lui Kim Stanley Robinson, însă fără 30 de milioane de morți datorate unui val de căldură din ce ce în ce mai puternic situat în viitorul apropiat, asta dacă se poate.
timespace coordinates: the holographic universe (or one of its beta versions)
One of this year’s most ambitious documentaries just out of Sundance. Definitely a must see. I will be drumming the same tune as other reviewers when saying that indeed it is gripping, courageous in its portrayal of inner/outer worlds, incredibly audacious in tackling the new mystagogue-gamer-philosopher-entrepreneur-shooter-zoomer-doomer-loner-continuum. After Room 237 we find Asher as disposed to accepts all the wildest theoretical and philosophical speculative claims at their face value. Nowadays, altough the experiential dump sounds hollow, the performative dumpster is there for everyone’s diving. From its most excessive (and consequently numb) the LIFE INTENSE: A modern Obsession (book by Tristan Garcia) to the “how does it feel to be a…”(fill in the dotted line with whatever lies at your heart) experience is omnipresent, defining almost what all the locked-in quarantined brains intensely dream about. How can we preserve what experience makes important to us in a world where everything of importance is transformed into an illusion and disqualified (dismissed as either folk psychology or irrational atavism filling up a growing listicle of cognitive fallacies etc)?
As easy as it is to acknowledged a truly post-cinematic drive (in the sense of how Steven Shaviro has coined and helped defined this new post-cinematic affect) overlapping and overflowing canonical cinema, jumping platforms as easily as exchanging genres, juggling low or high brow (William Blake, silent era Jesus movies, various hi rez action games, various real and crafty mutating glitches and uncanny 3D CGI scenes) is never an easy task. A torrential rain of multiple movie edits from various PKD-based Scifi’s or VR +false memory +replicant dreaming classics (Total Recall, Minority Report, Blade Runner) feed into a mental & cultural & pop theoretical swirl pool sucking everyone into The Matrix Gospel & Simulation Theory. A Glitch manifests tremendous amounts of leaky weird realism – at a time when reality turns out to be much weirder than ur run-of-the-mill safety valve fiction. Yet there is some major absence in the midst of this plenty. Please read so u can accuse me of higher expectations or being just a pedantic bore.
In spite of its eagerness to not ignore and to include, I find A Glitch in the Matrix lacks something important – especially when it comes so close to pointing out why Philip K Dick’s imaginary worlds are so important – insisting on their inherent mood, or the way they give us a feel of futures inaccessible and improbable or follow characters into closed private odd worlds we always get trapped into. Maybe because of all this, I find it peculiar that its grasp ends where it ends and its digital dragnet is pretty mono. Maybe mono is key to the movie – to actualize and show too much of the trappings of sporting a white, male, 40+ and hetero “dude” subjectivity. Shortly: too much effort, too much computing power to make us (presumably different others) feel how it feels to be an isolating-isolated, self-sufficient, solipsistic and fairly desperate funny-sad-scary Euro-American roleplayer (i wonder how does this – diverge or converge with what Adam Curtis tries to unwind again and again in his documentaries using other means & stylistic choices – this time our current emotional, atomized inner prison mental-block-freeze).
Also there is more to simulation theory during algo-capitalism than the risk of actually being in one. There is also the deep kind of theoretical affinity of such a theory including the holographic universe to larger trends towards higher abstraction and financialization. The “real subsumption” of labour under capital and disruptive strategies that seems to favor the 1% or at least the long hand of Big Tech. There is more to the whimsical affirmation of Elon Musk about the possibility that everybody living right now is part of a simulated world – and the proliferation of self-serving stsrtupedelusions actually proffered by actual CEOs and real bosses. There is a difference there. Thus, a simple A Glitch in the Matrix syllogism might mean that although some can afford computing power (and fossil fuel to burn) to run the simulation, everybody else can be dealt with in alt deleted terms or stay at the receiving end of just ‘poor data, let her/his itchy glitch stick permanently’. Something that post-cyberpunk already made clear (Noir by K W Jetter comes to mind): we still leave in a very patchy wetware world – where exploitation intensifies, and where the lack of coordinated public health measures have aggravated & incubated COVID-19. Where fixing and debugging is simply not an option for the needy & those who simply can’t afford.
Asher was always interested in fanboys, in paraeidolia, in intensely jarring otakus and fandom effects, in relating to a very peculiar type of obsessive individual and an inner worlds inhabitant that has stopped being just nerdilicious trivia hoarder & seeker. What is important is that he is not being judgmental, he is not trivializing, nor pathologizing, in fact non- neurotypicality (even if unmentioned) seems to be one of the strengths of the documentary. Another one is exposing this underlying fear of the moderns – as W James said once: their biggest fear is just the fear to be duped.
Yet when all is said and rendered and screenshot, I wonder about the much larger non-actualized virtual world out there, virtualities as sensed and explored by many Balkan, African, Asian, South American, hell Oceanian gamers, freaks, blerds, more ways that do not suffer from the same starting point or set & setting or how does that relate these (monads?!) to the specific situation over there. I understand the need to document a timeless time, our time, to document a timeless frozen place: the room you are in (which has a very precise shape, furniture, lightening even in games). I feel there is reason to expand focus and dwell more on the aesthetic choices (call them permanent mood boards) of how various geographic ‘otherings’, imaginings and cultural zones (say largely abandoned factories, farms etc from the disaffected, post-industrial Eastern Europe now used for Leningrad siege Lazer tag) or literally larger areas of the planet (the Global South) are and have been portrayed or simulated in present or future settings (just one example: the filter of dusty, dun, yellowish, burned look in movies and games playing in Iraq, South East Asia, etc). Outside of a Mexican -other, A Glitch in the Matrix has very few to show and that’s significant. A more truly globalized, wider realization of virtual cosmopolitics and “virtualisation” is severely needed imho.
Same issue I have with the (not only) philosophical temporal flattening – or peculiar insensivity for certain shifts (i repeat for a documentary that celebrates such sensitivity for how does it feel to be locked in). Ok, you will say philosophy is only tangential to the doc, but I think it is key, since various personal philosophies and self-made cosmologies are being recorded, corroded, animated, discussed and described in this documentary & taken very seriously. In fact I would even add – expanding on a pet idea i have been thinking and writing about since some years- what i call “scavenger cosmologies” is quite central to the whole monadic Matrix-worldview of the documentary. A Glitch in the Matrix is not under-theorized, it does not suffer from lack of theoretical positions. It basically cuts trough the whole history of Western (Greek & Judeo-Christian) philosophy, and cannot help itself but visit BIG commonplaces such as Plato’s Cave myth as ultimate source of the virtual and cinematic experience. Yet when it makes all these wider (if impossible to ignore) generalizations it looses I think touch with the feel and bumpiness of historical and temporal dimensions. In today’s philosohical jargon there’s also the question of how embracing ‘simulation theory’ stems out of a strong correlationist position in philosophy, that haunts so many successors of Kant from Hegel to postmodern thinkers. They all completly eliminate noumena – “relegating us inescapably to a world of phenomena tailored to our measure” (Steven Shaviro, Extreme Fabulations).
Ok, now u can say it is just a perfunctory info-tainment introductory level dive into mind matters. I say it is not, since it dwells with care & a lot of attention to these histories. Nevertheless, how such important things get transmitted, changed and how they differ from period to period gets lost. To take one example – how such platonic or historical neoplatonism got transmitted is left for others to ponder, but as some philosopher said, statues u can remake (simulate?) but antique minds u cannot. The Greeks of Renaissance are not the Greeks of the Golden Age of Pericles. The Greeks of Classicism are not the Greeks or Renaissance and so on. All these instances of virtualisation are time-based, suffering the modulation transmission noise and alteration ebbing towards different ends and forms of receptivity. Virtualisation is specific and has a pathway that has some relevance and importance. I would argue (with respect to Asher and the effort of his team as well as the various well-chosen guests invited to back up his vision) that Descartes 1600s story about the demon simulating and duping him differs from the group sit-in flickering lights of the (V-th c BP) cave myth fire in significant ways. I am not just trying to reintroduce some technological determinism here but only to see how such experiences might differ and make a difference. In Science and the Modern World (1925) which I reread recently, Whitehead makes a point to emphasize how this sensibility to thinking moods, expressions and subtle differences is a key advantage for philosophy (catching the particular flavor of thinking at a particular time juncture, a certain school take on a concept, of not loosing sight of how abstractions abstract from the where and whom). Lets just say that in Descartes’s case “experience” as such was virtualized (or disjointed or ‘bifurcated’) in a very modern way, completely detached from the outer or inclusive cavernous drama of Greek natural elemental forces, Promethean fires and looming shadows. As many point out – cartesian inner feeling is really an intensely privatized ‘illusion’ in a very peculiar way. In it we encounter a very particular divisive I (Decartes “I”) colored by very specific internal doubts, something that does not even have a larger inside or outside. His is own dissected interiority, as we understand it, colored by a jumble of qualia, of a disordered play of sensations: heat, coldness, of various sense inputs that can only be verified by consciousness – only by his cogito.
His involvement with physiological sciences (even if he mostly understood ghe body and head pneumatically in terms of physics: heart as a pump, pineal gland as pouch) where sense perception takes precedence is torn by a particular kind of perceptive inaccuracy reflected by his chosen enumeration. This is quite specific to Descartes in tandem with a rise of plethora of scientific evidence based now not on human perception and subjective verification but on ever more refined instruments & constant external testing of an objective world. Don’t want to get into more detail just making sure there’s no confusion here.
Also, as much as we need a tribute to PKD (Philip K Dick) his incredible inheritance and wild SF contributions still to be cherished, repeatedly filmed and enjoyed everywhere and all around, I again feel this focus (a hangover from the prophetic accolades, the drag of his celeb predictive powers?!) on his 1970s Cold War paranoia era multiverse takes precedence over how this might differ from other times and places. If we take PKD seriously and enjoy his multiverse hypothesis to the max – then where are some of the other Earths, authors or virtual believers that do not stick to the US or Euro-US Western block template? I ask where is for example Stanislaw Lem? A contemporary (and one might say one of his most ardent Eastern block admirers), Lem (otherwise a big skeptic of larger trends within US sci-fi) is also an explorer of various ‘other’ imaginary worlds, of brain-in-vat impossible isolation tanks and even Cold War Futurologic excess. It would have been so nice to contrast the Cold War MK Ultra LSD-tinged paranoia of PKD to the Lem diving into not just personal hells and broken paradises, larger sentient planetary oceans talk. We’re confronted today with SF literalists on every turn especially on the right (think Musk or Dugin or Fukuyama) that read SF movies or narratives like von Däniken. Gone is the Jamesonian or Suvinian critical discussion around epistemology, cultural logic of late capitalism, Utopia or Entfremdung FX. It’s almost like the academic fad of combining post structuralist theory with SF it’s been overtaken by the conspirative mind who sees only scripts and plans, no questions or variability. To me such literal SF readings are completly opposed to how Lem tried to comprehend futurality or alien intelligence, information bubbles, data overload, or even pokes fun at a bland and linear understanding of planetary consciousnesses.
timespace coordinates: somewhere in the present or near-future Berlin (or close to you)
Attempts at reviewing this movie might fail miserably. It is an incredibly – very dry though very funny – slapstick movie about some really serious shit. It is many things – for one it is probably the best recent German (and probably contemporary) film on the increasing corporate interests and pressures encroaching upon students, assistants, researchers, postdocs, universities and high education institutions.
Most probably one of my favorite movies lately. It is a very low budget looking movie. Its made-up and unreal low aesthetic serves its scope perfectly – toning down the huge investments and media craze behind variously hyped “technological fixes” and gimmicks (as this TechNO-fix book argues) that seem to worsen up things the more they juggle quick ‘solutionism’ with hidden costs and a big price-tag. The most ridiculous fixes and exploitative solutions abound in such a desperate situation (dire annual reports, accelerating ecological collapse). Although there are probably very good reason to attempt large-scale geo-engineering, there is also the feeling that there is no grand plan and that everybody is trying to circumvent, ignore or redirect the increasing flows of climate migrants. Blue screens only makes the VR developers attempts at making the forest fires or hurricanes more realistic, more close to home seem impractical and plainly wrongheaded. Everything is muddled, completely detached from anything outside holodeck. The main character is Phoebe (Sara Ralfs) who is not an actress – and this helps bringing some real picaresque cine verite – as well allowing all the other proper actors to play ham (and quite hateful) roles. Phoebe is completely enmeshed in Academic exploitative situations. Instead of a “quant” role – she gets mired into the machinations of higher faculty members. She lands a university bullshit job (David Graeber with a smile in heaven) that isn’t even a part-time (25%?!). A precarity that proves what Universities risk becoming, and how insecurity and exploitation go hand in hand.
At no other time in history has Innovation, A.S. (artificial stupidity), VR/AR founder magic leaps, transmedia festivals or generally VR development (dah! experience economy!) – felt so just-in-time, just simple cover-up gimmicks (that is why we need apud Suzanne Ngai a Theory of the Gimmick). Expensive gadgetry that seems to basically exists just in order to secure badly needed (and dwindling) research funds. There is nothing to predict, there is nothing to anticipate, since it all seems crystal clear from the point of view of the scientists (and a good part of humanity as well as various other species that are forced to adapt as well as they can) that the current situation is untenable and leading only to an increasing sense of doom.
And yet almost in symbiosis with the above, lots of initiatives are bound up in the same display (rut) of smartness & innovation. There’s lots of money especially in desperate times – funding is not lacking if you’re in the high-tech Demo branch. In fact the core team in the movie has so much unspent money from the previous assignments that they feel one should buy new furniture, new lamps (more decor for more meetings and farcical brain storming!). Yet, funding bodies themselves seem oblivious, complacent and bound up with the same carousel of justifying their own investments – encouraging high-tech low concept toys and exercizing market pressures to outdo any competitors by promising better tomorrows. It is a Welt am Draht (1973) without the wiring and with visible strings attached.
Both the university, the creative sector and the NGO environment seems to veer towards what amounts to a cognitive sweat shop (“concept sweathops” mind you – which u could extend to anything: from corporate boardrooms toneo-Stakhanovite (стахановец) brainstorming- heartstorming workshops.
This is a movie about the huge arrogance and cynicism of (how else can u call them without espousing the same balmy anti intellectualism & anti-science tropes?!) specialists, elites and (even worse) tech gurus & pundits everywhere giving paid advice on how to motivate depressive and increasingly loan-dependent and indebted students. Weitermachen Sanccouci is about how to incentivize and still keep all hierarchies intact (the constant joke of the movie is nudging – a sort of neo-behaviorist Pavlovian methods dressed as evolutionary cognitivism, behavioural economics or hokey evo- psychology). Let’s pretend and keep things afloat during austerity economics via minimal positive reinforcement (cookies, medication, drugs, gamifictation? or anything else in btw) with a theory behind: Nudge Theory. The abstruse self congratulatory language of seminars, bizarre surreal PowerPoint presentations is also being fully explored and ridiculed.
It is not a dark or spiteful movie – and it is easy to identify with the main heroine that seems to stray off beaten paths and genuinely try something different. She teaches math that actually listens to the problems of her students (not much younger than her) and tries not to transform everything into a Monopoly game.
A VR or augmented reality that fails to augment is a basic glitch – (not only in the sense explored by Asher in his recent documentary A Glitch in the Matrix) but also as a feature of post-cinematic, post-phenomenlogical media apparatuses (Steven Shaviro). Glitches, bugs, technological failures should not be seen just as breaks of an otherwise smooth technological progression but as valid manifestations of what lies beyond current capabilities of technology. A ‘demonic realm’ featured in recent paranormal found footage horror (Paranormal Activity series) and recent meta horror sci-fi (Resolution or Mandela Effect) movies seem to communicate with hapless humans correspond more often than not with new technical devices that stand outside of the human sensorium. What is untouchable, inaccessible – peers trough the boundless technological promises where another reality might find itself excluded, junked and reduced to the status of a blindfolded audio walk. The unreality of our current hell gets simulated because we don’t seem to take notice, leaving us immersed as before, Sanssouci -like the title. No worries. Keep going as if. The air cooling systems in the main university building goes crazy starts an artificial snow storm almost in solidarity with the planetary climate system. The same chaotic effects of a buildings thermostat that augment the student strike (as most student strike go gets shut down or gets described as minor nuisance by the VR faculty staff). The climate change inside faculty hallways unexpectedly makes it finally experienced and touchable.
This slapstick situation becomes almost our default way to express harsh truths. Weitermachen S – humorously retrieves another forgotten or slowly emerging backlog – the history of Socialist computing via its Chilean Cybersyn Project. A decentralized computer vision that was never fully implemented (stopped short by the military CIA backed coup) and that was not trained on War Games but on managing economic emergencies red blinking in a slick room designed almost like a futuristic planned-economy example of a Star Trek-like spaceship deck.
TimeSpace Warps 