RETRACTED CINEMA
[This text has been accepted for forthcoming publication and is now
under editorial review with Found
Footage Magazine.]
Introduction
The spirit of archival or found footage film-making has been around as long as the practice of repurposing objects, namely, the Stone Age. But in art, so the story goes, the functional detour takes a radical direction: it begins materially with Dada, with collage and montage no doubt, but more unmistakably with Marcel Duchamp’s gesture of the readymade. An ordinary, already fabricated object is removed from its familiar place of utility, put up in a space for reflection, and thereby proposed, perhaps strangely, as a work of art. The aesthetic of the readymade asserts that the most profound creative act is to reveal that the world is indeed not identical to itself. And if we nudge this logic a centimeter further, the readymade reveals that what we most urgently need in order to address our worldly cravings more than the design and manufacture of new products that promise unprecedented satisfactions is the radical reconfiguration of the existing material world as it is. In this way the readymade aesthetic, at least from our standpoint, goes beyond (without excluding) the materialism of an ecological politics. It calls for a creativity ex nihilo: to make something out of the nothing or void that is already secretly at play at the center of the established reality, a structuring absence at the core of daily life, the chaos that drives even the most self-evident order. This artistic position echoes the sentiment elegantly expressed by the utopian slogan of the Situationist International: Sous les pavés, la plage. Underneath the very pavement on which we stand and stroll already lies paradise.
The epithet “Retracted Cinema” names a program of ten found-footage films I curated to be screened in September 2020 at Xcèntric, the experimental film wing of the Barcelona Centre for Contemporary Culture (CCCB) in Barcelona, Spain. The catalyst for the program came from a curious collision between two unrelated moments. I moved to Barcelona in 2018 to pursue a sabbatical project in conceptual printmaking sprung from a specific artistic misuse of digital code. Here I began meeting with artist and professor Eloi Puig (University of Barcelona), whose work focuses similarly on conceptual missteps into the universe of code. Common interests led to weekly conversations that formed the backdrop against which the idea of retracted cinema emerged. Puig’s Torvix project (discussed below) was a particular inspiration in synthesizing détournement, OuLiPo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) and algorithmic filmmaking, and his invitation for me to work with him and his programming colleagues opened an important door for the current project and my own art practice. The second moment, which crystallized the idea, cropped up initially as a joke shared with another artist friend, Werner Thöni, one afternoon over a vermut. The topic of expanded cinema had entered the conversation, somewhere after an unrelated reference to imperialism, and it was then that the beautiful reductio ad absurdum fell into my lap. Expanded cinema was born out of a resistance against the stultifying effect of the spectacle. But today what relevance can it possibly aspire to amidst the endless activation of consumers in the “experience economy,” who earn their pocket change under the oppressively collaborative, creative, and sensitively affective ethos of the contemporary workplace? Moreover, expanded cinema advances based on an impulse to annex the territory of other disciplines (e.g. live action performance) to the space of film projection and to bolster the conquest of today’s artistic centers of institutional power (e.g. the gallery, the museum). Following these polemical lines to the end led to two partially-comical propositions. The purportedly rebellious aesthetic would appear strangely yet hopelessly complicit with the expansionist dynamic of capital. And the obvious remedy would be to retract cinema, in both senses of the term: to withdraw or contract and to redact or recant.
In the following weeks, what began aloft in jest gradually took root as the unmistakably apt moniker for an OuLiPo-inspired strategy of detournement that could be approached, on one hand, through the rigorous application of stipulated rules (constraints, including but not limited to coded algorithms) and on the other, through a folding of found materials back into their own territory as the site and medium of auto-recontextualization. The Retracted Cinema screening at Xcèntric, originally scheduled for March 2020, had to be postponed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Quickly, in the interval, the inward turn of the “retracted” aesthetic began to resonate with contemporary life under international lockdown policies. The subsequent, explosive responses to the ongoing crisis of racism in the USA and beyond – a bursting forth during the months of retracted life – pose radical questions for any simple continuation of the expansionist status quo.
The idea of algorithm refers to a set of instructions that drives a machinic operation. The algorithmic process can be described as intricately sophisticated, not to mention specialized, and at the same time compulsively idiotic. The ambition of the algorithmic, from the simplest input/output computer prompt to the unrelenting heuristic mission of machine learning, proceeds from an instrumental logic. Siegfried Zielinski, the great media archeologist, rightly commented that the so-called “digital revolution” was all along a contradiction in terms. The dominant aim of the digital is to maximize efficiency while preventing change within the unfolding of any process. It introduces corrective measures in communication designed to ensure that the signal comes through as planned without interference from the noise which it inevitably produces and upon which its transmission depends.
An algorithmic production process is iterative, a repeated cycle of operations, that is, a repetition compulsion. It repeats like a psychoanalytic drive, an automaton, a mechanism that dreams of expediency. Yet while its pleasure principle ventures to save us from too much thought, the algorithm springs from an entropy that instigates its iteration in the first place and risks a halting problem. In this vein, the algorithmic pushes conception relentlessly into its proper execution. All the while, inside the apparent conveniences of the automaton lives another potential, one that suggests that ideas and conceptions live separately from how they are deployed and that the uses to which any set of instructions is put can be questioned, modified, and redirected. The algorithm as such is radically abstract (and abstractable) and demonstrates that execution and application turn out to be a distinguishable instance of conception and instruction. In short, the algorithm itself is as already taken out of context as any readymade. It is this potentiality at the root of the algorithmic – whether constructed with film/video editorial tools or with coding – that the work of “retracted cinema” seeks to foreground, exploit, and even celebrate.
What follows are the words of the Retracted Cinema filmmakers themselves about their work, presented in texts of varying lengths, styles, and interests.
Peter Freund
Gonzalo Egurza
17-17, Argentina, 2017, 5:10
Today, our lives are traversed by algorithms. Contemporary social networks and platforms on the internet set the pace for production and market relations. Search engines, user information collection, and statistics; they acquire value when they are put at the service of algorithms. The algorithm-market relationship is perhaps the best expression that the current capitalist system has found.
In this sense, and taking into account that images have always been inherent in social systems throughout history, algorithmic functions can be thought of as the most adapted manifestation in the current production of images.
In my work 17-17, I am interested in thinking about possible re-readings of the cinematographic montage using a simple algorithm that breaks with the notion of shot and re-signifies the notion of frame within the same scene. A “retracted” cinema can pose a change of direction that takes a detour from a destination we already know. My interest is to do so with such an icon of film montage, The Battleship Potemkin.
I like to think of cinema as a monster with three heads: the head of science, the head of entertainment and the head of art. When we cut off the head of entertainment (the market), we withdraw from the established order towards the most essential, the unfathomable and the unknown; in other words, towards what is worth exploring. [GE]
Blanca Rego
Psycho 60/98, Spain, 2016, 6:30
When I was young, my interest in mathematics was zero. I have never been a scientific person, but I was interested in logic and coding, not because I liked coding, but because I was curious about computers and what you could create using them. I grew up in the 80s, when we were not so familiar with computers. My interest in algorithms came later, mainly through experimental literature, OuLiPo, and writers such as Italo Calvino. Then, when I was studying animation, I discovered structural films.
Most of my work does not involve found footage or any kind of recontextualization of material because I work mainly with computer-generated graphics, usually basic shapes. We could argue if that is not also a recontextualization—a recontextualization of geometry, op art, minimal art, conceptual art, etc.—but maybe that is a question too complex to answer here. When I use existing material, it is usually because I am curious about what I can find behind the obvious meanings of those images. I do not want to reveal anything myself, it is not about what I see, it is about what I can not see and can only be revealed through algorithms, rules, glitches or any other tool beyond my conscious mind. Retraction is a means to reach expansion, maybe even clairvoyance. What I look for in an algorithm or a set of rules is what I can not predict.
In this relationship with my work there are politics implied. As a filmmaker, I do not want to control everything, I want to be surprised by the result of my work. I am not who controls the film, it controls me. I establish certain rules, but I do not know what those rules will lead to. I do not like the figure of the artist as an over-controlling genius, I want chaos and noise. But chaos is just an order that we do not understand. For me, that is a political stance. I am not a genius, I do not understand everything, and I do not want to send any message, I just want you to feel.
This philosophy resonates with the current “retracted life” because now we have more than ever the feeling that we do not control our lives. We can set some rules and try to adhere to a routine, an algorithm, but at the end of the day the system has always had glitches and you can only expect the unexpected. [BR]
[FIGURE 1]
Gregg Biermann
Happy Again, USA, 2006, 5:10
Both algorithmic thinking and the folding of existing material on itself accurately describe my video Happy Again, which is included in the Retracted Cinema program, and also much of my work of the past dozen years. I see this work as a hybrid of two different artistic traditions. One tradition comprises artworks that play with the appropriation and recontextualization of found images, sounds or materials. The second tradition, which applies to my work, includes art and music that use sets of instructions as a means of organizing materials in time and/or space. Happy Again is handy in describing how these different artistic ideas function because its processes are rather simple. In Happy Again the signature dance sequence of the Hollywood musical Singin’ in the Rain is superimposed over itself seven times. The central layer is left alone but the three layers beneath it are running at progressively slower speeds and the three layers on top of it are running at progressively faster speeds. The result of this compositional idea is that there is an increasing sonic and pictorial reverberation that rolls out from the temporally central frame, where all layers line up for 1/24th of a second. The “rigorously ruled structuration” superimposes itself over and effaces the classical Hollywood style of the original film. The use of one section of an iconic Hollywood film (and nothing else) lays bare my intervention into the material. My compositional idea is what transforms these images and sounds into something quite different from how the original material looks and sounds. There are no outside images or sounds edited in but the processes at work on the appropriated material still work to call into question the unity and autonomy of the work. This approach can be understood as an artistic “retraction.”
I don’t consider myself a political artist. What I mean is that most of my work does not take for a subject much that addresses politics. However, I think that everything is political because unless you are living alone on the top of a mountain and do not interact with other human beings you will be subject to power relationships. As an artist who is living in our society and who wishes other people to experience his work, I am certainly subject to power dynamics. I seek to avoid, as much as possible, being dependent on any outside agency or institution to do my work. I don’t want the goals, vision or mission of any institution to determine what artistic decisions I make. Even so — there is no such thing as a pure work and there is no such thing as an autonomous artist in our society. My use of iconic Hollywood films in my work underscores this because my compositional structuring strategies are certainly not the only thing operating here to recontextualize these images. The fact that an individual artist is taking an industrial cultural product like a Hollywood movie and using it as the basis of a new work to be shown in very different contexts (underground film venues, art galleries, or even online under the aegis of an experimental film festival) is a more basic kind of recontextualization. It is motivated by my awareness of power relationships. I’m always thinking about the ways in which the individual is at odds with the institution. I question the ideas of genius and the masterpiece that are bandied about by art world institutions. I can see all of the value (status and monetary) that those concepts confer, and often it is the most powerful arts institutions that benefit. It doesn’t mean that I hate Vincent Van Gogh or Gene Kelly. Happy Again is as much an homage to Singin’ in the Rain as it is in opposition to the Hollywood classic. [GB]
[FIGURE 2]
Eloi Puig
Torvix, Spain, 2011-Present, 5:00
Reordering Torvix [1]
Some organizational systems — such as the alphabetical order — have no logical explanation, and when they do,
it is probably so remote that we can’t find any relation between the systems themselves and the uses we make of them.
That’s simply how it is: arbitrary. (Jacoby, 2011: 121)
With this statement, Daniel Jacoby[2] began an article discussing his latest work in relation to an ongoing preoccupation with ordering and the question of how the scientific method establishes criteria for ordering. Resonating with Jacoby’s work, my “Torvix” project applies alphabetical ordering to generate filmic montages. Yet in no way does the work aim to interpret or understand anything. The only spectator who would be able to grasp its logic would be someone who watched the film enough times to recognize that there are repetitions of certain video fragments that coincide with the same letters that appear simultaneously superimposed on the image. Otherwise, the spectator is left to experience the work as a re-mix resulting in a choppy montage of video fragments, perhaps something akin to Maxwell’s Demon[3] by Hollis Frampton.
In Torvix, at no point do we position ourselves within the obsessive line of work to which the Swiss artist Ursus Wehrli subscribes – that is, a kind of hobby obsessed with the exhaustive staging of surprising forms of ordering. On the contrary, we are closer to an apparent arbitrariness that unfruitfully seeks its own meaning. But, at the same time, this arbitrariness is far from the menial Fluxus exercises carried out in public space, such as the act of Ben Vautier and Maciunas cleaning their teeth after eating “Flux Mystery Food” [4] in 1963. Torvix is closer to what Jorge Wagensberg called epistemological chance. A propositional chance, it advocates the ignorance of an observing, thinking subject, destabilised due to insufficient laws, clumsy observations and the weak power of calculations: “Generally, we invoke chance when we are denied information or part of it…an idea for a new cosmology in which determinism and chance are not just compatible so much as allies in the task of explaining nature” (Wagensberg, 1985: 52).
Torvix valorizes the potential of the textual processor, and, at the same time, its validity as a tool with which to reconstruct text. We recall the refrain of Kenneth Goldsmith: “We live immersed in language in a way that nobody would have dared to dream” (Goldsmith, 2015: 10). We are children of the empire of text, we are governed by it. Torvix functions as a new catalyzing agent within this new textual discipline, arising from conversations with my software programming colleagues, Marc Padró and Pau Artigas[5]. In 2010, we embarked together on the project, initially pursuing the task of making a software machine for reciting poems by a well-known Catalan avant-garde poet. From this point of departure, we turned our attention to the more general question of how one can perform a text. We sought to dissect the mechanisms of language, to put in doubt the standardized application of grammatical rules and to understand the inevitable modifications that translations between linguistic and digital codes generate. Our leap into the void, so typical of experimentation, aimed to integrate these questions and to use them as resources in a new context. Based on the transcription of textual recitations in video source materials we previously recorded, we identified the most important rules to be deployed in Torvix. We sought to foreground the recited text by utilizing its linguistic features as the medium for recomposing new video montages. Our task as film editors was to reconfigure collections of frames in relation to each one of the 27 letters of the (Spanish) alphabet, envisioning what could be considered an audio-visual grammar. Starting with the visual recorded recitations, we performed an intricate kind of analysis on the text in order ultimately to return to the visual, in a process that questions the very duality of text-image/image-text. [EP]
Notes
[1] <http://www.eloipuig.com/inici/> (accessed on July 1, 2020)
[2] <https://danieljacoby.com/> (accessed on July 1, 2020)
[3] <https://film-makerscoop.com/catalogue/hollis-frampton-maxwells-demon> (accessed on July 1, 2020)
[4] <https://www.alfabeta2.it/2014/12/27/larte-contemporanea-inutile/> (accessed on July 1, 2020)
[5] <https://tallerestampa.com/en/contacte/> (accessed on July 1, 2020)
References
• Pugi, E.; Vela, A.; Vilà, A.; eds (2011). Impresión expandida / Expanded Print, Universitat de Barcelona. Barcelona.
• Wagensberg, Jorge (1985). Ideas sobre la complejidad del mundo. Tusquets. Barcelona.
• Goldsmith, Kenneth (2015). La escritura no-creativa. La caja Negra. Buenos Aires.
[FIGURE 3]
Vitor Magalhães
Naturalezas muertas (en seis movimientos), Portugal, 2019-20, 8:39
RETR\ACTED LIFES
(in tiny movements)
Film. Light and Shadow.
Noir.
Ruins of an active world.
A desperate image-thought should look like this: dream of decay. Thoughts being considered inside a room. Connecting, relating, choosing, emancipating.
Feedback ~ Seedback
An object is never alone. It stares back at you. It is (the inorganic part of) you.
Natura morta
Peculiarities of rehearsing invisible shadows.
Particles of dust.
Deserts of repetition.
A text is moving inside a text. Images not moving. Things as they are.
Facts breathe without breathing, and generate plausible realities overrun by meaning.
Upstairs and downstairs. Cause effect. Interval impulse. Surplus value.
We can find an optimistic angle in a fairly background environment (you can choose any subject and you are willing to choose any subject you like, no matter what).
Light, again. Shadow, again. Fall, again. Move on. To some point in time. Of no return. Bearable illusion.
Visitors have arrived (image-bell jar) They stare at each other but they don’t seem to see. They appear to articulate a speech but silence is their only language.
- Lights on!
Circles of unflickering chaos. Perceptual framework.
Survival by way of anticipatory sacrifice. Bright and charming emptiness.
The substance of the world ought to speak for itself, without any artificial dye.
We could have relied on the position reélle of History. From A to B and backwards. Imagining the phantasmal privation of every figure. Image as number as sequence. It means that in each story the same mood is played over and over again, and each time it interrupts itself.
Machine dialectics, symmetrical optics.
Folding, infolding, repealing, reviewing, collapsing.
Rooms of unfilled bibliography. Questions are stylistic journeys and may be served in any banquet. Real questions come as no surprise.
The opening of an enclosed space. Open clause. Shouting, not hearing. Sweating. We know little about this particular storyline of discontent.
Every possibility is bound to be buried. Or to be failed by the next page or image.
Never underestimating the delicate melancholia of the viewer.
Furniture has the same nature as human condition, while absorbing narrative protein. The knowledge of a body (“thing”) is directly proportional to the conceptual experience of duration. As much as we know, obscure objects of (suite/suitable) desire are all consumable items.
Stories on truth and experience.
Answers may not be required. Traces of indirect motion, of marginal gestures, of twisted gaze. Everything is in their right place. Although it can be replaceable at any particular moment. Phrasal works. Reverse angle.
To reveal time is to reduce time. Expand to compress.
A house breaking its legs. Force field
Restrained subjectivities
Artificial memory
Index corpus
\
[VM]
Albert Alcoz
Home Movie Holes, Spain, 2009, 3:00
"Retraction" is a rather luminous adjective to deal with structural film perspectives and ideas of previous order to edit different images. My work Home Movie Holes deals with the idea of dismounting some amateur 8mm through appropriation and reconfiguration. The editing of the images was done in 2009 using iMovie. I remember splicing digitally single frames in order to produce different dynamics according to the dots of the material instead of the photochemical images. I changed the perspective from which to consider the figurative value of the images, focusing the point of view on some holes (numerical inscriptions generated in the laboratory). [AA]
[FIGURE 4]
Barbara Lattanzi
Optical De-dramatization Engine, USA, 2015, 5:00
The full title of the software subject of these brief notes is "Optical De-dramatization Engine (ODE) applied in 40-hour cycles to Thomas Ince's 'The Invaders', 1912." I will refer to this 2006 software as "ODE."
Between Now and Not-Now
The original motion picture source material for the ODE appeared publicly in 1912 as a folding back. When Thomas Ince created "The Invaders", the specific historical violence that the fictional narrative re-enacts would have happened within a generation or two of those in the audience. According to film notes by Scott Simmon, "The Invaders is the first long Western not to retell stories of famous frontier figures...It draws its history more loosely from the late 1860s, when the Union Pacific Railroad was surveying through the Black Hills and other Sioux and Cheyenne territory."
While the invading US cavalry and land surveyors were depicted by white actors, the casting of Sioux and Cheyenne was a departure from the norm. Their depiction was accomplished by another group of actors, specifically Oglala Sioux from the Pine Ridge Reservation (South Dakota). One imagines that for the original audiences (one assumes these were mostly white), a short-circuiting to a degree of actuality within the already-cliché Western genre must have been jarring on some level, if not emotionally electrifying. The movie neither predictably nor faithfully adhered to either myth or genre.
Species of Representation
ODE is not an algorithmic abstraction of "The Invaders.” One viewing approach is to experience the ODE as the re-staging of a re-staging. The software engages a material event of film production (circa 1912) stripped of dramatic purpose. Instead of drama, the ODE's resultant fractal movements and patterns suggest the possibility of other species of representation that can be probed within an originating production considered as a search space.
The fractal dimension was part of the original film recording. The revealed patterns were already present, arrayed there in front of the camera - patterns swarming the assemblage of actors, landscapes, interior sets, horses, smoke and dust of battle. Light-manifested patterns were optically gathered and then fixed through chemistry applied to an organic particle system composed of photosensitive silver halides suspended in animal gelatin, laid on surface of cellulose nitrate.
This de-dramatized species of representation, this graphically-rendered space of creatively-turbulent matter, is expressed as fractal movements and patterns of various degrees of complexity. James J. Hodge refers to the encounter of such movement patterns as an experience of "lateral time". The species continues to evolve because of reproduction pressures external to the 1912 production. In other words, "The Invaders" continues its accretion of artifacts generated by copies of itself multiplying over many generations. It does this relentlessly (it is a driven process). In addition, it does this alongside its own branching - the endlessly-cycling ODE - from one technology to another, from one institutional archive to another, ad infinitum.
References
Hodge, James J. (2019). Sensations of History. University of Minnesota Press.
Simmon, Scott (2004). ‘"The Invaders" Film Notes’, More Treasures from American Film Archives, 1894-1931, collection curated by Scott Simmon. National Film Preservation Foundation
[FIGURE 5]
Estampa
What do you see, YOLO9000?, Spain, 3:00
We usually talk about our work as reflecting on technologies themselves. Such reflection has of course a long tradition in art, starting from a modernist aesthetic, and we consider this interest still useful and relevant, particularly in relation to new technologies. Many artificial intelligence technologies are still young in their cultural reception and use, and we want to understand how and to what ends they function.
In What do you see, YOLO9000? we interrogate an object-detection neural network (YOLO9000), endeavoring to explore its vocabulary and its worldview. We deploy heterogeneous input materials (experimental films, XVIIth century paintings, etc.) and work systematically with small transformations. For example, we input the same image but transform its scale, which causes the network to detect something quite different, thanks to the small alteration. Another example is we endeavor to detect and identify all the visual elements within the frame of a moving image. This process leads to a series of dark films – for example, using an excerpt from Singin’ in the Rain – where the whole film is substituted by the network’s detection through a bounding box around the element combined with a label. This overload of detections forces the viewer to wonder and imagine what was originally in the frame to reflect on the distance between word labels and images. A third example involves systematically exploring detection “thresholds,” where the neural networks guess the contents of the image and then express in a percentage figure (%) their confidence in the detection. At the end of our film, we experimented with YOLO’s threshold by lowering its confidence systematically and thereby forcing it to speak more and more.
As these are new but already pervasive technologies, we think it is political to try to understand them. And to do so we want to use them in as many ways as possible and, of course, particularly against the grain: forgetting industry standards, mocking some discourses around these standards, celebrating outputs that we like, and so on.
Some AI developments, like artificial vision which is applied to identifying and labeling images, have been fueled at least in part by an interest in automating the process of monitoring online life. In this sense, life during the current pandemic presents an exacerbated model of the contemporary world. All interactions outside the closest family circle have been transferred to the computer and therefore increase the ongoing collection of data through the apps on our devices, our circulation of images, and so forth. Trying to understand this world feels like a necessary step toward changing it. [TE]
[FIGURE 6]
Peter Freund
Floating Point, USA, 2020, 6:00
Floating Point is a work of algorithmic video sprung from the tension within the moving image between its linear syntax and the nonlinear archive or database that it simultaneously embodies. Borrowing from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey the scene in which the HAL 9000 computer is de-activated, the piece re-presents while re-framing the twenty-five (25) shots of the original sequence. The frame of the unfolding re-presentation widens to reveal immediately adjacent shots in a grid system that tabulates the sequence’s twenty-five elements.
The accompanying grid diagram shows the conceptual geometry that structures the piece. The center, white portion of the numbered grid lays out the sequence path from the first shot to the twenty-fifth, which Floating Point follows and replicates from the original film. The square, gray overlays indicate samples of the expanded frame composition. The outer turquoise region schematizes in a flat, two-dimensional view a three-dimensional topology in which the inner, white grid has been folded back onto itself, in the manner of a conceptual origami, such that its edges and corners meet. To the extent that these points of contact cannot be formed simultaneously in physical space, this topology stipulates an “impossible geometry” – that is, a geometry that cannot be visually configured or imagined in three-dimensional space but only conceptualized through an ordinal system. At this level, the piece offers up a moving image for the mathematical or computational eye rather than the human or retinal eye.
The resulting work is produced through computer programmation (Marc Angles + Arnau Giralt) and when screened in its intended form runs live as software performance that in real-time configures simultaneously the grid and the progression of shots within it. To screen the work is to insert the performative time of machinic operations into the timeframe of non-supervisory observation – could we even call it “aesthetic time”? – which the expedient logic of the algorithmic is normally meant to generate. If the film hints at any political ambition, it seeks to assert in a modest and oblique way the principle of non-identity operating in the self-evident by hinting at the actual potential already at work in the identity of the moving image. The “performance” of Floating Point withdraws from the utopian gesture of recombinatory intervention. Each presentation generates the same input/output relation, as the exact same outcome appears to result from the same algorithm, unless the hardware fails to support the generative, performative process. This fragility, even when undetectable, nonetheless endures. It is in the apparent lack of difference produced by the reproducible, positive, successful operation of the system that one is asked to see already at work its very opposite. [PF]
Kuku Sabzi
Lost Footage, Iran/USA/Spain, 2020, 2:11
She might have reminded you of Juliana Pastrana, the “Non-Descript,” paraded under the name, the “Bearded Lady,” who by her own account lived and died happy. But in fact she doesn’t resemble Pastrana at all, because like others of her kind, she is constitutionally elusive. There is also a degree of uncertainty about whether she was happy at the time she was caught on film walking through the woods of Northern California in autumn of 1967. The anomalous existence of the footage testifies to the fact that her species, sapient but neither pre- nor post-human, does not answer the call to be recognized in and by the human social order. This withdrawal, even indifference – in short, this “retraction” – offers no reason to romanticize or exoticize the mystery. It simply but decisively underscores a fundamental blind spot in the anthropological regime. The common rejection of the footage as a hoax presents but the trivial, symptomatic side of this motivated blindness. The elusive character of her kind exposes what is more intractably at stake: not the transiency of our current era or age in deep time but the very coherence of the concept of the anthropocene.
Lost Footage mobilizes the predictive logic of text generation machine learning to regenerate scan-line by scan-line the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film (stabilized by and provided courtesy of Bill Munns), purportedly documenting a Bigfoot near Bluff Creek, California. Set up by programmer Marc Padró, our neural network trained for roughly ten days before the machine ran without interruption for a month to generate the 3,175 frames of the entirely new film. The phi proportion (1:1.618) – the predictable standard for aesthetic recognition – was utilized to define the generative (reference/fill) ratio within each scan line. The segment length within scan lines was incrementally increased in size over the progression of frames in the original footage during the process of producing the new film sequence while simultaneously preserving, all along the way, the fundamental phi proportion. The escalation in segment length accounts for specific visible variations in the generated results over time. [KS]
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Presented at the Barcelona Centre for Contemporary Culture (Xcèntric, CCCB): <https://www.cccb.org/en/activities/file/retracted-cinema/233169>, the Retracted Cinema program gave birth to an offspring project, “Retractive Arts,” which encompasses an array of more than twenty contributions comprising artworks of various mediums, artist statements, and critical texts. The latter project was published in five installments for the November 2020 issue of the Barcelona-based contemporary art and theory magazine A*Desk: <https://a-desk.org/en>. For more information about the Retracted Cinema program and the Retractive Arts project, please contact Peter Freund at surplus.lack@gmail.com.