Written by Bhagath Subramanian.
“I am perhaps misled by old age and fear, but I suspect that the human species … teeters at the verge of extinction, yet that the Library—enlightened, solitary, infinite, perfectly unmoving, armed with precious volumes, pointless, incorruptible, and secret—will endure.
—Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel” (1941)
“In Nyasaland (Malawi) at the height of the nationalist movement, mobile units, and by extension government messages, were blocked from reaching their destination. On other occasions, people stood in front of screens or nationalist leaders took to the microphone themselves. In Ghana a lamp was actually fitted to the screen to prevent unrest among the audience, using the cinema screen to light up political dissidence. It was as if the film was watching the audience.”
—Tom Rice in his 2016 article for The Conversation, British Empire’s forgotten propaganda tool for ‘primitive peoples’: mobile cinema.
1. The Time of Monsters
Cinema is going through a time of great technological and ideological crisis. Massive shifts in the global cinema culture is taking place, reflecting the changing tastes of audiences and the effect that new filmmaking technologies have had on the way the form and its culture are perceived by filmmakers and film watchers. While CGI and streaming have been around long enough for them to be seen as expected parts of the modern cinema experience, it is only now that audiences are beginning to catch up to the ideological crisis that the filmmakers, studios, and film unions have been embroiled in, which recently reached a climax in the form of the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes (Zhuang 2023). These cultural crises have also been reflected in shifting of the tide in which films benefit at the box office, and the emergence of new technologies like AI which threaten the existing aesthetics and practicalities of the form. Cinema is being pushed through a tumultuous time in history and it will come out the other end forever changed. It is dying and being reborn, just as it had many times before. Are we able to ascertain what new form and what path cinema might take in the coming new age? In order to do so, we must first rework our popular understanding of what cinema is.
2. Brief Note on Semantics
Often in discourse, I find that the vast majority of the general cinema going and non cinema going public use the words film, movie and cinema interchangeably. There is usually not too much distinction between the three terms, and their definitions are subject entirely to the contexts in which they are being used. Amongst a certain cinephile population, we find that these three terms begin to take on certain definitions and begin to become distinct from each other. These distinctions are usually based in some form of value judgement. The word movie, more often than not, carries with it a certain baggage that isn’t attached to the words film or cinema. The word movie, over time and in certain cinephile spaces, has begun to denote a type of cinema that is “lesser”. A big budget superhero film is called a movie, while an independently produced slow burn thriller or drama is called a film. Anything that provides a sort of intellectual ecstasy and is of a high calibre of craft is celebrated by being heralded as cinema. The terms are used to elevate a specific work’s cultural status in accordance with its perceived value.
Therein lies the problem. This categorization of what is and isn’t cinema, what we call a film and what we call a movie, comes from a place of value, of moralizing what is formal and aesthetic. The viewer superimposes their own subjective experience of the work and comes to their own moral conclusions about a given work’s aesthetic, and it is that which forms the basis for most people’s classifying works into either movie, film, or cinema.
An alternative to this way of classification can be found by being more rigorous and intentional with our thought processes in regards to cinema. We can achieve this alternative by approaching these terms not with value judgement, but with scientific judgement.
We can begin by looking at a more antiquated term: motion picture.
The term motion picture describes roughly the same thing that the term movie describes today. It also describes the direct result of shooting celluloid film through a motion picture camera, as in the film footage consisting of 24 still frames per second that create motion when projected in successful sequence, as it exists after passing through the camera’s gate and before being cut up by the editor. If we begin to define motion picture as what we get straight out of a movie camera, then we can begin to work towards more well defined ideas of what is a movie, what is cinema, and what is film, while working towards these definitions from a scientific origin and with intent that is more informed by aesthetic and formal analysis as opposed to moralistic value based analysis of form and aesthetic.
In the strictest, most conservative sense, cinema is a director’s use of cinematography and editing. It is from this basis that we can begin to define the movie as a combination of cinema and other art forms, resulting in a multimedia artwork the foundation for which is cinema. A film, in the strictest most conservative sense, is simply the raw output of the movie camera, the material which is worked on to produce cinema. Film is also the medium before the advent of tape and digital through which cinema is transmitted and stored. Film is a material, as much as video is. For the purposes of this essay, film will be used in its modern, interchangeable sense.
We can begin to more thoroughly define what cinema is in the modern day by first destroying the idea that most of us have in our heads of what is and isn’t cinema. We can do this by going back to that radical and controversial idea put forth by Robert Bresson, that the birth of sound was the death of cinema.
3. Decay is Life
In his book, Notes on the Cinematograph, Robert Bresson (2016) claimed the advent of the talkie and sound to be the death of cinema . Subsequent similar sentiments over the past century, and this current one, regarding the invention of new filmic technologies being heralded as omens of the imminent death of cinema hang like a perpetually dropping and resetting sword of Damocles. Andrei Tarkovsky disregarded colour cinema as a death of cinema and a gimmick (Who’s The Fairest of Them All 2012) before going on to create cinematic works in colour that many today regard as the millennium’s, and even the entire form’s, ultimate expressions of mastery. Digital video too was heralded as a great death of cinema, and still is today, along with advancements such as CGI, motion capture, virtual sets, and now most controversially, artificial intelligence and machine learning’s use in all areas of filmmaking.
With each new leap in cinema technology came a great ideological crisis wherein the survival of the form and its culture was threatened. With each crisis came a great weathering and reshaping of form and culture, giving a sort of evolutionary rebirth that propelled the form forward. Crucial to the passing of each ideological crisis and massive technological leap forward was the shift in power, artistic and financial, from those who held it prior to those hands that power would fall into. The waxing and waning of powers that the various groups in the cinematic landscape held dictated the mode of functioning of the industry during that era. There are times when the studios and the power of their brand and product held more power than the statuses and creative reputations of the artists whose films they financed, and there are times when filmmakers and actors are the ones with massive cultural and popular power that causes studios to bend to them and their creative visions (Maher 2022). The shifts in power are gradual, and take place over the decades, sliding towards and away from explosive points in the medium’s history, points which are punctuated by a birth of a new technology.
New technology that influences the mode of cinema’s existence in global culture is not limited to technology used in the creation of films. It also includes technology whose primary purposes include the dissemination, storage, archival, and restoration of films. The way changes in reel sizes and projectors affected the lengths of feature films produced in the early decades of the 20th century (Sommerfeld) (Capture 2023), the introduction of digital projection and digital cinema packages, videotapes, DVD, Blu-ray, peer to peer file sharing, streaming, 4K film scans, digital remasters, the use of AI and CGI in film restoration efforts, all have sizeable influence on the culture and the mode of cinema either almost entirely on the merit of their singular bursting into existence and disrupting the form and industry or through their convergence with other technologies whose lifespans their own existences overlap with. In its most simplest essence, cinema is the use of cinematography and editing- the illusory effect that results from the rearranging and splicing together of footage captured by a movie camera, in order to manipulate representations of motion and time. In reality, cinema is the convergent form of a near innumerable technological disciplines and cultural expressions, the centre of which is the camera. Cinema has expanded to account for everything from sound to interviews with movie stars, from trailer reaction videos to behind the scenes footage. Everything informs the cult of cinema while using the form as their own basis for formal existence and keeps it moving forward through history. It is a form that cannot help but be at the mercy of technological advancement, which forever forces it along the path of mechanical reproducibility which has been its reality since its inception.
4. The Aura of a Ghost
Walter Benjamin wrote of a concept he termed aura (Benjamin 2021), the unique essence that an artwork holds by way of its unique material existence that is affirmed through ritual, whether that ritual be religious in nature, grounded in exhibition value, cult, politics, or other cultural matrices that uphold artistic artifacts as objects of significance, objects that hold power over and through its audience. Mechanical reproduction of art destroys aura, but also creates a new aura. Reproduced copies carry their own aura. The value of a vinyl record from a favourite band, a piece of collectible merchandise from a big franchise, a pair of sneakers, a print of a painting from a museum’s gift shop, all carry in them an aura that ties the object to the aura of the original, even in cases where no such original exists in the traditional tangible sense. A screenshot of a tweet carries with it an aura of its own that ties it to the original tweet that exists on X’s (formerly Twitter) servers. This naturally implies an aura held by the original tweet, despite the tweet not existing in any tangible form. The tweet itself is compiled from code almost instantaneously at the request of a client, be it the original poster’s device or the device of someone who encounters the tweet in their infinite scroll. What then is the original object containing this original aura? The code as it exists on the servers, the original string of text as it was being originally typed out on the poster’s device and keyboard? Or is it simply the tweet itself, infinitely being assembled and disassembled as and when it is needed to spring into existence, endlessly having its aura destroyed and reproduced according to the demands placed on it by the content consumers?
We can explore this question in thought more clearly if we look at a more traditional form of art- music, as made by a band, recorded in a studio, and uploaded directly to a platform such as SoundCloud. The bandmates come together in a studio, wielding the instruments, and perform their respective parts of the song, all the while being recorded by mics plugged into digital recording devices. The resulting audio files are compiled using a digital audio workstation, a final audio file of the song is exported, and then finally uploaded to SoundCloud. Is the original the resulting audio file, or the band’s performance in the studio? Let us move to the example of films. An actor performs, a camera captures it, footage is edited into the final film, copies are made and then sent out for distribution. The film is not what happens before the camera. The film only comes later, after extensive work in the editing suite. That resulting final film, is the means through which the cinematic experience will be born. The only difference is that the unique aura of the film is only unleashed onto the world when the film is being played. Cinema only exists at the moment of its projection. It is a reality made of illusion, born with the initial whir of the projector, and dead again once the reel runs out, going back into its case to wait for another rebirth. The record of the film, whichever form it takes (DCP or film reel) is what gives life to cinema, born again in its intended aura in the theatre, by the director’s design. It is in a singular moment, the original and copy. The film object is merely a set of instructions designed to give life to the cinema.
Perhaps the same applies to the digital world and all its web based media. The tweet contains no record of an original in the sense that is described above. If one exists, it is impossible to access. The only version that exists, even for the creator of the tweet, is the version that exists on X’s servers. For all intents and purposes, the original is destroyed even before it can even come fully into existence, wiped away from a chance at ever having a unique aura, instead relegated to an existence that is entirely digital reproduction. Such a mode of existence not only anticipates cinema, it is already here for it. The infinite scroll is filled with audio-visual works the formal basis for which originates in cinema, the pure essence of the coming together of camera and cut.
5. The Machine’s Machine
The next technological leap that cinema is being forced through is the rapid introduction of algorithmic processes. Algorithms already dictate the vast flows of information across the web. Not only do they decide what content gets displayed and when, they are also capable of learning the habits, behaviours, and personalities of the users that engage with them, providing each user with a feed of information tailored exactly to their preferences. The algorithms do not do this on their own. Each node of information comes with a confirmation request, a way to reinforce or instruct the algorithm in how it should tailor itself to our needs. In the cases of the infinite scroll, each node of information, in the form of post or tweet or Reel or TikTok, comes with options with which the user can provide feedback, either by Liking or Disliking or Commenting if they would like to take their involvement to a more direct level, generating their own content in the process and contributing to the flow as dictated by the algorithm.
Not only do we train this algorithm on our behaviours, but it in turn, trains us. Yanis Varoufakis explains this phenomenon while using Amazon’s Alexa as an example, in his book Technofeudalism (2023) which discusses the titular concept as a system replacing capitalism wherein cloud capital controlled by Big Tech reigns as the supreme form of global capital:
“What begins with us training Alexa to do things on our behalf soon spins out of our control into something that we can neither fathom nor regulate. For once we have trained its algorithm, and fed it data on our habits and desires, Alexa starts training us. How does it do this? It begins with soft nudges to provide it with more information about our whims, which it then tailors into access to videos, texts and music that we appreciate… Having impressed us with its capacity to appeal to our tastes, it proceeds to curate them. This it does by exposing us to images, texts and video experiences that it selects in order subtly to condition our whims. Before long, it is training us to train it to train us to train it to train us … ad infinitum. This infinite loop, or regress, allows Alexa, and the great algorithmic network hiding in the cloud behind it, to guide our behaviour in ways superbly lucrative for its owner: having automated Alexa’s power to manufacture, or at least curate, our desires, it grants its owners a magic wand with which to modify our behaviour.”
This sort of training by algorithm can be found in cinema as well. At its purest, strictest, most conservative essence, an algorithm is a sequential set of instructions for how something must operate. Cinema operates on a similar principle of sequential instruction. In his essay, Stop/Motion, Thomas Elsaesser, states that there is no such thing as a moving image (Rossaak 2011). Cinema is nothing more than still images that replace each other in rapid succession. Motion is then created in the eye of the audience, much like how the construction of text and the montage of images can create meaning in the mind of the viewer. A cinematic film then, along with the images and cuts that make it up, are a collection of pictorial stimuli that form themselves into meaning in the minds of the viewer— sequential code reaching the object of instruction.
6. A Film is a Gun
During the British Empire’s colonial rule of Africa, extensive research was conducted regarding the various behaviours and reactions to visual, pictorial stimuli and the difference in these reactions between Western populations, the urban African population, and the rural African population. The leading idea that began to emerge was that those people from cultures featuring image making aspects that were either primarily or entirely restricted to the realm of low fidelity 2D images, like drawings and paintings, processed pictorial stimuli in ways that were considered underdeveloped or insufficient for the purposes of receiving or processing filmic or photographic communication in the manner intended by those creating and disseminating the images. The concluding statement for virtually all of these research efforts was that pictorial perception and its various forms (the understanding of cinematic language, the intuiting of depth, the mental processing of a 3D environment on a 2D plane as in a photograph), as it is widely understood today, is not something innate to the human being, but is something to be learned (Serpell 1980).
During the British Empire’s villagization efforts in countries like Kenya, the local Kikuyo people’s attempts to raise literacy rates in English in the hopes of being able to deal with their colonial oppressors on a more even field were thwarted specifically because the colonial forces knew that better literacy amongst the colonized population would give them the education needed to help them build a successful revolution (Nolan). Schools were shut down and people were herded into village camps, where they could be more closely monitored, tormented, and controlled. It also allowed for the Empire to more easily deliver to them propaganda by way of films. Initial efforts required educating the population in cinematic language and how to respond to films. The Empire would first have to provide an education in pictures and cinema to those with an entirely different pictorial perception from what the Western world was used to, for the primary purpose of more efficiently feeding them propaganda without risking the rise of an educated opposing force that literacy would create.
This is where the Colonial Film Unit’s mobile cinema unit, the Cinema Van, was deployed (Rice 2016). Sent to each village, the Cinema Van would gather a crowd and play films– a mix of instructional films, propaganda, and entertainment films. The purpose of the van was to be able to use technologies such as radio and cinema in a manner that allowed imperial forces to more easily subject oppressed peoples to a means of transmitting pro-Empire messages at the fastest speed that the technology of the time allowed, whilst also educating the oppressed peoples about how best to receive this information. These mobile cinema units and their screenings would usually be handled by a conductor, who would narrate the films for the audience, explaining the technology, and also pointing out where to look at on screen while they explained what was happening.
In her paper The Neocolonialism of the Global Village, researcher Ginger Nolan writes:
“British strategies of late-colonial warfare in Kenya construed electronic media as devices for extending soft power across different languages and levels of literacy… It is often claimed that the advent of electronic communications has caused a dematerialization of many things—of place, of representation, of sociality, and of economic exchange, to name a few… Electronic media have been touted as devices for integrating agrarian people into the global market (and making them directly bear the risks of that market’s vicissitudes), in lieu of other communicative media such as print, which had in other parts of the world helped enfold agricultural classes into the cultural and political fabric of nation and empire.”
It would have been impossible for the British Colonial Film Unit to execute its mobile cinema and propaganda programmes without first restricting the oppressed peoples’ access to more contemplative and literary forms of information transmission and art. Cinema is a form where the reception of information takes place in a state of distraction (Benjamin 2021). As soon as the audience is able to barely grasp one image, it is gone and replaced with the next. The people’s original ways of pictorial perceptions are phased out and replaced with the cinematic language, and with no alternative in the form of literacy, they are wholly at the whims of what the producers and exhibitors of films have to display to them.
7. Mutant Forms
The rural Kenyans and other African peoples subjugated under British colonial ruled had to be trained and educated to receive the pictorial propaganda of their age at the speed of the fastest transmitting visual medium of their age, cinema. Much like the colonial masters of the past, the technofeudal lords of today train us to receive images and information at speeds never before possible in history. This is made possible by way of the intersection of the infinite scroll, cinema, and social media technologies. Services like TikTok, Instagram and YouTube are on the verge of perfecting this new blazing fast form of cinematic information delivery, if they haven’t already. The algorithms that control the flow of information on these services almost always tends towards the direction of pushing content that satisfies the subconscious fascist tendencies in society as default. It is only after that threshold is passed do the algorithms then begin to learn the habits of each user and tailor their feed accordingly, setting us into a feedback training loop where we contribute to the machine, and the machine contributes to us and our understanding of reality. Much of what it shows on our screens teaches us to receive information in this new way, not in a conscious manner but in a reflexive one. Attention spans are reconfigured and shortened to keep up with the speeds necessary for such a high flow of information, and a new language that had its initial sprouting in cinema begins to take shape on a branch so distant from the original that most can scarcely recognise it as being based in the same foundational rules of form.
In theory, transmission at bleeding edge speeds to meet infinitely growing demand requires content generation far, far more faster than previously imaginable and at volumes impossible for human beings to produce themselves. In reality, we live in a world where the true nature of the immense demand for content at high speeds and the attempts to meet it are more complex. For the vast majority of the history of the internet, which is not a very long time to human beings, content generation has been the realm of people. However, there are those among the populace who envision a great technological leap forward, and see amongst all the existing technology and media a gap that must be filled by the creation of and immediate unhindered use of a new technology, no matter the cost and at total disregard for political reality and history.
8. Sea of Simulation
On the subject of the failure of neoliberal ideology, Cornel West in a 2017 interview with Hope Reese for JSTOR Daily said, “We lost sight of attacking issues of poverty, class––with the death of Martin—and moved into an obsession with having black faces in high places. As long as we had those black faces in high places, the poor could live symbolically through them, vicariously through them.”
This vicarious living-through is now happening on a much larger scale in the digital age, where access to a wide range of media tailored to appeal to a wide range of people is readily available on any device that one has access to. In terms of cinema, films like The Eternals (Zhao 2021), Top Gun: Maverick (Kosinki 2022), and RRR (Rajamouli 2022) are celebrated by those across the entire spectrum of cinephilia for their diversity and the way they champion the cinema going experience, all while disregarding completely how they are funded by forces and organizations that are imperial and militaristic in nature, for the benefit of those organizations and their goals. They function as propaganda while convincing the masses that they are merely entertainment simply because they are constructed using the language of popular cinema. People are content with the reality of their material conditions and the status quo as long as they are allowed to keep living vicariously through their on screen heroes. Cinema allows them to do this for their hopes, their dreams, their aspirations. What of their fears? Their anger? Their hate?
With the increasingly cinematic nature of social media technologies allowing for faster and faster speeds of information being transmitted to the masses, people are more readily able to engage with content designed to induce upset, paranoia, and hate, using forms of engagement meant to propagate such behaviour. X’s quote tweet function encourages replying to a tweet in a manner that is meant to insult or embarrass the original poster. The cinematic nature of technologies like TikTok and Instagram allows for the greater consumption of content that is designed to invoke visceral emotions. Each emotional reaction is then punctuated by a like or a share or a comment, further bolstering the algorithm’s understanding of the emotional intricacies of its users. It continually provides clip after clip, scene after scene, in a sequential manner that begins to take over the functions of interacting with the material world.
The increasing involvement of algorithms in all facets of human life, from the automatic curation of our experiences and by extension, the regulation of our emotions, creates a mode of existence that would have been impossible without this technology. Walter Benjamin (2021) wrote, “During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence.” Our sense perception is now almost entirely at the whim of the technologies that we use to augment our perceptions and interactions with the material world around us, the immaterial global flow of information, and with each other.
However, our current reality and mode of existence is not constructed by machines, no matter how much our reality is saturated by them and made up of them. Our world and mode of existence is the result of material conditions and political realities created by human beings, especially those who are in control of these new technologies.
9. Neofuturism
It is easy to blame the computers for what human beings face in the artistic and political realities of today.
From a 2019 article in The Economist, in regards to algorithms used for the handling of trade on the stock exchange:
“Algorithmic trading has been made a scapegoat, argues Michael Mendelson of AQR. ‘When markets fall, investors have to explain that loss. And when they don’t understand, they blame a computer.’ Machines might even calm markets, he thinks. ‘Computers do not panic.’”
Another example by Walter Benjamin (2005) has him describing an automaton built for the purpose of beating human opponents in chess. The machine is actually a clever illusion involving mirrors, and a concealed human chess master hidden in the machine that manipulates the chess board using a system of strings. In our age, chess systems like Stockfish and AlphaZero employ complex algorithms to beat the best human players, and rival chess systems as well. Systems such as this are heralded as great advancements that prove the obsolescence of the human component of their relevant field, with no regard for the history and existing culture. Such thinking fails to take into consideration the reality of the considerable human effort required to bring such a system into existence, and the reality that such technologies can only be deployed by human users. These technologies do not shape their worlds, they are tools used by human beings.
Still, there seems to be no end to the obsessive need to continually develop technology that promises the obsolescence of the human component. Today, the developments in the fields of machine learning and generative artificial intelligence has led to the birth of a growing subsection of the global culture that believe in these technologies as a great new radical push forward for art, those that see in these technologies the death of the old ways and a liberation of form.
I am reminded of the obsessive need for the liberation of art from all shackles of the past, of history, and of the desire for a great historical leap forward in the search of a new age of glory as set down by the Italian Futurists of the early 20th century, and how their goals and desires aligned so closely with those of the destructive dreams of the Fascists (Woods 2003). In their cause, they see a transcendent righteousness that must be brought into reality, whatever the destructive cost it may bear to peoples and cultures. A way forward no matter what. These new radicals who mask their causes as liberation are the neofuturists, even if many of them do not even know that they are acting in accordance with the tragic recycling of history’s steps (Eveleth 2019). How can they, since they are so rooted in the rejection of history that they do not even seek to know their ideological rivals before casting them away.
It is then no surprise that these massive forced pushes towards a new technological age in the form of artificial intelligence technologies are taking place at a time of rapidly rising neofascist movements all across the globe. The political realities created since the global swing to the right began post-2014 has created an atmosphere of perverse nostalgia for a great past that must be found again in a great new age. The way fascism finds in war a beautiful creation of a new world through the violent destruction of all that simply does not suit the image of the new glory, it finds in artificial intelligence technologies a haphazard opportunity to plunder the artistic efforts of others so that it may reshape culture in ways that suit it, all in a bid to discover a new golden age. The great need to develop more technology as the sole solution to society’s problems is a fascist impulse. Neofascism is not created by technology. It is created by human beings, who will use anything to try and bring their perverse dreams to reality. Artificial intelligence is simply their next bid. It is easy to blame the machine. But we must refocus on the human threat.
10. Vorpal Blade
This need to combat the human threat finally came to a head with the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Part of the fierce negotiations from both unions surrounded the need for strong regulations surrounding the use of generative AI technologies in aspects of filmmaking relating to writing, performances, the creation and use of digital replicas, and the cross project use of actors’ digital likenesses. While many feel that better terms could have been negotiated for, particularly with SAG-AFTRA, the strikes resulted in strong protections for filmworkers in Hollywood and has set a precedent for the rest of the global cinema industry.
Stronger regulations for AI are on the horizon, and the deals between the unions and the AMPTP demonstrate that there is long term commitment to the control of the spread and use of this technology.
In a 2023 article for the Washington Post, art critic Sebastian Smee writes, “The easier it is to get software to spew out digital imagery in response to a verbal prompt, the less interesting that imagery becomes. The same thing happened with NFTs. Invented as a device to create artificial scarcity, they were so easy to make that they instead produced the opposite of scarcity: a deluge of supply and a subsequent loss of interest. Second, because humans feel the pull of the physical. The more dominant the virtual becomes, the more we crave the physicality of art. That’s not just hopeful, old-style humanism. It’s a clear phenomenon. Even as the digital possibilities get greater and more sophisticated, the art world has seen an undeniable rise in the popularity of physical materials — not only paint, but also ceramics, textiles and all kinds of sculpture, all of which are undergoing a noticeable revival.”
Smee’s sentiments reflect the increasing disappointment amongst popular audience when it comes to CGI heavy blockbusters and the recent string of comic book movie flops at the global box office, films which have been oversaturating the market for a decade now.
This trend is also reflected in the success of films like Oppenheimer (Nolan C 2023) and Barbie (Gerwig 2023), in which the former uses the fast faced formal language of blockbuster action films to blaze through a 3 hour historical epic mostly played out in the style of a court room drama, and in which the latter uses the iconography and mechanisms of corporate product worship and conventional neoliberal ideology to explore basic feminist ideas for a popular audience.
A deluge of AI generated content will only serve to greatly devalue the work of AI art to the point where audiences will fall back into old, reliable habits. AI art will create the weapon that will lead to its own death, its first death. With its first rebirth, it will finally begin to take shape into something of its own, with its own unique form and space in culture unhindered by the neofascist dreams under which it currently finds itself saddled with in the current mode of political and artistic expression.
11. The Ghost of Cinema
Mixed media production company 1stAveMachine have launched a concept for a new type of digital synthesizer that they call the 1stAIMachine (Hook 2023), and it stands out to me less as an interesting or innovative concept, but as a promising first sure sign as to what one can expect of artificial intelligence and generative algorithms when they begin to meld with cinema in a mode of existence that immediately follows the one that they are currently shackled with.
Taking the form of a board with dials, buttons, and multiple screens, it is reminiscent of an audio synthesizer from something like Novation or Teenage Engineering. In place of providing the user with an array of audio presets that they can manipulate and rearrange using various modulation techniques to create music, this board uses video and generative AI to allow the user to mix and manipulate video in a manner that moves away from the sort of editing possible in video editing suites and towards the sort of machine based engineering that you find in audio synthesizers. Users are able to upload still images, and the board will animate them, turning them into a motion picture sequence that takes on styles and aesthetics according to the settings that the user dials in. In practice, this is not much different from entering prompts into an AI image generator. It is the attempt at a certain ideology that interests me however.
The term megatext has several meanings. One definition that interests me is the one on The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction’s website (SFE 2020): “Science fiction is written in a kind of code, a difficult vernacular learned through an apprenticeship. Its decoding depends importantly on access to a megatext – the huge body of established moves or reading protocols that the reader learns through immersion in many hundreds of sf short stories and novels (and, with significantly less sophistication, from movies, television episodes, and games).” The definition of the SF megatext is that which comprises the components that make up all of the science fiction and fantasy works in existence. This implies that a megatext, in its simplest, most conservative definition, is a grand intertextual web comprising of every single artistic work in existence. A single text made up of every text from across history and beyond.
If we are to take the goal of machine learning efforts to their ultimate and extreme conclusion, that being the scraping and processing of every single text in existence, the assimilation of the entirety of the megatext into its database, then we are speaking of a world where the totality of the aura of every artwork is under threat of destruction, serving as extractable and processable resources. The aura of art itself being subjected to infinite reproduction, implying the mechanical reproduction of the entire human capability of artistic reproduction. If we speak simply of the cinema megatext, then we are talking about the scraping of every cinematic work, and the destruction of the aura of cinema. Cinematic works will be borne of this stolen megatextual aura. The aura destroyed in the original scraped, human created works will be reborn and will persist with the ages, much like how the aura of the Mona Lisa is destroyed with every copy and piece of merchandise and is then recreated every time someone lays eyes on the work in the Louvre for the first time in their lives. The aura borne of the stolen megatext as created by the AI will be pulled entirely from the ether of amalgamated data, a copy of a copy of a copy, much like the tweet whose original does not exist, whose aura is a ghost doomed to never find a home in an object that can dedicate itself to any true ritual value.
In time, AI art and AI generated films will have their place, in their own corner of the world’s culture. That time will come when the modes of existence have shifted greatly, creating an environment where the technology can be explored unshackled by the chains of the hypermobile global capital forces. They will develop their own form, their own language, and move away from being crude attempts at simply replicating existing forms and aesthetics. This is what every technician and artist working with artificial intelligence must work towards, not a new world shining in glory bestowed upon it by new technology, but a set of tools with which to engage with and better understand the worlds that stand before us today.
There is a world of beautiful ones and zeroes, a sea of data flowing between peoples and technologies, each byte an imprint on our collective anthropological story that is waiting to be explored. It is waiting for those who can see beyond the villages that we have built ourselves into.
As for cinema, it will remain what it always has been- cinematography and editing in harmony.
Cover photograph by Bhagath Subramanian.
© Bhagath Subramanian. All rights reserved.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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