Okay, hi. penultimate session which I've just been told eight minutes ago has has had a radical rewiring of content which renders the introduction I was about to give you completely useless thanks Kojo a man full of surprises but it doesn't
change the fact that well you know just just to let you know I guess the nature of our conversation and preparation and perhaps the reason why we at the Global Art Forum wanted Kojo and Anjali to come and be part of this forum download update. It is the 10th anniversary this year of YouTube. And this means that 4 billion videos are viewed every day now on YouTube. 100 hours of video are uploaded per minute. So in the next 30 minutes, 3,000 hours of video will be uploaded.
And there are a billion users worldwide. YouTube, amongst other sites, Tumblr and so on and so forth, have become, of course, the primary ways in which fame and the power of fame is now measured. YouTube also forced us to live with Gangnam Style for a lot longer than any of us hopefully wanted, but yet 2.275 billion of us have watched it. So we can't all be innocent. So I got in touch with Kojo and Anjali a few months ago and said, well, we'd like you to come and speak at the forum and to think about your relationship between technology, filmmaking,
and the history of both of those things, how those two things collide and collude. And for those of you who don't know their work, the work of the Otolith Group, a very kind of meme-y way to describe it would be that they further the genre that has been titled or called the essay film, which was made famous by Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard. But I think they push it further into our present, our extreme present. And the scale at which the Autolith group both see and narrate is at the very least planetary.
And it deals with alter futurisms, zombie pasts. And for me, a very important aspect is that everything... They believe that everything, including electromagneticism, tsunamis, and every single part of our bodies, are somehow both material and immaterial. That's the thing. I always come away from their films thinking about, again and again, the relationship between the material and the immaterial. So how this is going to work for the next 25 minutes or so is Kojo and Anjali have prepared a presentation,
which has nothing to do with YouTube. Maybe it does. and then we're going to talk for the last five or seven minutes or so without much further ado will you please join me in welcoming Kojo Eshin and Anjali Saga thank you thanks very much Shimon it's great to see so many people here this is our first time in Dubai and it's our first time at the Global Art Forum and we're pleased to be here we're soaking up everything and trying to get a sense of everything that's going on here. So as Schumann said, we've adapted this talk, the talk that we were planning slightly. It's now called On the Use and Abuse of Gifts for Life.
Schumann is going to scroll through a number of Gifts from a Tumblr site that we're very fond of. And without further ado, we're going to begin. within the ramifying dimensions of the YouTube platform composed of an instructional video of a Korean woman in her mid-30s spoon in one hand, knife in the other explaining the correct way to prepare kimchi of fail videos of Asian American college jocks in flannel shirts, skating along the concrete surface of the Salk Institute and riding all the way into the ocean. Of a clip of gong led by the departed David Allen
in a studio in 1973 playing the tricksy time signatures of the song I Never Glid Before. Of a scene of Lee Kuan Yew weeping quietly in a television studio as he considers the reality of Malaysia's separation from the new state of Singapore. Of camera phone footage of the distant lights that many claim to be tsunami angels. Hovering above the coastline of northeast Japan in 311. Of laboratory footage of naturally occurring extraterrestrial quasi-crystals in Siberia. Of real-time maps, of the weather systems, of prevailing winds traveling throughout North America right now. Of a conversation between an owl and a dog in Guangzhou on June 2014.
of a hippopotamus and an elephant in Malawi in September 2012, of a lioness and a baby antelope in the veldt of South Africa, all of which is uploaded by users whose largely unpaid efforts are assembled and organized and evaluated and monetized by the power laws operationalized by Google's page rank algorithm. within all of this exponential expansion a certain format returns repeats itself and in doing so insists upon itself impresses itself upon us as a series of online events and so we surrendered to its insistence and followed them like sleepwalkers
allowing them to guide us like Virgil's leading Dante into circles circles measured in frames per second That's how we found ourselves Returning Over and over In spite of ourselves To encounter with animated GIF file format Whose visible music we began to hear in its temporal signatures Its animated silence As GIFs confront specific films Television programs As compressed quotations As loops constructed by reversing footage So that it travels backwards and joins the point of origin of the shot we found ourselves studying the ways in which GIFs studied movies, observing the ways in which one visual regime reshapes another,
how the GIF reformatted the movement of video and the motion of television into a still in order to magnify a detail within the movement of a film frozen to extract a gesture to be animated as a loop, as a silent infinity, in this intensive, exasperating, mediated, seemingly trivial, trashy, trendy, flighty, flirty, encounter between an existing image and a figurative project dedicated to observing it. We observed one image studying another image. What kind of commentary do they produce? What are they saying? What are they arguing about? What do they imitate? Who do they inhabit? Where are they going? What do they possess. As these formats studied another and ignored
us, it was as if... No, it was indeed the case that we were face to face with the external objectification of thought. With an industrialization of thought. That needed... That needed humans to function. But which demanded to be analyzed upon its own terms. Which are not ours. Directional rain in electric blue falling towards a man, white, seated protecting him. The shadow of a film projector thrown onto the top right corner of a face. White, staring ahead, film unseen, spooling across his jacket. Reflections of transparent curtain lift and converge, travelling diagonally across a man, white lying on a bed. Left white
fingers rotate a pen at the left side of the head. The sole of a left black shoe lifts and drops. as the right black shoe lifts and drops. A striped ball hits the gothic lettering of a poster watched by a shadow cast upon a pillar that bears the reward for information for murder. From above, white fingers daintily hold a black dropper squeezing single liquid into the blue pupil of a wide white eye and then its matching left eye whose lids are clamped open by steel calipers. The gift curtails the movement of video and circumscribes the motion of cinema. And within the wide, wide field of stillness, the smallness of its gesture, animated from within the physiognomy of a body, frozen in the space of the frame, makes for a greater impact.
Because it renders stillness as a mode of incipience, of imminence. It is as if the scene is resting in an endless fermata. To edit is to be possessed by the power of a gesture that wants to live on in our bodies, sustaining itself, prolonging themselves. Until they begin to function as externalizations of habitual movements that are not human but which live in our bodies. Images and sounds happen or are negotiated between bodies and media. Sounds and images live in us. Bodies serve as living media that make us perceive, project or remember. To isolate, to extract and to loop a gesture, an incident, a behaviour is to clarify repetition as
a certain kind of powerful futility, as an impotent infinity, a cineplastic power. Is the gift the appearance of the unhistorical within the historical? What if what looks initially to us like repetition, what feels like a kind of memory, is actually a method for feeling unhistorically? For dehistoricizing cinema, for sinking down onto the threshold of the moment and forgetting all of the past, for balancing like a goddess of victory. Imagine the encumbered eloquence of GIF As the tails of three trapped tigers
Frozen midway between rising and falling Levitating in unison in its downward trajectory A temporal signature momentarily opened inside a picture frame A visual music Sometimes a syncopation Sometimes a great nation Perhaps a great notion from the visual culture of industrial cinema flattened, dismantled a forced decontextualization turned into a forever loop that will continue to repeat itself when you leave the page. A loop of a train crashing in northern Spain. Auguste and Louis Lumiere's train pulling into the station to loop
to loop footage to loop footage of fatality to loop footage of fatalities as yet unknown and unidentified implies that this footage is incomplete, is incomplete material, is an incomplete material that depicts mortality, a mortality whose unfinished effects persist into the present, the present that persists as you watch the images that are no longer past. And to reconstruct this immortality and mortality is not so much to disregard its popularity as to account for and to affirm its trendiness. As Rob Horning writes in the New Inquiry, to share a gif on social media is often an attempt to belong to one's time,
to show how one is willing to change with it. We know that everything that becomes popular is just a trend. We know that it is ready to disappear. But this ephemerality can make it more, not less urgent. More, not less necessary to participate in it. This is what pursuing virality as a feeling is about. Virality is an aesthetics for ubiquitous surveillance. It takes being seen for granted and moves beyond that to momentum and to circulation. In some ways, the concept of curation is too static for this era. A GIF is formatted for momentum, for an unpredictable lifespan, for an entry, a gateway into the vitality of collective culture, which our solitary interfaces and devices tend to curtail.
To go viral is to participate in that shared social enthusiasm that surges and dissipates. The popular is close to what Gilbert Simondon calls the pre-individual. It is a cultural matrix out of which our individuality emerges. It is our precondition. It is our vicarious participation in the popular that feels less lonely than claiming one's potentiality as a solitary, transcendent, avant-garde artist. Thank you. Thanks so much.
One of the things I always appreciate when I get to invite you to do things is the fact that you take that invitation and prepare something original. And so we're privy to see you at the kind of cusp often of new ideas. Could you tell us something about this interest in the GIF, which I'd like to get into both technically but also ontologically in a minute, but just more prosaically, when did you first become aware of GIFs, and secondly, when did the format of the GIF and for the, by the way, anyone not know what a GIF is after that talk?
Just to be clear. So obviously a very, very short clip that's on a kind of infinite loop, right? So, yeah, when did the GIF enter your consciousness? And when did it then enter your kind of mind screen as the otolith group? I mean, I think it's been there on the periphery of perception for a long time. But as with most of the most intriguing developments of the last few years, there is a kind of tug of war between fascination and a kind of irritation so the
clip you just had which was Truman Show that moment in the Truman Show where the director strokes the face of Truman that's kind of one of the peak moments in that film. So the idea of looping that scene forever, it has an obvious attraction. But I think the GIF really came into prominence quite recently. Just last year when Haroon Farocki died, E-Flux invited us to respond to Haroon Farocki's death. And I wrote an essay which came out
of myself and Angelika's long-standing friendship with Harun, and it came out of a discourse that we'd had around knowing Harun since 2006. And one of the EFLUX team, an artist called Mariana Silva, prepared these GIFs that went with the EFLUX special issue on Harun. And she prepared one particular GIF on Harun Frocki's Inextinguishable Fire from 69. And there's one magical sequence where a figure takes Chairman Mao's, the quotations of Chairman Mao, created by Lin Piao, as we know as the Little Red Book.
And she takes two pages, folds these pages of the Little Red Book and makes a paper plane out of these pages. And then she flies the paper plane, and through the magic of montage, the paper plane goes through three cuts and ends up flying into the soup of the Shah of Iran, splashing the soup in his face, and the Shah of Iran rears back as if he's been shot by the bullet of montage. And it's a magical sequence. Alexander Kluger said that this shot was powered by the energy of a thousand suns. The whole film is not even three minutes. And what Marion and Silva did was loop
the section of Farocki's paper plane. And the idea of sustaining this paper plane, sustaining this militant gesture of montage that Farocki made when he was 25, and the kind of exquisite gesture involved in sustaining that moment combined with the fact that we were all thinking about Froggie's death, the combination of mortality and montage and then the prolongation and sustaining of those two things really, it just really impressed itself upon us. I just couldn't get over it.
I wrote in the mail that I said, this is one of the most beautiful works of art I've ever seen. It's barely three seconds. And it was that moment I thought, well, you know, what I can see in the potential of a GIF is that, yes, it seems to be superficial and glib, but it can also concentrate a huge amount of effort but a huge amount of thinking and effective capacity that you bring to it. And after that, I couldn't really stop thinking about them. Marianna Silva also sent this Tumblr to us, and we spent a lot of time looking at this. Here's Truman Show again, also one of the best moments in the film.
and I began to see how the capacity of it to both be a kind of intensifier for cinema and be a post-cinematic practice we began to see how appealing that was and so I think that was a kind of that was the entry point into it and pushing that further I would one could say that we get the formats we deserve or we deserve the formats that we get if that's the case what are we deserving
that we've been bequeathed the gift now push it up What are we deserving of? I mean, I'm interested in the GIF in relation to how it sustains or works with a tableau vivant. Sorry, another question hidden in that, I guess, is precedence. Because I think someone just mentioned to me that the discussion we just had about smart cities, maybe didn't mention proto-smart cities, such as the history of world fairs, for example,
and so on and so forth. So there's often a way in which technology or new technology is delivered to us as though it literally has come without any precedent, either aesthetic or historical. So for you, the GIF has that painterly precedent already embedded into it. Is that right? Yeah, I mean, I think the post-cinematic and theatre can begin to put... One can begin to create a relation to that looping construction, and that's something we're going to be exploring as a landscape, where figures move through, that figures move through it
as a kind of backdrop, in a way. So, yeah, I think the GIF kind of works in that way, if you are to consider the potential of how the tableau vivant works also within cinema. I mean, the question about whether we get the GIFs we deserve, whether we get the formats we deserve, or vice versa, I mean, initially I resented the extreme temporal constraint similarly with Vine I resented these six second constraints but it was only thinking about this presentation and re-reading Nietzsche's
on the use and abuse of history for life that I started to think what if you take footage if you take a film which seems finished and completed the fact of taking a moment and looping that implies an unfinished dimension to that work. It implies that the work is not locked but can be opened up again. And so I started to appreciate that dimension of the unfinished nature of the work. And I also started to appreciate what Nietzsche calls the dimension of the unhistorical, what he calls the plastic power of forgetting, of active forgetting,
I thought that most of us talk all the time about living in an age of archival abundance, living in an age of a kind of continually ramifying archive, an age in which archives and histories crowd out the present so that our sense of the present gets, narrows and diminishes. And I thought, what if the GIF was a way of creating a kind of island of forgetting inside of a historical artifact such as Clockwork Orange or Fahrenheit 451? In other words, initially when you look at a GIF, you think, oh, well, they are isolating a moment
in order to draw attention to that moment in order to set up a memento mori, which is how the Ferocchi gif works. That's a memento mori. It's a kind of remember-to-remember Ferocchi. But I think in certain cases, it can also work the reverse way. I think it can open up this pocket of dehistoricizing time within it. So the more we started to discuss the gift, the more it seemed to draw to us quite fundamental questions. We spend a lot of time thinking about the kind of methods of dehistoricizing and methods of ahistoricizing,
precisely because the conditions for instant memorialization are so present. if we live in a world in which real time archiving is a continual condition and at a certain point seems to be almost a demand then it seems necessary to at least explore methods for forgetting methods for living in the present that's the moment when Nietzsche talks about if one cannot create the future without being able to sink down into the present moment, without being able to balance like a goddess on the hinges of the present. And so the gift started to gain all kinds of paradoxical capacities, and it started to
become more and more compelling to us because of its ability to host our desires for it. and you know, not every gift is worth analyzing but if there are enough gifts to create a certain attention to the question of gesture which we're obsessed with and the capacities and the powers that gestures have over us then the gift starts to look like an externalization of thought it starts to look like the inside of our heads which have been possessed Can I just push you on that? Because no one put their hand up when I asked if they don't know what gifts are.
So everyone here knows what a gift is. And the context in which gifts mostly proliferate is that of humor. And if we go back, I think it was Serlio during the Renaissance who basically qualified the two forms of architectural gesture. And it's going back to the antiquities. There's basically the comic and the tragic. The gif, primarily in most people's lives, exists as a burst of comic relief. But here you are seeing something of the tragic. You mentioned Nietzsche in the gif. And I've never seen that portrayed before. And this Tumblr is extraordinary for that reason.
Yeah, and there you see Peeping Tom, one of the greatest films of the post-war era. a profound analysis of spectatorship. I mean, just one of the great films. And if you can have these extremely subtle, you see his fingers caressing the camera, you have these very subtle moments that draw attention to a kind of fetishistic desire of spectatorship. then if a GIF can host these kind of philosophical kind of obsessions, then they stop being funny. And I also think that there's a profound relation between the loop and catastrophe. Everybody remembers the kind of enforced loops after 9-11
where American television stations continually repeated the loops of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. Everybody remembers being kind of possessed by that loop with no way of exiting. At the birth of cinema, Augustin Louis Lumiere's trains entering into a station. The only reason that the Lumiere brothers made that film, Trains Leaving the Station, is because they realised that the trains left the station and arrived at the station every day at the same time. The only reason they could make workers leaving the factory was because the workers left the factory at the same time every day. So there was a temporal loop built into everyday life,
which the Lumiere brothers observed and filmed. In other words, loops structure everyday life, and certain kinds of gifts can make that apparent to us. Not all of them, but the best ones can. and that's what's eventually became apparent to us. I think one of my earliest memories is a loop and that memory is of Battleship Potemkin where the child... And I think my father would put me in front of films like Eisenstein's films and Bunuel's films. These films were on television in Britain in the 70s and 80s. it was before Endemol got hold of everything in television
or reality TV did. And there was a sense that, you know, you could be four or five years old and sort of be in front of these kinds of programs late at night if your parents were in the other room or whatever. So I remember this scene of the baby going down the stairs in the pram, which is kind of repeated in The Untouchables, I think, down the escalator. But I remember this moment and the mother and the baby being trampled on as a wound, as a serious kind of emotional wound. And that defined for me pain. That defined for me sadness. And it's always there in me, like a wound, literally, that scene. And I think in that way, it seems that these moments in cinema really construct our emotional language.
We've just got a few minutes left, but this focus on the loop makes me think of another neologism from the last few months for me, which is Hito Stael's notion of circulationism. but what I'm now I now want to put for loopism as as maybe the kind of the yin to that yang because if circulationism is basically about the kind of the possibility of the of the kind of the infinite proliferation of movement of whatever energy information capital to more and more destinations the loop is is by definition a kind of closed circuit, which, I mean, of course, it is also circulating, but it's, and you mentioned Nietzsche,
of course, eternal return. So, but what's fascinating about the GIF is that it's got these two components, hasn't it? The absolute, like radical concision and then infinite looping. Those sort of two things. Yeah, I mean, on one hand, science fiction, it's no surprise that you're paused on Blade Runner. So for us there's a profound relation between the essay film and science fiction whether that's Le Jete or whether that's Je T'aime Je T'aime or whether that's a very recent film like Looper or whether it's a film like Source Code. In all these films you see figures trapped in a loop of fatality. The loop is a circuit of death that subjects enter into
and in some way surrendered themselves to. So the loops have something to do with the drive towards death. At the same time, loops have something to do with the question of musicality. I think it's crucial the loops are silent. I think if they were like six chunks, six seconds of sound, that would destroy it. The kind of the visual music of the scenes from Blade Runner in which we see the burst of fire. We don't hear Vangelis' music, but it's playing anyway. but the images themselves have a phonic dimension to them. And loops return us to a kind of, in a certain sense, they're extremely primitive. They're a certain form of silent early cinema. They are still frames with small movements within them.
And, you know, they're a kind of... Muybridge, actually. Exactly, yeah. So they have a primitivism to them and they have an anachronistic dimension to them. which gives them a clarity so that we can see them as forms of silent music or forms of what Fred Moten calls phonomaterialist music. So this means that in some of the more tragic moments, we can hear mourning and we can see mourning. They have a homophonic dimension. mourning, moaning, mourning. We can hear and see all these simultaneously. And there's a kind of, there's a lyricism to them at their best,
which is really good to think with. And I think anybody who works with images, anybody who has a kind of, anybody who has an editorial imagination, anybody who thinks as an editor, and I think maybe that's all of us these days, can't fail but respond to certain moments of exquisite poignancy, such as this one. We have run out of time, but I could take one question over here and one over there, and then that will be it. We've got a mic here. Well, we'll go back there first, and then here, and then that. We'll take both questions at the same time. You just made this comparison with music, and I kept thinking throughout your definition of some of these gifts,
it seems there's almost like a parallel to the invention of hip-hop music, because there's an editing out of the break or the peak of a track, and then putting one after the other, or maybe even looping it, that seems like this may be like the cinematic version of that same kind of editing out. Well, in one way, yes. But I think the loops are a measure, but they are not syncopation. Not yet. Maybe there was only one moment of syncopation that I saw, which was a GIF of American Psycho, Patrick Bateman. and in this scene Patrick Bateman played by
Christian Bale of course Christian Bale rotates a pen behind his left ear and lifts one shoe like this and lifts another shoe like that now that's syncopation because that's one, two, three things happening and there's a kind of there's a temporal shift going on between his first and his second shoe and between his foot. So that's syncopation. So for the gift to be, to attain to the greatness of a DJ premier or the RZA or Frank Ocean, it would have to have that kind of syncopation and usually it doesn't. You know, not usually. I would say the gifts we're looking at are more
in a paradoxical way, they're like a kind of, they're actually more like Morton Feldman because they are very short, but their shortness means that the stillness surrounding them seems on the verge of movement. So you see one thing happening, but this implies that all the stillness around it is on the verge of moving, or is moving so slowly you can't quite perceive it. And that's closer to things like Rothko Chapel or Crippled Symmetry, where Morton Feldman lets the sustained piano roll all the way out to the edge of infinity. And so there's a...
With the gift, the very short and the very durational, they meet and they curve around each other. I'm afraid we've run out of time, but I would urge you to ask Kojo and Anjali personally your question, and they will answer it personally. Will you join in thanking Kojo and Anjali, the Otter-Lift Group? Thank you.