The Otolith Group Artist Talk Part1

The program is created by the MNC Film and Video The story of Jack-on-2 is the English artist, Otelis Group, the Egyptian artist, White Shark, the English artist Duncan Campbell,

the three artists of the artist. Otelis Group, member of the group, is it weird? The two of them, Kodo Eishun and Angelica Saga, the two of them who have a meeting, the idea and the idea and the knowledge and the knowledge and the world of the world, and the world of the world and the world of the world. I'm going to be a part of the project. I'm going to be a part of the project. I'm going to be a part of the project. I'm going to be a part of the project. I'm going to be a part of the project.

I'm going to be a part of the project. I'm going to be a part of the project. I'm going to be a part of the project. I'm going to be a part of the project. I'm going to be a part of the project. I'm going to be a part of the project. I'm going to be a part of the project. I'm going to be a part of the project. I'm going to be a part of the project. I hope you've been waiting for a lot, but I don't know if you've been a artist talker. I hope you've been looking forward to it. And now I'm going to introduce you to Kodo Echun and Angelica. Please welcome your hand.

Kodo Eishun, Angelica Saba. Two of you, in 2002, have been a group of people who have joined us. They have been working on the world and the past years, and the past years, and the past years, and the past years, and the past years, Moving Image's building, we can't look at the work of the film. So there are also films and films that are also presented in the film. So this is the MNSA Filament Media.

They have a single channel of the film, which is a film of the film, which is a film of the film. The one is, So Born in Sisters, an installation is made for the film. We have a lot of different films that we can see in the same way. We have a 3-minute film that we can see in the same way. We can see it in the same way. So you can see it in the same way.

The other films are the most popular, Radiant or Medium Earth, which I've seen in the past, I think it's a lot of people who have seen it. The other films are the most popular in the world, which is a lot of great opportunities. So, first section is video clip, I'll see the next question and answer. Video clip first.

The others, the engineer, the boy, the journalist, they all wanted to meet the director, have it out with him. They urged me to go with them. I told them it was pointless. If he was going to make the film, he would have done so years ago. They didn't believe me. They were dead set on a reckoning. Force him to acknowledge their existence. They don't want to face what we all know.

We are not images, not sounds, not even fictions. Just script, 20 pages in a drawer, an idea, a possibility. Nothing more. I can see them now in his study. The movie is made in 2009, Autolis 3.

The text is a scenario, pre-made research, what is a fictional narrative? This is a question that is a keyword that has been made by the image. This is a movie called Sajitle, which is a alien, which is a alien, which is a alien, which is a human being made in the world. It was not a movie that was released, but it was not a movie that was released. It was a movie that was made in the first sci-fi movie. But the movie is that the movie was a long time to remake the movie before the movie was released.

It was called the Pre-Maker. So, he was able to do the movie with the movie. He was able to make the movie again and make it more like that. Why did Sadia Tria come to us and why it was alien? And how did the creation of this process be? Okay. Thanks very much Eunhee for inviting us. And thanks to everybody for coming along on a Friday afternoon to hear our conversation about some of the themes in our work.

And of course, I'd like to thank everybody here at the MMCA for inviting us and making us stay in Seoul so special. It's my first time in Seoul, and I've wanted to come here for a long time. So I'm having a good time, and I'm learning a lot. So let's see. Let's think about this question of scenario. So I'm going to start talking about scenario, and then I'm going to hand over to Angelica, and she'll talk about pre-make, and we'll try and go backwards and forwards like that. And in that way, we'll try to respond to Unhi's kind of key question. So what you saw was this moment in Otterle 3

in which you see different kinds of footage. So you see 1960s London, you see 1960s films by the filmmaker Satyajit Ray, and all of these come together in a kind of imaginary city, a city that is a kind of cinematic geography. that's kind of what you see but what you hear is this account of what the film that you are looking at might be not the film itself but its potential so we could say that

what drives this film is not so much how to realise Satyajit Ray's unmade film but how to keep its potential as an unmade film and how to keep the idea of an unmade future open. So instead of making the film, in a way we want to explore what it means to unmake a film. And the way we did this was to imagine that the four characters of his screenplay emerge from the world of the script and set out on a voyage of discovery.

So they set out to realize themselves as fictions. They set out to bring themselves into existence. So this means that you're not seeing a film, you're seeing kind of different versions of what is not yet a film. So it's a study in what might come to be. And this is based very much on the ideas of Pasolini. So Pierre Paolo Pasolini, he's quite well known, but we really liked a number of films he made, which he called notebook films. And he made these films in the 60s. And we were very influenced by a film called Notes for a Film,

about India, which he made in 68, or something like this. And in this film, he goes to search India for different locations. So the film you see is just the locations for the film that he will make. So we took this idea and adapted it to London and to Ray. So this film I think of as a series of scenarios scenarios about five possible versions of a film, but we don't see any of those versions. We just speculate about them. I think in relation to your question of the alien, it's a question that we have been thinking

about separately and together for a long time. In relation to Setyajit Ray's proposed film, The Alien, which was actually then taken by Steven Spielberg to make E.T. And, you know, Setyajit Ray was quite pissed off about that. But, you know, what could be more alien than to have 250 years of colonization by the British in India? And I think, you know, that in itself is a kind of science fiction. But also one could say that the Hindu pantheon is also somewhat of a science fiction.

There's like three million gods all flying around in the universe. and in the multiverse there's multi-layers to it, you know, on chariots and throwing kind of all kinds of crazy weapons around. So for us, the question of this, the alien, and the idea of the pre-make was to think sculpturally about the film. So there's five characters, but we think of it as a sculptural project because we are interested in this new shape of what is to come as a kind of question of continuous decolonization.

So our characters, in a way, decolonize the script. We are letting them decolonize the script. and find a kind of, let's say, the condition of the alien as a continuous project of becoming. So for us, these were some of the ideas. Also, the question of displacing location, looking for characters in London as opposed to looking for characters in Bengal. we like this idea of thinking of London as Calcutta. Certainly a lot of the economy of centres of Europe, like London,

came from their colonial adventures. So these were some of the things that were informing Artelith III. I mean, just to say another word about research, In a way, the entire film comes out of our research into this unrealized film. Maybe every sentence comes from or is related to a particular text, a particular film, a particular theory. For example, the word pre-make is not our invention. It's invented by the French filmmaker Chris Marker.

In a series of fictional film posters that Chris Marker made, he imagined different films with fictional settings. So he imagined Last Year, Man Bad, but he imagined it filmed in 1928, for example, with different actors. So he did about four of these imaginary film posters, and he called these film posters premakes. And his definition was a remake which is made before the original. So you hear in this scrambling of temporality, in this change of the nature between past, present and future, you hear what we think of as a kind of creative anachronism.

The anachronism understood as a creative sabotage of the future. and we really like this notion of pre-make so we adopted it and so the whole film takes place under this sign but also tries to extend Marker's idea into new worlds so the whole film is a kind of argument with ourselves over the nature of science fiction and more specifically the question of how you represent the alien? Does the alien have a body? Does the alien have arms and legs? Does the alien have a

face and eyes? Or should the alien be a question of the unthought? Should the alien be a question of a thought that is at the limit of thought? So the question of the alien is a question of an encounter with the limits of thinking itself. And this question of the limits of thinking is a question of philosophy, and it's a question of horror. And so the whole film is different attempts to study different notions of the aliens. Satyajit Ray has his version. Steven Spielberg has his version. and in the film we argue that abstraction is a strategy of alienation.

The alienation from figuration is already one step towards the question of the alien. In the film we move away from the question of the alien as a body towards the question of the alien as a condition and as a landscape. That takes us closer to the world of Tarkovsky, specifically Tarkovsky's film Stalker, in which the alien is a landscape of weather and climate and gravity. So the alien becomes a question of an environment that does not behave according to Earth conditions.

And so the film continually proposes all of these different questions of what it means to encounter the alien and what it means to represent an alien and what it means to be alienated by what you encounter. and what it means to affirm alienation, to use alienation and the encounter with the alien as a resource to be affirmed and to be intensified.

two, three가 어떻게 보면 지금 말씀하신 그런 시간의 문제와 관련이 있지 않을까 싶습니다. 특히 오토리스 타임라인을 보면 안저리카 사가가 미래의 안저리카, 과거와 또 미래의 안저리카 사가를 만날 수가 있고요. The Oatly 3 is the Alien. It's about the fact that we have a human being, the human being, the human being, the human being, and the human being. The time paradox is that we have to think about time and time.

We have to think about it. So, what is the question of what is the question? It's a very interesting question. It's a question that is what is the question? What is the question? What is the question? What is the question? What is the question? What is the question? What is the question? Yes, the question of what runs through

One, two, and three. The trilogy, yes. I think it's... That's a big question. Well, I mean, it wasn't planned as a trilogy. That's the first thing to say. You know, these films were not commissioned by one person. They were commissioned by different people. So I think what we kind of wanted to basically establish with Otolith I was the question of putting these two real figures together that did actually meet. This is my grandmother, Anasuya Gyanchand, who was president of the National Federation of Women in India.

And she traveled all over the non-aligned world, including the Soviet Republic, meeting many women's groups and thinking about processes of decolonization. for me her friendship with Valentina Tereshkova who was the first woman in space put her into a different category of woman for me because she became somebody who was thinking about the kind of process of communist state form of technology in relation to feminism because the Indian conditions of feminism

were very different to the project of state building after the British left. So putting these two figures together seemed like an interesting... It was our first film. We made the timeline, but it was our first film together. And to put these figures together and have them kind of not dialogue, but see themselves somehow in my present as being able to conduct and be trained. We went to Star City in Moscow and were trained to become cosmonauts,

and we performed these parabolic flights. So in a way, this coincidence that came to us to be able to go to the Soviet space program city and to perform these parabolic flights, it felt like something that she would have always wanted to do somehow. and then to set the future you know this world where she's living this descendant is living in a Dr. Usha Adabaran saga then moves to the off world in the future and lives on a space station confined to this space

because the earth has been destroyed and all she has are images so this first film we were kind of basically looking at the condition of weightlessness as a metaphor for a kind of potential but also for a kind of groundlessness and it was set in 2003 at the beginning of the Iraq war and we connected these moments the kind of sense that the the demonstrations that took place in London at that time, where there was two million people demonstrating against the war in Iraq, we knew what was going to happen. We felt this terrible sense of doom.

But to put these ladies in relation to each other for a kind of world that would have allowed them to meet, for a world that would have allowed women to be space women expanded the metaphor of weightlessness. Otolith II then took us to, let's say, another kind of state. So we were looking at space. Then we decided to go to the ground and look at the most intense conditions of living, and that was in the Bombay slums.

A relative of mine, distant relative, but a very respected one and filmmaker in India, a renowned documentary filmmaker called Anand Patwadhan, made a film in the 80s called Bombay Our City. And in this film, he analyzes the kind of development of the slums in Bombay and the kind of large numbers of people coming to Bombay and the prejudice they receive and the terrible conditions they live under. We wanted to look at the slums again, you know, in 2007, 6 or whatever it was, 7, and look at these kind of unregulated forms of living in Bombay

and then think about a kind of constructed project of modernism which was Chandigarh in Punjab built by Corbusier. So these two, again, these are complicated histories of these films, but these were two moments we were putting into relation. We then actually wanted to go underwater, but that is another film called Hydra Decapita. So that isn't within the official trilogy. That becomes part of another trilogy around water that we made. But maybe you want to add to this? Sure. I think we could say that what characterizes the three films

from Otolith One made in 2003 to Otolith II made in 2007 and Otolith III made in 2009 is a perspective that is a kind of an extraterritorial perspective that allows a distance on the present. So there is a narrator that is somehow removed in time and space from what the image shows and what music shows. So this relation in which the narrator is removed into the future

or is removed in terms of space and is also removed in terms of humanity in the sense that the narrator is some kind of mutant or evolved or non-human figure, this kind of distance allows us to make a commentary on the present. So we were really searching in these films for a new aesthetic language to express political feelings of despair and depression and anger and frustration at the political situation in Britain,

especially, and the political situation wherever we went. But we were really also at odds with the typical language of art cinema as it was formulated in the UK at the time. So we really were not so interested in a lot of the kind of art being made through the kind of video art that was influenced by American video art of the 60s and 70s or film that was influenced by the London Filmmakers Co-op. We weren't interested in any of those traditions. And we really wanted to invent our own language that could speak to the time.

And so in the films, you see this effort to also critique what it is documentary is. and also an effort to critique what it is we ask an image and a sound and a voice to do when it is faced with a political crisis. What kind of image can speak from crisis, not only about a crisis, but from the crisis? and what we wanted was an image that admitted that it was not sure about its own status.

We wanted a cinema that was as uncertain and as insecure and as unhappy as we were. We didn't want a film that knew what film was. We didn't want a film that was certain about what politics was and about what the future was. And so the forms that we detected with their distance and their temporal complexity and their maximalism, the way in which they have almost too much going on, the way in which they're very difficult to summarise,

all of this is really an indicator of our discontent, of how distant we felt to a lot of the art that was made in Britain at the time. And it was important for us to find a form for our distance, and the narrator's in our film, their distance is in a way our distance. I think it's important to talk about the analogy, the analogy, the analogy, the analogy, the analogy, the analogy, the analogy, the analogy.

I think it's a bit more interesting to see the other films and the questions that I've been looking for. First, the second video clip of the video clip, and the key words and related to the story of the story. Thank you.

so The End

Thank you. Thank you.

this is what we're dealing with, this is what we're dealing with, and we're dealing with the current, the world, the world, this is what we're dealing with. So, the world's world's world, and how we're dealing with the current, and how we're dealing with science fiction, The first thing is the reality.

I think that's a good idea. I'm going to throw a question from the film in a very specific video. So, I'd like to answer it easily.

It's a film that is by the new version of digital psychedelia. That's how a friend of ours, Mark Fisher... Sorry. We don't know if we could see the lights on the screen. But the police are alone. We couldn't even see the lights on the screen. So I will seek the protection of the light when I was not on the light.

Flat screen television seems to travel across the sky. And these scenes, they come from many different advertisements for three kinds of technologies. For phones, for laptops, and for flat screen televisions. So we studied hundreds and hundreds of advertisements for these three devices, and we started to create subsets, subcategories of the different kinds of gestures and the different kinds of expressions that you could see in these adverts.

because these adverts came from around 2005, 2007 onwards, which is when the smartphone begins. So these adverts are something like education in how to interact with smartphones and how to behave in front of your new flat-screen television. So they are something like schools of desire, these advertisements. They introduce you to new ways of interacting, and they introduce you to new desires.

And what we saw when we looked at these adverts was that they were introduced all over the world. You could see them in Saudi Arabia. You could see them in Nigeria. You could see them in Hong Kong. You could see them in Australia. The same kinds of adverts. So we started calling specific kind of gestures. We called them magical gestures. Magical gestures of dream factory capitalism. That's what we could see. And so we then extracted them. So we're just talking about three or four seconds. We took them out from the advert, which of course is only 40 seconds. And then we slowed them down.

And then we joined them together. And this is the beginning of anathema. This is what you start to see, in which we start to build a picture of the present, but a picture which is defamiliarized. What we thought was that it had only taken a very short time for us, that's to say users, to become used to their mobile devices and more than used to become intimate. so you know from 2007 to 2011 that's only four years

but in those four years you get used to going to bed with your mobile phone and waking up with your mobile phone you get used to looking at it the last thing you do and you get used to turning to it the first thing when you wake up so what we wanted to understand was this kind of intimacy this kind of symbiosis, this kind of closeness between mobile phones and humans, between laptops and humans, between flat-screen televisions and humans. And what we want to understand was the introduction of what advertising people call the touch point,

which of course is the finger, the way we all swipe and the way we all touch our phones. We want to understand the relation between touch and screen as a new form of intimacy. And we, in a way, wanted to imagine what our mobile phones and what our technologies think of us and how they understand the relationship. In a way, we know what we think. We know what humans get from the relationship. We get a sense of power, a sense of potential power, a sense of self-satisfaction. When we looked at these adverts very closely,

we could see there would be always this moment where somebody would pick up their phone, They would look at their phone, and then they would smile to themselves. They'd go, hmm. They would have this look of satisfaction as they received some information. And so this is how adverts imagine that we respond to our devices. But what do our devices think of us? So we wanted to create an anthropic inversion in which the technologies basically enter into a relationship with us through the haptic, through the haptic interface of the screen.

And this is the starting point for Anathema. I mean, we were interested in the erotics, to be more precise. When you talk about the intimacy, I mean, let's say we were interested in the erotics of the haptic relation with our phone. Haptic is all about our kind of kinesthetic, touch-sensorial relation to the world. But also the capture of our erotics by mobile phones. so the film isn't necessarily celebrating this form of being tethered to our phones it is almost a nightmare we like to see it as somewhat of a nightmare

and technically what we did was we took elements from all of these different adverts moments where we observed these gestures and we basically slowed them down. We worked with a lot of different software to almost peel off the face of the advert that wants to present itself to us. And we wanted to look at the architecture of its pixel, kind of skeletal form. So it was almost like looking at the kind of algo erotics, the erotics of the algorithms that are kind of behind this form of capture. But it is somewhat of a film that needs to be seen, really.

It is a kind of psychedelic experience, algo-psychedelia. Yeah, I mean, one way we could characterize it It's a film that wants to explore the sex appeal of the inorganic, which was Benjamin's term for the relation between the commodity and the human. The sex appeal of the inorganic seemed to be very strong around this moment of 2011. and so as Anjali points out the film stays on the surface of the image and tries to defamiliarize the recognition

effect of adverts, the way in which adverts flatter the viewer or the way in which adverts seduce the viewer or the way in which the adverts instruct the viewer. We wanted to defamiliarize that. And so in the final section of Anathema, we started to zoom into what we call the skin of the image, which is the skin of cinema is an idea from the Canadian film theorist Laura Marks. She talks about the skin of the film.

So we wanted to go towards the skin of the advertising image and magnify the skin of the image and to speculatively go under the skin of the image so that what you had was a subsurface image, an image which was under the skin of the image. and by the end of the film you are inside of a very abstract geometrical space. When you are in this space it feels like you have left the world of smiling faces and smiling happy people.

It feels like you've left this far behind for an abstract world but actually you've gone further into it And this duality between leaving the world of the surface and the world of the black mirror and being drawn further into it was for us a political question, question, which is to say the only way to engage with the negative and positive effects of a new technology is to enter into those negative and positive effects.

So it's a film that is critical of the relationship between technology and humans, but it's not saying we should throw away our devices or we should reject them. It's not an anti-technological film. I'm quite the opposite. It's a film that enters deeply into technology in order to show a way through technology. So in that way, it's a film that tries to suggest what it means to be entangled inside a relationship. So at the time, we were reading the work of the American political theorist Jody Dean,

who analyzed the relation between communication and capitalism. And this was a key book for us, this notion, this concept of communicative capitalism, that capitalism in our time operates through communication. And then the other key book that we were reading at the time was by the Iranian philosopher Reza Negrestani, and we were reading his book Cyclonopedia. And in Cyclonopedia, Reza Negrestani argues that humanity did not discover oil. Oil discovers humanity, and oil effectively controls politics.

so oil is the puppet master that pulls the strings of the politicians oil pulls the strings of Bin Laden and George W. Bush and so we took this notion from Cyclonopedia and we imagined that the liquid crystals which are inside every screen we imagined that the liquid crystals were in a way entering into a relationship with us through the screen. So we try to imagine ourselves into the perspective of a liquid crystal.

We try to imagine the film from the perspective and the position of liquid crystal, which is this particular mineral which behaves in a certain way and allows light to bend. So this film is a film which is a kind of science fiction of materialism. I mean, that scene in Videodrome, if you're a child of the 80s, that scene with, I can't remember the actor's name. James Woods. James Woods, yeah, sticks his head into the television which is literally like your head is just consumed by mass media and it's quite a powerful moment where the television screen has almost become the retina of the mind's eye.

So from that image till now, it's a body shock horror that we're living in. It's real. So when we think of science fiction, I mean, for us, science fiction is not a question of space opera. It's not a question of Star Wars. It's not a question of a galaxy far, far away. Science fiction for us is much closer to the stories and the essays and the novels of the British science fiction writer J.G. Ballard, James Graham Ballard. Ballard argued that Earth is the alien planet

and that science fiction has to become as abstract as reality itself is and that science fiction needs to develop a mythology of the near future. He argued that science fiction should be based in the next nine minutes. so he wanted a science fiction that is nine minutes from now and so what Ballard does if you read his books and his essays he gives you something like building blocks for training your eyes and your ears to see your present as a science fiction that is present around you now

And so our technologies then allowed us to create a science fiction around them and allowed us to move between science fiction and horror in the way Anjali is pointing out. So these references, Negristani, Jodie Dean, J.G. Ballard, Cronenberg, these are all references from the 80s and from the contemporary era that we worked on really intensively. When we make films, we try to create a kind of force field around us so that we can live inside of the force field.

We edit this film in our basement. So we call these films post-lens-based films. That means we don't go out into the California desert like we did with other films. No, we stay in our basement, we gather all the material, and we make the film on Final Cut Pro. So it's a post-lens-based film, and while you're in that state, you're in the basement, in the studio, working day and night, on and on and on, towards a particular deadline, a particular commission that you have, we try to enter into a specific emotional state and stay inside that.

So what we do is we watch a lot of films, which give us a certain feeling, and we listen to a lot of music. So we made this rule in which we only listened to music from 2011. and so we didn't listen to any of the music we have from the 60s or 70s or 80s or 90s. We just listened to contemporary music so that we were in a way... Even if we hated it. So in a way we were kind of castaways on an island of the present. We were kind of prisoners in the present of 2011 in a kind of specific temporal and musical media diet

that we placed ourselves in. And we stayed inside of this for the months and months it took to make this film. And then afterwards we emerged. And so we created a kind of artificial state of mind, stayed inside it. And the film comes from this kind of deliberately artificial desire to evoke a new form of horror and a new form of science fiction at what humans are becoming. what humans themselves are doing to themselves. So it comes back to this question of mutation.

To answer this question of what technology is doing to us, you don't ask humans this question. You imagine how the technology would ask this question. You imagine what humanity looks like from the technology's point of view. Yes. Thank you.