The next video clip is to continue the story. That's not going to go? You have any ennemi? Oh, I have too many enemies. Ennemis? To? But who? Oh, you know, the warriors of war, the bureaucrats, the comprador, then the proprietors, then the fraction of intellectuals and the reactionaries who depend on.
These are my enemies. But you know, it's a lot of enemies, all that in a sense. And you, what do you become? Oh, you know, the modern times, like always. Yes, I see. The ones with the parents. The main entrance. Yes, no matter the entrance. I don't know if you remember, before I reviewed my bachelor's bachelor's degree in September, I was at home and we had to collect the fish in Avignon. And now, I don't know, it seems that the fact of having done this manual, before, who helped me to succeed in the BACHO, who helped me to do with you. Ah, well, it's not that you can understand better what I said, when I was talking about philosophy.
Well, yes, a little bit. In June, I had... I think there was a link. Because in June, I didn't do manual work, and I played. Yes, but it's possible that there was a link, I believe it. But what effect do you feel? Do you have to harvest the peaches? Thank you.
I think the film is very important to me. The third clip of the show is that the light is on the light. The film is that we watched 1967. It was a film called the Chinese director of the Chinese. The movie is the 16th episode of the sequence of the sequence of the sequence. Because the movie is the communist like us, the communist like us. The communist like us is the Chinese people of the Chinese.
So the text I've been able to use, I'm going to use the reference to how to use it, how to use it, how to use it, how to use it. This is the artist group's one of the works that's been created by the way. It's a very important part of the scene. It's a very important part of the scene. There are some of the pictures in the Indy's pictures. The first part is the Angelica Saga's grandmother
who has been abroad in the past. We have a text that we can see in the text. We have a way to take this method. And reference to the film, what is the effect of the effects of the film? And the important thing is that the Chinese people made 6.8.19 was created in the past. So, at the time of the 6.8th century, it was a bit of a young age, a young age, a young age, a bit of a kind of kind of a period of time. So, at the time of the modern era, the Soviet Union, the other
kind of political issues, and the other kind of and the very good work of a very kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of So I would like to hear the text of the work that was behind the scenes and the political situation. So thank you. Yes. So the sequence of Anvia Chemsky and Francis Yehanssen, the Algerian professor, in dialogue in a train with this window, you know, France or wherever they are passing by, where she as a young Maoist is, you know,
questioning the politics and the militancy of the Algerian, the FLN. For us, it was a brilliant scene because it allowed us to put these certain discrepancies into relation. And actually, instead of looking for certainties from the kind of archival specificities, Instead of looking for specificities and historical specificities, we were more interested in expanding the archive into what it suggests, which is its discrepant relations. Because, okay, so this archive comes out of my grandmother's and grandfather's archive
of delegation photographs that when they traveled, they were always given a set of photographs after their trips, of, you know, documenting their trips. But they came, they were traveling, you know, all over the non-aligned world, you know, meeting figures like Nasser, Abdul Nasser, and, you know, Chairman Mao, and, you know, spent so much time in the Soviet Republic like meeting all kinds of different figures. Again, in this process of decolonization, we were interested in how do you bring these questions to the surface of the present so that the images cannot just be speculated on
and reserved within the past. So we took the relationship between, say, Maoism and the FLN and allowed put the dialogue on the recto and verso of the images so the back of the photographs and the front of the photographs become a dialogue so he became the back of the photographs and she became the front of the photographs again to kind of sexualize the photographs if you like to put gender relations into the actual materiality of the images, allowed for the photographs to kind of release themselves
from a kind of material function only and speak. We were interested in this kind of asymmetry, as I said, to bring into the surface these different political moments and maybe Kojo wants to say something now I mean the music we used was also there's other things going on in the in the film Communists Like Us because we have got this the score by the music by Cornelius Cardew who was a British Maoist composer who believed in bringing all kinds of people non-musicians together
and getting them to improvise, bus drivers, teachers. He created this score called The Great Learning, and all these people would take tin cans and pots and non-instruments and real instruments, and using their voices they would improvise. So we were very interested in cardio as well in relation to this film. But I was recently in Edinburgh with a bunch of Indian historians, and they were really pissed off with this film because they wanted me to give a kind of really detailed historical narrative on these photographs, which the research is huge,
but when we found them, we were struck by the fact that they were coming from all kinds of different places with all kinds of different processes of forms of decolonization going on, different independence movements from different parts of the world. So we wanted to enhance this kind of sense of living with this uncertainty. Yeah, I think related to that, when people say they do research with archives or with historical research,
In a way, what artists tend to mean by that is that they embark on a kind of a quest for the historiographic reference, or they embark on a quest for the index. so the people try to match the iconography of the imagery to the historical index of the imagery. You try to match icon to index. So what that means is you have these photographs
and first of all you try to identify the date, then you identify the location, and then you try to identify the people and of course you try to identify the photographic agency that commissions the photographs and then you try to identify the photographer and then you try to identify the ownership of the photographs themselves. So you do all of this indexical work. In other words, you make history carry out an indexical project and we respect all that highly but there are also other ways to work with historical and archival images and communists like us is an experiment
in how to use historical images in a trans-historical way. So instead of trying to locate the actual and concrete historical indexes of place and time and location, identity. Instead of that, what we did was create a trans-historical relation to other times and other musics and other images, which have, and this is the most important thing, which have no necessary relation to the photographs themselves.
There is no necessary and real historical relation. There is no necessary reason why these photographs have to go with the subtitles from La Chinoise and with this great composition, which is called Paragraph 3 of the Great Learning from Cornelius Cardew. There was no necessary reason that they belonged together. What we have done is create a work of trans-historical association. And so what the historians disliked was the associative
and non-necessary belonging between the two. They didn't like it because it felt subjective and arbitrary. What they were saying was, but why this Goddard film? You could choose any film. But why this music? You could have any music. Why bring these things together? So they wanted a historical reason for our choices. And sometimes, if we feel like it, we can give a historical reason. We can say, well, we were interested in the circulation of the nature of Maoism in music and in cinema and in photography.
And that's true as well. But there are also non-historical or trans-historical reasons which are just as important. reasons which are not indexical and reasons which are not iconic. And these are much more difficult to get to because what it means is you're using history for things which are not automatically about history. So in a way, we are putting historical image into something like a labyrinth or something like a mirage of history. And that's why historians really objected to this work because what we do is expose the way in which images travel outside of their index.
And this is something all historians agree with in principle. When you actually put it into practice, they get deeply offended by it because it suggests that images, it suggests that history does not belong to historians. It suggests that images do not belong to historians of images. It suggests that photography does not belong to historians of photography, that we can do things with photography that go beyond what a historian of photography tells us that photograph can do. So the question is, what is the capacity of a photograph? What is the capacity of a subtitle?
What is the capacity of a music to travel outside of its index, outside of its date, outside of its location, and outside of its time? So what we did was arrange something like an impossible meeting between images and sounds and voices, images, sounds, voices, and music that would never have met in real historical time. So we create, once again, a complex transhistorical conversation that does not have a basis in historical reality but is more important for that reason.
And this was the experiment. And when we first made this work, it was a performance. So we sat here just like this, and we had three overhead cameras, and two cameras would show the images. And then we had a big book of posters, of Cultural Revolution posters, and we would turn the posters, and then we would have a record player, and we would put on the record. We did this performance for 2006 and 2007 and 2008 and 2009, and then in 2010 we said, Halas, that's enough. Let's make a documentation of this performance and let's make a new video from it, and then we don't have to do the performance anymore.
And so this video comes out of a kind of performance moment. and so when I watch it now I can feel the driving force of the music the music just drives those images forward and the images seem to take on a kind of different kind of speed but then I can also see the intimacy between the faces of the women inside the photo. So what I see now is, and what I feel, is different kinds of speed and different kinds of slowness
inside of the relation between the photograph and the music and the subtitle. And so I think what we were experimenting with was with what it means for photographs to travel and what it means to put images into circulation with music, which is also traveling, and subtitles, which are also moving, and to have all of these three moving at different speeds and different slownesses.
Yes. and some of the people who have seen this picture, and they can see the images and see the images. And the people who have been able to write about the people's and their thoughts, their thoughts, and their thoughts are going to be able to perform a lot of problems.
I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. Because it's a good point. It's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. The next clip is the sound, image, and image. The next clip is the next clip.
Always repeating is all of living. Everything in a being is always repeating. More and more listening to repeating gives to me completed understanding. Each one slowly comes to be a whole one to me. Each one slowly comes to be a whole one in me. Soon then it commences to sound through my ears and eyes and feelings. the repeating that is always coming out from each one that is them that makes then slowly of each one of them a whole one repeating then comes slowly then to be to one who has it to love repeating as natural being
I'm not sure if I can't believe it This is a film called People to be Ressembling. It's a film called 2012. It's called Kodona, Kodona, and the text. It's a song and sound. It's a song and sound. Why?
What kind of language is that the Kodona Group's sound? and how to hear the sound of the process, how to hear the sound of the sound of the sound, how to hear the sound of the sound of the sound, how to hear the sound of the sound of the sound. I'll talk a little bit about that. Well, so the question, because I know I can see some people here without translating devices, but basically the question was why did we make this film and the use of sound and image
and the group Cordona, which was made up of Colin Walcott, Nana Vasconcelos, and Don Cherry. and so the first two letters of their names, Colin, C.O., Nana, no, Colin, D.O., Don, and Nana, so it's Codona, they created this name from those initials. So why did we make this film? I mean, I think it's very personal for each of us because we both come from a kind of music background in different ways. Kojo is a writer, me as a musician. And as also a kind of organizer, a producer of experimental music.
So what attracted me to Kodona, this group, was basically this interest I've always had in, well, I've always enjoyed my hatred of this idea of world music. I've relished in a hatred of this term. Because it kind of comes out of a... I saw it happening in the 90s, this kind of benettonisation of music into this kind of drum and bass, kind of gloopy soup of someone playing some tabla and then this Indian girl singing. and, you know, over... So it was very much about fusion, which is another word I hate. And fusion food, fusion music,
I find all these terms quite irritating. Because for me, they kind of speak of a kind of flattening, of a homogenous world, a kind of flat space of relations that are assumed, that are not struggled for, that are just kind of circulated. into this kind of awful space. What attracted me to Codona was basically Don Cherry, who was kind of a character who was actually interested in the complete opposite of this. So what he was somehow relating to when he was working with musicians was absorption. There was something about the way Miles Davis This also works with Indian musicians and how free jazz musicians work, which is very
much about listening. Listening to the instruments as kind of devices of sound production that have entire cultural histories attached to them. Listening to musicians as, yes, readers of time, readers of knowledge through their relationship with their instruments. And when they played music together there was a kind of sense of absorption which is very different for me than layering music together which kind of came out a lot of this like young producers suddenly having studios, having
digital studios and kind of being able to do all this stuff which was kind of a lot of bad music came out of that. So for us, Codona, the group, kind of represented like a possibility of like really looking at these questions, looking at the thinking space of the musician, looking at the way the gestures of the musicians, looking at the gestures of musicians with instruments. And the text, well, so we basically took the album cover as our, you know, as our kind of device to look into, let's look into this album cover and see what we can see. And we found that the person who had photographed,
we found the photographer who'd photographed these figures, the band for the album cover, and we went and looked for the photographers who were in Italy. And we managed to gain access to the archive, which you don't see in the clips. This film was commissioned for a show at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, curated by Okwi Enwesor, and it was an exhibition that was about the label ECM, which I've forgotten what it means now. Editions of Contemporary. Editions of Contemporary Music, yeah,
which is a great label in Munich. And kind of for Okwi, I think, represented a sort of bringing, a kind of space, just this little office and recording studio and archive, which had so many figures from all over the world coming to make music there that he kind of became fascinated by this legacy just hidden in Munich, because Munich's quite a sort of boring right-wing German town. You know, suddenly in Munich there's this incredible label which has been responsible for recording all these great musicians throughout the years. So it was a great exhibition, and we were very proud to be involved in it because it allowed us to unfold our interest in music in general
and specifically into Don Cherry, who was somewhat of a kind of great figure because he would travel all over the world and get invited, and he would immediately work with people and their folk traditions. He would look into people's traditions of music and bring out all these great things in musicians. So the film was really, I don't know, trying to take these elements and work with them. But that's, for me, what it was. As Anjali says, ECM, they were and still are one of the most important music labels in the world.
ECM started in 1969 in Munich, and they still exist now. They have a kind of jazz label, which is how it started. And in the 80s, they also started a classical music label. And they have composers such as Steve Reich and Arvo Pert and Anu Abrahim and many, many, Ilya Cancelli. Many extremely important composers record for ECM. and ECM have never released a single, only albums, only albums from 1969 until now, and they are totally 100% independent.
They're not owned by Columbia or Warner Brothers, nothing like that. And all of Godard's soundtracks, Jean-Luc Godard's soundtracks since the 90s have been made from music recorded on ECM. So ECM and Goddard have a kind of deal whereby Goddard can use ECM recordings for his films. So ECM are an important label. And we were, as Anjali says, we were very proud to be part of this major exhibition at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. and we had a really long-standing interest in Don Cherry because Don Cherry was part of Ornette Coleman's group
who invented free jazz at the end of the 50s. So Ornette Coleman is one of the most important musicians of the 20th century. He died last year. But Ornette Coleman founded a group in which Don Cherry played a trumpet, a pocket, a white plastic pocket trumpet, which is unusual in jazz. And this group in the late 50s really pioneered the invention of free jazz. So this is a revolution within recorded music. So Don Cherry was part of this incredibly important group, but he left this group and begun, as Anjali says, this travel, and he travelled especially to many Scandinavian countries,
Norway and Sweden, and travelled in the US and Turkey and Mali and India and really travelled and became something like the John Cage of jazz music. He was somebody who gave permission to musicians and to artists. He inspired people. So we were very interested in Don Cherry And when he comes together with Nana Vasconcelos, who is a Brazilian percussionist, and Colin Walcott, who is American multi-instrumentalist, they Codona form in 1978, and then they stop in 1982, when Colin Walcott dies in a car crash.
So they make three albums, 1978, 1980, 1982, and then it comes to an end. And so what we were fascinated by was that you had three multi-instrumentalists, Don Cherry from the world of jazz, Nana Vasconcelos from the world of Brazilian percussion, and Colin Walcott, who played 24 instruments and recorded with Meredith Monk. So you had these three musicians who knew a lot about music, but they made a very small, almost chamber music. So it wasn't busy fusion music with many, many instruments. No, it was small and intimate, which means they were listening to themselves and they were reinventing their music each time.
And so what fascinated us about Codona Codona was the way in which they took musical principles from jazz, from percussion, from experimental classical music and made music which was not any of those. It was a genuinely new music. Hard to define and in that sense, free music. And our task was to make a work based on photographs. As Angelica said, we went to Italy and we met the two photographers who had taken photographs of Cardona when they were on tour. So we got these photographs and effectively we made a photo film.
And we always liked photo films because making films with photography is about creating movement inside of the image. So this was the test. And while we were making this, we realized that Codona were fascinated by the modernist writer Gertrude Stein. Gertrude Stein was an American modernist who was writing in the 1910s and 20s, and she wrote a book around 1918, I think, 1920, called The Making of Americans, which is about 760 pages. It's like this. It's massive. And on the back of the first Cardona album,
there is a big quotation from Gertrude Stein. And when you read this quotation, you hear that Gertrude Stein has invented a language in which she repeats sentences with variations. And the voice you hear is a 60s recording of an actress reading from the making of Americans. So what we decided to do was take Gertrude Stein's way of writing as a kind of a score that we would apply to the photographs. And so the whole film is what we call a five-sided film
in which we go to each of the different musicians and then we go to Codona themselves as a kind of fourth entity and then we go to a kind of missing entity, which is a kind of fifth entity. And we continually work with these photographs to create a kind of what the American literary theorist Fred Moten calls a visible music. Fred Moten who is one of the most important theorists on what we call the aesthetics of the black radical tradition says that we can understand jazz music as a form of black study
so when jazz musicians are playing they are studying and when one jazz musician plays and the other jazz musicians stand and listen and watch, this is also study. And when we sit in an audience and listen to the jazz musicians playing, we are also studying how they study. And he says all of this is a form of black study. And so we decided to take the photographs and in a way listen to them and try to make music with these photographs. And so the whole film comes out of this process.
And finally, in that final sequence, these are the hands of one of the greatest drummers in the post-punk music world in Britain. He's called Charles Hayward. He was in a famous group from the 70s called This Heat, which is from the world of post-punk. So Charles Hayward, he is drumming. And then you can see a projection of a capoeira dancer. So Charles Hayward becomes the drummer and the screen and the conductor. and so what you have in that final scene is a rhythm of vision
in which the image of dancers comes to life through music. So in this scene you have some kind of complex relation between image, sound and music and only at the end of this do you finally hear a codona composition. That's the Codona track that you can hear for about 2 minutes, 22 seconds. The Trades of Stine's famous, we know a lot of people who are like Rose is a rose, there is there.
It's like this. It's like this. It's like this. It's like this. It's like this. It's like this. It's like this. It's like this. It's like this. So, the Autolist Group's music has created all the different films. I think the music is a particular feature that we can create a particular feature and how to act as a little more and more as a relationship to the relationship. I'm going to feel like I'm feeling a little bit more about the movie. I'm going to ask you a question about the keyword.
I have a question about the question. I'm going to ask you a question about the coder. It's a Friday afternoon. I'm going to ask you a question. So I'll have a time to ask the audience questions. interested in this idea of the alien that was brought up.
And it's quite nice that J.G. Ballard was also brought up as he was born in China, in Shanghai, living in a foreign settlement camp, which was then later on occupied by the Japanese, and this relation of being alienated as such. But then I'm wondering what the alien then does imply to the need for a local community, or this idea of then a native that an alien does imply. To be alien, then you require something else for it to be alien in a way. And maybe you can kind of further elaborate on this idea of who is the alien and then who are they alien from and how that may relate to the film. Yeah, it's a good point.
I think in the context of Otterly 3, we're talking about alienation as a resource for self-transformation. Alienation as a capacity that should not be overcome and healed. you know there is a there's a kind of common sense understanding of alienation which means you are divided from yourself you are separated from yourself and so one one way of understanding alienation is that you need to overcome alienation and make yourself whole or make yourself healthy
or make yourself well and i understand that impulse but uh that's not my impulse my impulse is to dig deeper into this sense of distance from oneself and this sense of separation from oneself. In other words, all of the capacities that some would say make you an unfit and unhealthy and unwell person. So instead of making yourself healthy and fit and well, Artistically speaking, you dig deeper into those resources of alienation, and those alienation alienates you from yourself, and you gain access to a part of yourself that you would not have otherwise.
So in Ballard's case, Ballard was literally an alien, because he was in, as you point out very clearly, he was in this prison of war camp, which meant that when he returned to England, he always felt a distance from England. Many science fiction writers either migrated or had an illness when they were young, which somehow takes them outside of their environment. So they have this distance. But my point is that alienation is something that all colonized subjects have, and it's a resource to be used, not a resource to be repaired.
So this sense of distance, this sense of distance from oneself is a capacity which is one of the vectors or one of the avenues or pathways to the new and to the future. and every artist has to find their own way to tap into this capacity for alienation and to use it to alienate themselves. And for us, the whole film,
certainly for me, the whole film is a kind of experiment with different versions of this quest, like different ways of affirming alienation. So the question of alienation is not the same as the question of migration, and it's not the same as the question of the native, and it's not the same as the question of Ballard growing up in one place. So you can be right where you are and be fully alienated, whether that's through gender, whether that's through sexuality, whether that's through raciality, whether that's through psychic turmoil.
So in that sense, the questions of alienation are bound up with questions of discontent, questions of a discontent with reality, with the world as it is, And this discontent also includes yourself. You are also discontent with yourself, not just with the external world, the external problems, which are very real and which we all know very well, but you are also discontent with yourself. So in a way, you understand yourself as part of the problem that needs to change. And you can use alienation as a resource to struggle with yourself.
And this is an artistic project, which does not have any... There's no guaranteed method for it, but there is, I would say, a drive. And I say part of the artistic project is to find a vocabulary for this alienation, because it takes work. It's not spontaneously available. It's not there. It has to be fashioned from things around you. You have to build your vocabulary. you know the alienation is there but the language for it is not there is a gap between your alienation and what you do with it and how you move inside it
and with it and how you honour it and take it seriously so this film speaks to those kinds of questions you know And it speaks in an oblique way and in quite a direct way. Thank you. So I think that's the case of the science of science.
So, what do we think about science? I think that's a lot of questions. So, it's not just sci-fi, but it's not just a question. It's a question that's a question. So, if you want to talk about sci-fi fiction, or if you have a different sci-fi artist, I'm curious if you have any other sci-fi fiction writers that have influenced us. Well, I think Octavia Butler is very important.
and Samuel R. Delaney, African American science fiction writers. I think the profound sense of alienation is kind of... that I think African Americans feel is turned into such an incredible creative space in a writer like Octavia Butler. in her work is just brilliant. I think for me she is one of the best. I don't know. I think alienation is not always necessarily in people who define themselves
as science fiction writers as well. It can be in Michael Haneke's film Hidden, Caché, where the kind of racism of France, which is so kind of accepted as their project of liberalisation, their politics of secular violence, which has just been demonstrated with this poor mother being brutalised by the police and disrobed in public. It's like, get your tits out or else. this is really what it's come to in France, is really unbelievable heaviness,
which is almost like a kind of monster. And the way that Hanneke in the film Caché kind of reveals it just by showing normality is quite brilliant. I think when we are making films, and we watch a lot of cinema, because we like to look for the alien in many different films, but it doesn't have to be. We like to look for this sense of displacement or discontent or a sense of things out of their time, because things out of their time tend to live better for longer. you can watch certain films for your whole life
why? I think we ask ourselves that question when we make films could we watch this in the future? does it stand the test of time? so I think there's a kind of alchemy to this which involves reading philosophy reading science fiction looking for always this question of the alien in ourselves, but also the politics of alienation, the politics of the native, and all of these combine to bring these questions. Yeah, I agree with Anjali. The work of Octavia E. Butler, if you don't know her writings,
I strongly recommend all of her books a good place to start is the two books she wrote towards the end of her life one is called Parable of the Sower another is called Parable of Talents and these have this figure of this young woman who is a hyper empath this figure who feels who is sensitive to pain to an excessive degree and who becomes the kind of the center of a movement, of a kind of new kind of philosophy.
And Octavia E. Butler, who was a gay African-American novelist at a time when there were very few gay novelists writing in America, I think becomes more and more important over time. And the work of Samuel R. Delaney, who Anjali also mentioned, Samuel R. Delaney is also a gay African-American writer, and he started writing when he was very young. He was a kind of child genius. He'd published maybe four books by the time he was 19. And his books are extremely complex. And he was also a theorist of science fiction. So he continually analysed what it was science fiction was about.
And he had a kind of definition of science fiction that we like a lot. He said, science fiction is not a projection into the future. It is a significant distortion of the present. So he would focus on specific aspects of the present within America. and then he would exaggerate them to extreme dimensions so that a particular dimension takes over all of reality and distorts it so that reality undergoes a kind of pressure. And a book of his I like very much is called Triton, T-R-I-T-O-N.
Triton is one of the moons of... You can tell me which... You can tell me which is Triton. Is it one of the moons of Mars? Can anybody remember where Triton is a moon of? Triton is a really existing moon of a really existing planet. Anyway, it's all set on Triton. And there is this space which he calls an unlicensed sector. And in this unlicensed sector, all kinds of inconceivable alienations, sexual, racial, gendered, all kinds of deviations, perversions, all kinds of pleasures are permitted. And this plays an important role in the world of Triton.
So he's really important. and then Antje's point is true that a lot of science fiction often happens outside of the genre of science fiction the genre of science fiction often has very little science fiction in it because it's so much formatted according to you know according to previous science fictions so you don't have you are not confronted with with the unthought and with the shock of the new. And I mean, Hollywood science fiction is just pointless now. But there are moments. There are always moments within every... I spend a lot of time watching a lot of very bad films, and there are always amazing moments.
But equally, I would say there's moments within television. In Britain, there is a series from a few years ago called Black Mirror. Maybe some of you saw it. Black Mirror was really, each episode was a significant distortion of a technological present. So each episode was a 40-minute episode in which a new technological device had exerted a malevolent influence over the present and had distorted it into a different kind of dystopia. So if you've seen Black Mirror, which is, it's all on YouTube now, that's also well worth seeing. And maybe one last science fiction, just one last, is the Manifesto for Xenofeminism, which I like a lot, which is six women who are spread across the planet.
So some are based in Canada, based in Australia, based in Paris, based in the UK. and they've written this kind of manifesto for xenofeminism in which they take up the ideas of cyberfeminism, which were formulated in the 1980s by Donna Haraway, the American philosopher of science, and in the 90s by Sadie Plant, the British cyberfeminist, in her book Zeros and Ones. And these women, under the name Laboria Kubonics, They take up these ideas from the 90s and renew them. And the Manifesto for Alienation ends with this brilliant line.
It says, if nature is unjust, change nature. That's how the manifesto ends. So I strongly recommend the Manifesto for Alienation. Just go online and type in xenofeminism, X-E-N-O-F-E-M-I-N-I-S-M, Zeno, feminism, just go online and have a look. And this is science fiction which has a political dimension which is intended to intervene in the politics of the present. And that's the kind of science fiction that I find deeply inspiring. or the idea of the idea of the dystopia, or the idea of the idea of the dystopia,
and I think we're living in the world and living in the world. What is the point of the perspective of the positive, and the part of the project that you've been doing? Well, I mean, I feel we're living at the end of the world, so I don't feel very happy about that. Humans have destroyed the planet. I don't think happiness is something that we can share it collectively, and we can share it through struggling for it, but I don't think it's something we can assume.
is there. We have destroyed the world. We are destroying it. Somebody like Trump might be voted into power. He's going to destroy. He's dangerous. I don't think there's much to feel very happy about. Look at Syria. Look at these millions of refugees starving with nowhere to go. I mean, I really Look at the contamination of the planet. We control the weather. We have destroyed the world. I don't really understand where happiness comes into it. I think we can share beauty through understanding and through sharing politics, through communication in depth about things,
but I think happiness is something we have to win. I think the question is not so much a question of happiness or unquestioned or unquestioned the question is not so much happiness or unhappiness happiness or sadness despair or not despair the question is vocabulary language artistic language if you're an artist literary language if you're a writer musical language if you're a musician the question is the vocabulary that you have that allows you to analyze the world that you
exist in and to play your part in intervening in it this is what's necessary the struggle to invent a language which is not spontaneously available, but which has to be invented, and the struggle to invent a language for real problems which really exist, but sometimes do not have a name yet, or real problems that have, for example, a scientific language, a scientific definition, but which need to be translated from a scientific definition into a language that everybody can understand.
So I think the work of art is to invent a vocabulary for the abstract and concrete problems of the present, and it is also to analyze problems that only science tends to understand and come up with a vocabulary which is not a scientific vocabulary, but which analyses the same things as science does. And this is why science fiction is important because it's a way of narrating the real problems that scientists are speaking to us about but which people don't fully grasp because scientific language is difficult to process.
So we need new vocabularies to process the new problems of our time. The last year 2011 was the last year. The last year we are experiencing this world
and we are experiencing this very serious. We can read this and read this and how we can read it. and also how we can talk about the discussion, and we have a lot of discussion and discussion. And then, if you have a question, please ask us to answer your question. Please ask us a question. Yes. I'm going to talk about the work of the work. It's a very simple and simple question. What are the most important things that you're preparing for the future?
Okay, we have at least three different projects on the go, but we won't talk about them until we're further into them. And then we'll make a lecture performance about those projects, and then you can get a sense of those. the things that we are looking at. I think yesterday I stayed up until about 4 a.m. looking at this video of a bot summit. So, you know, the idea of chatbots and Twitterbots that communicate with you all the time when you go onto Twitter. This was a summit in which
different programmers talked about different kinds of bots. So I spend a lot of time looking at AI, at the kind of the artificial stupidity of artificial intelligence. I spend a lot of time trying to understand artificial intelligence and machine learning and try to understand the kind of the popularity and the spreading of the Turing test, the so-called test for intelligence. So these kinds of things will show up in our work in the future, amongst other things. What are the things that are currently doing?
Secret? Well, we are making a film where we're looking into this school actually in India, an art school, which was established by a figure called Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali poet, essayist, playwright, and musician. And he established this school in West Bengal in the end of the 1800s as a place where people who were not, you know, as a place to think on arts as a practice, as a kind of space of kind of decolonization, very much kind of influenced by sort of let's say the relationship between craft and craft culture
and what is craft, what is art, these kinds of questions. The kind of architecture of Shantina Ketan is kind of extraordinary because it was a place of sort of for people to come who were underprivileged. It was also a school for the underprivileged and for women as well. And it was basically a place where people could come and really witness the landscape, look into the landscape, appreciate the landscape after 250 years of British rule. And also after the Bengal famine, which came later. That came later, but still the school functions in that way. for us it's a very interesting space because Tagore was a kind of
figure that was kind of celebrated on western stages as this kind of Indian mystic and guru you know with news of the possibility of redemption for the west somehow we've always been interested in India as a kind of space of redemption for the west because the west loves India you know thinks that they can heal themselves when they go to India. So I've always found this very funny. And so Tagore is a kind of, you know, he won the Nobel Prize for his poems, the literary prize. The school is a question because it's like a laboratory, you know. It lives inside a kind of historical space,
but it's functioning. The whole kind of environment is a very interesting space. When you look at kind of the manufacturing of a global contemporary art world in Delhi and this kind of school. So this is a project that's underway and it's commissioned by the migrant Bauhaus because it's 100 years of the Bauhaus in a couple of years. And we have been commissioned to work on this project. But we veer from this kind of work to a very high-tech kind of... In this film, Tagore comes back from the dead and walks through the school. Tagore comes back as an avatar and walks through the school because it's a century.
It's a century since the school was formed, and a school, an art school, at its best functions as a kind of hub, as a kind of laboratory for producing a certain kind of social intelligence. and then the question would be if that social intelligence could speak and could take on a form what would that form be? That would be the locus classicus the spirit of a place and that spirit would be what we would call an avatar
so in this film the young and the old Tagore materialize and walk through the school now and have encounters with the students of the school but also the statues of the school and the different the kind of the entire social ecology of the school. So we want to combine the kind of the documentary with a kind of the kind of 3D imagery that you can see in a work like Sovereign Sisters which
is which is a 3D animation. So this combination of both elements we think Gains Gains something quite powerful Because Tagore looks like Gandalf That's really what he does He looks like Gandalf of Lord of the Rings He had long white hair He had a long beard And he would make his own robes White robes To the ground He looked like a saint He looked like Gandalf I mean he really did So you just have to imagine this avatar walking through this school. But we're also interested in the students there and all the different departments and working with them.
So you can see we have different ways of approaching the same ideas. You can see you have different entry points into the same matrix. So the film emerges from the different entrances we make into a complex of materials. But there are two other films which we're not going to talk about. Not yet.