Fwd: Re: Archive (17) Sebastian Lütgert: The Neural Image (and a few others)
Duration: 00:31:39; Aspect Ratio: 1.778:1; Hue: 215.922; Saturation: 0.148; Lightness: 0.186; Volume: 0.108; Cuts per Minute: 4.423; Words per Minute: 84.755
(Insomnia warning: the speaker is in a phase of severe sleeplessness, so some of his words are the wrong words.)
Shaina: For many of you here, Jan Gerber and Sebastian Lütgert need no introduction. But for others, the various instances you have been seeing, and the work that has come of out of these multiple instances,
858.MA,
bak.ma,
Indiancine.ma and
Pad.ma and
0xDB, are based on this
Pandora's Box of lots of wonderful things that Jan and Sebastian have created. So, Sebastian...
This is just a test for audio, this is not part of the...
What will she do with Thurday's rags
When Monday comes around
This is going to be deliberately slow.
This is the title. We have learned... I have learned a couple of things in the last week. One is that sometimes an image, one image, is enough. This is more than one, but it's a series. We've also learned, or I have learned, that there is a property of the image that is often forgotten, which is the question: who is this image for? The following images have addressees, so not all of them speak to all of us. But lets start with the first one, the first slide.
000: The Neural Image (and a few others)
The Neural Image
001: For Ashish, Shaina, Ashok, Jan and a few others
This is an image for Shaina and for Ashok and for Ashish, and for a few other people who came here for the second workshop that's going to start tomorrow, at CAMP. Some images need to be read, like this one. It's a proposal, and I hope we find some time next week to talk about it in the workshop, on in a bar over a beer.
This one is more like the conceptual framework of this talk. This image is for Kaushik, probably also for Silvia and Graeme. This is kind of, yeah, the conceptual idea. You have to look at it for a moment. And I think Kaushik has to say: ok, and then we're going to go to the next slide. But take some time. This is the general idea of the Neural Image, by analogy... Yeah? Really? Okay. Ashish? Um. Anyone?
003: For Salma & Kaya
beach
Juhu Beach
revolution
Obviously, the next image is for Salma and Kaya. It's an apology, but not for Deleuze. It's an apology for not having had enough time to take the two of you to Juhu Beach. There was enough time to go to the beach with Inder and Alper, and we found some things that were really surprising. So had we gone to the beach, we could have looked for graffitis. So next time you come, lets all bring more time, please.
004: For Jan
beach
Juhu Beach
This was taken almost in the same spot, how many years ago, seven? It's an image for Jan. It's a reminder to take some time off in April.
This is an image that Jan is going to talk more about in the workshop. This is the Neural Image, if you want the image. It's an image that comes out of the process of trying to visualize what machines see when they do optical recognition. These neural networks, computer vision systems that detect objects: cats, ties, cars, etcetera. This is one of the most frightening images of the 21st century that I have seen. But this is the future. This is a turtle, it's actually a 3D object, that to image recognition programs looks like a machine gun with 90% confidence. These are adversarial neural networks, trained to perturb neural networks.
005: The Machine Gun Turtle
Image source:
Google's AI thinks this turtle is a rifle
So for me, the Neural Image is the turtle. But then I scrolled down on the page, and what do you find, obviously? We saw a lot of them, this is the cat. Someone asked: How can a film be titled
A Grin Without a Cat? How can you make an image of a cat that to optical image recognition looks like a bowl of guacamole? But this is true, and this is something we'd like to talk about in the workshop.
008: For Sanjay
Worli
This one is for Sanjay, in whose bed I slept last night. So this is a thank you. This is the view from his house. And there is a lot of blue, above. There is also a person in the image, and you may want to take some time to look at the person... Done? It's never "done", no?
009: For 858.ma, bak.ma and Pad.ma
Paris
This one is for 858 and bak.ma, but also for Pad.ma. It's...
Ah, this is... I forgot one thing about Sanjay. This is also the place, exactly, where this little film that now follows, of images, came to my mind in the morning. So thank you for that as well. And maybe I can leave my bag at your house tonight, so that I don't lose it.
008: For Sanjay
Worli
This is an image for 858 and for bak.ma, but also for Pad.ma. It's an image from one of my favorite films, which is called
Critique de la séparation. This is a reminder that the crisis, or capitalism, or fascism, or whatever we want to call the current state of things, that what it produces is first and foremost separation. Or in the words of Brian Massumi: Every individual life is a serialized capitalist mini-crisis, a disaster that bears your name. So this still from
Critique de la séparation is a reminder to try and resist these processes of separation that happen after the revolution, and in times of crisis. And to refuse to experience or understand as an individual crisis what is actually a political one.
009: For 858.ma, bak.ma and Pad.ma
From:
Critique de la séparation (Guy Debord) 1961
Via:
So. 21.10. 19 Uhr: Against Cinema (Guy Debord)
Paris
revolution
010: For Ashok
Beirut
This is Beirut. This is an image for Ashok.
And this is an image for Shaina.
011: For Shaina
Beirut
Documenta 14
012: For Mosireen
Kassel
020: For Inder
Juhu Beach
This is the other end of Juhu Beach. This is an image I have taken maybe eight years ago, for Inder, who I didn't know back then. And... he's the only person who can tell you there's a dog hidden in this image, and only he can tell you where.
021: For Alper
Al Aweer Sewage Treatment Plant
desert
This one is for Alper. It's garbage. I found it in the desert. And... do we have internet here? Ah, maybe... we do? Yeah... So I found this in the desert once, in Dubai. I didn't know what it was when I saw it first. But only later I realized what it was: sewage.
So I want to play you a little clip.
See... here...
two female gold diggers, in a
gathering of the Golden League.
So, the image... Historians
don't search, they find.
To shield all these
images from language
means to actually
make use of them
because they are
in the desert
and that's where one
has to look for them.
This is a photo
of Silvia and Graeme, sitting at Sunraj, preparing for the seminar. The question is: Who has taken this image? Hint: Look at the floor tiles. You're looking at the floor tiles now? Good. There is a lot of red in the image.
025:
For Zinnia
CAMP
map
Sharjah
ides of march
This is another joke. It's for Zinnia. Only Zinnia will understand it. We're going to have that conversation at Pad.ma 20. This is another ides of march photo, it's a departure. You see a person on a
map. And again: the floor tiles give away the location.
026: For Rosemary
100 Piccadilly
map
Another map, for Rosemary. This is a forbidden zone, this is the
map room in 100 Piccadilly. I don't know who the person is. It's just a reminder to go to this room, one day, and see what it's like now. You can take a look at the map for a moment.
This image is a question. The question is:
Where is the house of my friend? My friend moved, this was... this is his old street, his old house. I have not seen his new house, but one day, I will have to find it, so I will have to find the person who I can ask that question. Maybe some old friend of Inder who I can ask. This is in the morning light.
045: For Mariam
This one was copyrighted. Maybe I have to zoom in a bit, maybe just open it. This one is for Mariam, but she knows that. And the image that made it appear,
it's related to another image, the image that made it appear was already on the screen before. This, to me, is
an image of happiness, in cinema.
And this is also for Mariam. This is an image from
Happiness. Again, maybe we want to zoom in a bit, to see it better. It's the image of a horse.
046: For Mariam
Port Bou
048: For Walter Benjamin
This is an image for myself.
050 For myself
Beirut
And so is this one. And I think in this one, it's a reminder, again, I think in this one, if you zoom in, you see people swimming. It's a reminder to go swimming soon.
051 For myself
This one always looks a bit like it was part of... it was in
Le mépris.
052 For myself
This one is from a different film.
053 For myself
And here we have another photo with a
map. It's a bit ironic to see this as a reminder to smoke less, but maybe that's what this image is about. And to drink more water.
054 For myself
map
This one is for Madhushree. This is the first image, basically, the image we began with, on Holi, a week ago. You can see most of Madhushree in this image, in the center. She is not in Bombay today. She was in Bombay last week, but she was ill, so she couldn't come to the rooftop. For a few years, she was my favorite drinking partner in Bombay, and I learned a lot from her, and I miss drinkjng with her.
059 For Madhushree
Gokul
060 For Özge
Berlin
This one is cut at the hands. It's for Özge.
This one is strange. It's something I found in the desert. It's for Philipp, and it's also for Stefanie, even though we may not even have enough time to unpack all of this. But maybe we just make an appointment in Berlin, at some point soon, and talk it through. This is something that happened in the... that I found in the desert. It's almost a minute long, I guess. Maybe here. It was a very hot day, it was 42 degrees, and there was a sandstorm. I remember the camera was sandy for a long time. It's about
making it happen. It's for Philipp because he asked me a question.
070 For Philip and Stefanie
Arabian Canal
unmade film
desert
I found this when I was looking for images, and it's a sad one. Alper may know where this is. It's for a friend who, last time I saw him, was almost crying. His name is Vasif. This is Istanbul, just before a rainstorm sets in. So this is for bak.ma as well. And it's for Ashok, who couldn't come because he was ill.
080 For Vasif
Also for
bak.ma and for Ashok
Istanbul
This is an image we have, us at CAMP, have seen and taken many times. This time it's for Iram. Because the film here is Ferdinand Khittl's
The Parallel Street, and I've just given it to Iram, and I hope she has time to watch it. And you see CAMP, and you see CAMP.
086 For Salma
This one is quite obvious. It's for Salma. It shows the plants on my balcony. Even though they're in the off.
This is for a friend of mine, and a friend of Jan, who is in Australia, and for the last two weeks really, really wanted to talk to us, but we never found the time. This is the view from Pirate Cinema, in Berlin. And we want to meet him there, in July, with a lot of others. So this is for him.
Ah, this is... okay, we're getting to the end, wow. This one is for Graeme, who, before he fell sick, got infected with archive fever of a very new kind. He told me of
a nightmare he had, when he slept in the bed that I slept in two weeks prior. Because we all shifted beds a lot. I also had a nightmare in that bed, but I won't tell. So he had a nightmare where he saw... he was in an archive of manic overproduction that turned the users themselves into pixels. And he was figuring out the menus, he realized the name of the archive was Mad.ma. So this is an edit I made for Graeme, 10 years ago, from Mad.ma, if you will, for the launch of 0xDB, actually. The entire thing is an edit, but if that's the question: yes, this is an edit. It's maybe a minute long, it's quite dense. It's not finished, and I don't know if it will ever be finished. If it's too dense, we can watch it twice.
097 For Graeme
Aéroport de Paris-Orly
Jardin des Plantes
Los Angeles
Mad.ma
Madeleine (Robert Luxemburg) 2010
From:
Steal This Film II (Jamie King) 2007
Via:
Sun, Aug 13, 2017, 10 pm: 10 Years of 0xDB
and:
Wed, May 2, 2018, 9 pm: Pirate Cinema Season Seven Sneak Preview
Also see:
So. 28.8. 2005 20 Uhr: La jetée + Twelve Monkeys
and:
So. 4.9. 2005 20 Uhr: Vertigo + Sans Soleil
Muir Woods
Mulholland Drive
Paris, Texas
Suzhou River
The sequoia cut was still in Muir Woods.
On it Madeleine traced the short distance
between two of those concentric lines
that measured the age of the tree, and said:
"Here I was born... and here I died."
He remembered another film
in which this passage was quoted.
The sequoia was the one
in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris,
and the hand pointed to a place
outside the tree, outside of time.
"Here Hitchcock was born...
and here he died...
and here his copyrights will expire."
They walk. They look
at the trunk of a redwood tree
covered with historical dates.
She pronounces an English name
he doesn't understand.
As in a dream, he shows her
a point beyond the tree
and hears himself say:
"They will never expire..."
Tokyo
Twin Peaks
Vietnam
So that's what happens when you search for
blondes, in an archive that doesn't even exist yet.
This one was for the soundcheck. I'm not going to play it now, but we can look at it next week. This is for Silvia and Graeme. You've heard it in the soundcheck.
Deleuze
The next one is for Silvia and Graeme as well. It has music. It's a song by Serge Gainsbourg,
Les amours perdues. It's played by a band that's called The Elysian Fields. Not Deleuzian Fields! The Elysian Fields. It's the closing sequence from one of my favorite films of the 1990s. I remember watching it with Ashish, in Ashish's house, and a few friends, one night. It's a bit frightening, it's sad, but it's the first of two images that serve as a reminder that we haven't been listening to music enough in the last week, and maybe we can fix that in the coming days. This is maybe three minutes long. It's a timeline, it's a slit-scan timeline, it's rendered from 0xDB. It's kind of the countershot to the
Weekend shot some of you have seen on the first day. This one is about the music.
099: For Silvia & Graeme
Les amours perdues
Ne se retrouvent plus
Et les amants délaissés
Peuvent toujours chercher
Les amours perdues
Ne sont pas loin pourtant
Car les amants délaissés
Ne peuvent oublier
Tous les serments de cœur
Tous les serments d'amour
Tous les serre-moi
Serre-moi dans tes bras
Mon amour
On s'aimera toujours
Toujours toujours
Toujours toujours
Toujours toujours
Les amours perdues
Ne se retrouvent plus
Et les amants délaissés
Peuvent toujours chercher
Mes amours perdues
Hantent toujours mes nuits
Et dans des bras inconnus
Je veux trouver l'oubli
Toi tu m'aimeras
Je ne te croirai pas
Tout reviendra comme au jour
De mes premières amours
Tous les serments de cœur
Tous les serments d'amour
Tous les serre-moi
Serre-moi dans tes bras
Mon amour
On s'aimera toujours
Toujours toujours
Toujours toujours
Toujours toujours
Les amours perdues
Ne se retrouvent plus
Et les amants délaissés
Peuvent toujours chercher
Sombre (Slit-Scan) 2017
From:
Sombre (Philippe Grandrieux) 1998
Also see:
Weekend (Slit-Scan) 2017
Via:
Sun, Aug 13, 2017, 10 pm: 10 Years of 0xDB
One last. The last one is for Philipp. Philipp had a question. But he also said, sometimes you're hard to reach. So this is a reminder to myself, to reach him. But this is also a hint. This is Dubai, in maybe 2008 or 2009. It's an image I didn't understand for a long time. But maybe it's better understood with music. And the music, while also a bit sad, is already a bit happier. It's from an unmade film. And another reminder to listen to music more. And maybe you want to turn up the volume. It's very short, two or three minutes. It's an image of workers leaving the factory, which is construction workers in the Dubai Mall.
100: For Philip
Dubai Mall
Robyn -
With Every Heartbeat
unmade film
We could keep trying
But things will never change
So I don't look back
Still I'm dying with every step I take
But I don't look back
Just a little, little bit better
Good enough to waste some time
Tell me would it make you happy, baby
We could keep trying
But things will never change
So I don't look back
Still I'm dying with every step I take
But I don't look back
We could keep trying
But things will never change
So I don't look back
Still I'm dying with every step I take
But I don't look back
And it hurts with every heartbeat
And it hurts with every heartbeat
And it hurts with every heartbeat
And it hurts with every heartbeat
And it hurts with every heartbeat
And it hurts with every heartbeat
And it hurts with every heartbeat
And it hurts with every heartbeat
workers leaving the factory
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