All Your Base are Belong to Us
What a strange, intoxicating place the Internet has become. Where the early film theorist Jean Epstein spoke of the pleasures of being embroiled in the cinema, I find myself equally immersed in the screen of my computer. I confess, I am a cinema purist; I despise the practice of watching films outside the intensity and veracity of the cinema auditorium – but I am able to become, through the small size of my computer screen, absorbed in the erotic power of the Internet. There is something about the Internet’s infinite possibilities that is comparable to the sublime propensity of the cinema.
Jean-François Lyotard wrote in his famous 1973 article “Acinema” that avant-garde films can offer the sublime where there is a dispersal of sterile energy; sterile meaning pleasure for the sake of pleasure, discharge without need of invention or reproduction. The Internet, in its purest sense, is the absolute definition of this sublime experience. But what an unusual phenomenon it is: the usually discrete terms of audience and practitioner are now fluid, shaky, mobile. The Internet rips mainstream cinema open and queers its form – but now with the spectator in charge. With its proliferation of sharing technology, a new genre of video art has formed; one that is both fluid in its dialogue with cinema proper and distinct in its exchange with modern technological conventions.
This conversation between the Internet and cinema is enabled by the free exchange of films and the proliferation of artistic communities that, through websites like YouTube, share their work freely and directly with a global audience. The Internet breeds a language of its own but, rather than in the exclusive cliques and societies of art movements past, it occurs in a youthful culture paradoxically bound by anonymity and disconnection. As with experimental cinema, one must know where to look in order to find liberated and unchallenged movements; but unlike experimental cinema, subjects of the Internet are not so hard to find, as artists filter into largely indiscriminate searching platforms like Google – the only trick being in the words and phrases used to seek out all forms of bizarre, unadulterated pleasure (a talent possessed by a limited few people).
The early French impressionists (like Epstein) cherished the moving image camera’s ability to defamiliarise ordinary objects – those hundreds of films concerned only with the movements of cars, aeroplanes and merry-go-rounds – a practice still not lost on contemporary video artists, such as the Philadelphia-based Ryan Trecartin (user name WianTreetin) or Australian Wendy Vainity (who has been described as the Jackson Pollock of the Internet). These artists utilise the effects of unreliable technology to invoke delight out of frustration. Wendy’s video, kitty litter physics animation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4Aw9OdyZ6s) is a revelation for the senses. Wendy provokes the repetitive, awkward slowness of technology; irritation is transformed into jouissance, what Lyotard would call a simulacrum. The video features footage of a poorly animated cat as it shifts clumsily around a fairly abstract looking litter box. The soundtrack is marked by stereotypical sound effects common to editing software, which is placed into a repetitive loop by Wendy; the video offers a gesture toward the shallow thrill for rupturing the limits of technology.
The Internet operates as a Utopian platform for all forms of moving-image art. The popularity of both downloading software and websites for critical discussions of film allows almost anyone with a computer to access almost anything. And then, in an act of sublime nihilism, the user destroys itself. In its purest form, this exists as the virus (a condition relatively unknown to users of Macintosh operating systems, but they will get their fill soon enough). Then we see this destruction through the act of hacking, where the socially inept invert the power of technology to watch the rapid destruction of all forms of structure. Why? For the lulz! But, when the cinema bleeds into the Internet we see this destruction in the form of the mash-up. Here, video practitioners mutate cinematic genres and adapt solid genre to the fluidity of the Internet.
Mash-ups have given rise to fabulous, sometimes humorous concoctions that violently deconstruct the productive power of mainstream cinema. One brilliant example of this is from user tomthenomad whose YouTube video, shawkwsank r4edemptions (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAFq5QKgLRg&feature) mutates the sentimentality of the original feature The Shawshank Redemption in much the same way as Austrian artist Martin Arnold did to a 1940s Hollywood movie in Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy. Tomthenomad’s clip takes footage intended to be dramatic and affecting (including the moment when the protagonist Andy/Tim Robbins learns that he has been sentenced to prison for the rest of his life, or the warm exchange on the prison roof between ‘Red’/Morgan Freeman and Andy) and brutally mutilates it. Pixellated images of a pair of sunglasses dot the faces of both protagonists; clips are shortened to prevent the sequence releasing its dramatic climax; and a MIDI music file is transplanted onto the soundtrack. In 40 seconds, tomthenomad pulverises the excessive sentimentality of The Shawshank Redemption and intuitively illustrates Lyotard’s notion of the commodification of cinematic practice.
More complexly, in his Youtube video I-BE AREA (Pasta and Wendy M-PEGgy) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR4sHDR-1XE), Ryan Trecartin combines computer technology and avant-garde practice to exploit both the sentimentality of the mainstream and the superficiality of computer graphics technology. Trecartin’s films are purposefully reduced so that we can only watch his work on our computer screens; cinema-scale projection blurs the image and the sound file is too weak for any enhanced system. Pasta and Wendy performs as if Trecartin has given his camera a strong dose of LSD – the schizophrenia of his videotext violently smashes together the genres of horror, daytime television, teen-film, documentary and home-shopping programs. A strange concoction that challenges audience expectations of what a teenage slumber party should look like. His work is a prescription for sterile pleasure – something I can experience for free, anywhere in the world through my computer.
For the Lulz
The Internet ruptures the economics of movement. How else would I be able to indulge in the experimental erotic film Carmilla from French writer and filmmaker Stéphane du Mesnildot, whilst enjoying music videos from the great 1980s Mexican pop group Flans, while witnessing the underground movements of hackers serving DDOS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) to reckless corporations? Perhaps the freshest realisation of the Internet in the cinema can be found in one of the most well-regarded avant-garde filmmakers of all time: Jean-Luc Godard, whose recent work Film Socialisme takes memes and viral videos in order to unpack not only the politics of class, but also the sterility of the Internet – its freedom from productivity and capability for complete indulgence. His use of the well-known video The Two Talking Cats (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3U0udLH974) best expresses the universality of the Internet, how it can potentially exceed cultural barriers and perform pleasure at its most enchanting and sublime.
There is a dark side to the Internet: its unlimited accessibility. It is, in this sense, the ultimate machine-human cyborg, complete with an unconscious that provokes and unsettles. To think that one can have access to the entire world. This is the reason why so many supposedly democratic governments have mobilised to try to restrict access to content. Just look at the case of Egypt or the Wikileaks phenomenon – where revolutions have spawned from its power! The Internet makes sure that no film will be censored, nothing left inaccessible. The problem is that this makes the Internet’s power seem like a infant let loose in a candy store – a technology that can give us whatever we want has made governments react like stern parents trying to control their rebellious children.
Fortunately, the power of the Internet is precisely that it cannot be controlled – there is always a way around censorship and tyranny. The Internet transforms the very notion of genre into something more fluid, less rigid; it opens up new ways of seeing and seizes its power by its mutated vocation for pleasure.
Copyright Lauren Bliss July 2011
Crystal
(Work in Progress from ‘The Girl is Also We
ll’)
Elleke Boehmer
The Voyage: Edited by Chandani Lokuge & David Morley Page 3
