<videovortex> reality must be defended

[Florian Schneider]

dear all!

i wish you all the best for the next video-vortex edition 8 in zagreb!

i take the liberty to post a text that i was writing over the past few
weeks. it deals with the relationship between documentary and networked
environments and is somehow based on the two presentations at earlier vv
conferences in amsterdam.

the text might serve as an introduction to a larger project we are
currently setting up as KEIN.TV in the context of the next "berlin
documentary forum" which will take place from may 31 to june 3 in "haus
der kulturen der welt" in berlin.

http://issuezero.org

if you are interested in following up please sign up for the newsletter
you will get a message as soon as the project really starts on may 31.
at the same time we might invite you to some beta-testing of specially 
commissioned projects, such as "montage interdit" by eyal sivan, robert 
ochshorn, dafydd harries...

all the very best,

florian

---

Reality must be defended

Cinema addressed the unconscious, television modulated distance.
Nowadays it is not just about working on the net but above all on
working within and across networks. But how is it possible, especially
in a medium that claims to document anything or everything, to
rediscover or even reinvent documentary?

“We must engage with this society in the prevalent medium”: this slogan
conveyed filmmaker Michael Mrakitsch’s decision, shared by many other
filmmakers in the 1960s and 1970s, to work against television on
television rather than trying to make a living in some niche of the
cineastic realm.

If we agree with Mrakitsch, it’s time to apply this principle. Political
and aesthetic strategies shouldn't just duplicate or illustrate what is
given; instead, they must seek to confront new configurations of power
and powerlessness that proliferate across networked environments. It
might sound strange to drop the illusions of artistic freedom. This may
seem disconcerting from a contemporary perspective, since documentary
has migrated almost entirely out of television and back into even older
media — the museum, theater, or more recently cinema. This is not a
result of political or aesthetic considerations but, instead, one of the
few survival strategies still available.

To rely on claims about the pervasiveness of the internet in almost
every sphere of life has become hopelessly banal. However, it's much
more promising to suggest using this medium as the terrain for debating
questions about how social fictions are made — and, instead, sets out to
defend the real. Far beyond questions of taste, gossip, and the
notorious difficulty of addressing what unfolds on the net, there are
many reasons why it is difficult to view the net as an appealing
environment for critical debate, particularly in the era of so-called
“social networking.”

For instance, networked reality is still perceived as “virtual” (with an
unpleasant aftertaste of being somehow “unreal”), which is still seen as
a threat to authenticity and originality. At the same time, networked
services have enabled additional apparatuses that document, store,
monitor, and record every possible movement. In this light — omnipresent
documentation, on the one hand, and the deceptive appearance of
second-order reality, on the other — documentary is fighting a losing
battle on two fronts.

The rise of particular network services reduces myriad ways of looking
at things to short-term, unambiguous necessities (“Like!”). With this,
other ways to inhabit the net, or even to use it against the grain, are
dissipating. The net increasingly becomes a sort of convenient
transportation hub or a technology that is more or less “neutral.” Even
in this latter view, at its very best, it is supposed to accept the
given at face value, in the literal sense of the Latin word data,
meaning that which is given.

It seems as if the room to play with the potentials of a new medium —
freed from outmoded conventions of seeing and unburdened by the
imperative to realize value — has vanished beyond our conceptual
horizons. Walter Benjamin said of analog photpgraphy, “The illiterate of
the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one
who cannot take a photograph.” In this sense, our challenge now is to
learn once again how to see — both with new devices and despite them.

To make something visible one must leave something out. Visual
production is always a more or less conscious process of reduction,
which is never merely or strictly technical. Devices have nothing to do
with it. Editing images, reducing quantity and complexity to given data
for straightforward consumption, filtering out disturbing elements and
suppressing ambiguities: these illusions are fabricated, as if reality
could be consumed.

As long as these processes were standardized and were generally
accepted, we could participate in the great debates: Are we really
seeing the same thing? Who benefits from what is shown to us? Doubt was
the driving force of the analog — or so it would seem in retrospect.

But, paradoxically, standardization of image production was the
necessary precondition for perception to become “individualized,” and
for the “subjective” to give rise to subjectivity with all of its
supposed shortcomings and flaws.

To discuss what was seen and its effects made sense only as long as
unified standards applied — for recording and transmitting images, for
resolution and aspect ratios, and above all for framing.

Contrary to many claims made about the supposed power of images, their
actual impact was never as potent as the standardized realities of
factory society. Instead, it was the systematic over-estimation of that
power that was most effective. Yet through this ambiguity of
standardization, on the one hand, and individualization, on the other,
perception could seem autonomous enough to produce (or at least enjoy) a
certain degree of authenticity in what was seen.

In clear contrast to the age of television, the conditions under which
images are now produced are constantly renegotiated on an ad-hoc basis.
Encoding, decoding, compression, and distribution of data — let alone
its reception and processing — are all done more or less in compliance
with proliferating, overlapping, and conflicting technical standards.
There is no clear ground for calling these disparate “technical”
processes into question. The outcomes of these endless renegotiations
cannot be predicted; as a result, they cannot be generalized, let alone
refuted.

Authenticity no longer stems from a more or less autonomous rejection of
the standardized, mainstream image. Instead, it is largely the
accidental result of disparate factors — limited bandwidth, technical
improvisation, and/or the time pressures dictated by the demand for
“content.” It is no longer produced by an audience that can only listen
and watch yet is entitled to criticize — and does so precisely to
compensate for its own powerlessness. Instead, authenticity resides in
the “honesty” of more or less raw images which at their best can awaken
sympathy or malice.

Of course, television wasn't replaced by some digital cottage industry;
instead, its scale has been supplanted and expanded upon dramatically
and is sometimes called the “creative industries.” This deregulated
image production, a sort of postmodern affect industry, and its cynicism
about the digital are no longer concerned with details. What is at stake
is the question of power: what does it mean to own an image? Who has the
power and the means to exercise ownership?

Moreoever — and unlike the production of images in the fictional realm —
documentary has always had to raise the question of ownership. Who does
seeing belong to? And how does the image transform — even just
quantitatively — the reality latent in a period time?

This is the significant distinction that marks documentary now. When
realities are produced in networked environments, we must engage with
them in a network mode. Only if we claim control of the contemporary
means of production — the means to produce reality, in a sense — can we
begin to make an image that need not apologize and is not compromised by
its made nature, which does not inform on but, rather, forms reality.

Conventional understandings of documentary would have it capture and
“fix” reality in order to replay it later on. A particular moment or
site is isolated, stored, and reconstructed as an event in ways that
produce plausible forms of truth — all with a degree of permanence
beyond the contingencies of time and space.

However, conventional approaches are doomed to failure in networked
environments. When uncertainty is the precondition of any assertion and
instability is the rule, we must rely on an opposite strategy to
produce, invent, and develop truth.

We must do more than merely emphasize that everything is “intertwingled”
somehow or other, with events following one from another with a certain
degree of probability in some hazy automatic way.

It isn't enough to simply demand the triumph of “transparency” and
“openness” without also questioning how realities need to be re-created
again and again in new contexts. And it is scary to imagine ceding the
empire of optical experience — and hence the anti-optical as well — to
the imperatives of a handful of corporations and their proprietary code.

A crucial characteristic of networked environments is that image
production no longer takes place in our heads, as sometimes claimed.
Instead, a great deal of visual production is outsourced — in many ways,
and at every level — to apparatuses that preempt even the most basic
decisions involved in perception, cognition, and imagination.

Documentary must find new standpoints, both literally and figuratively.
It must take a stand vis-à-vis a postindustrial production of fictions
that increasingly possess, even own reality. Practices such as computer
vision, automated image analysis, and pattern recognition permeate
crucial areas of everyday life in the control society and subjecting
them to sophisticated algorithms. Empirical perception, less and less
the domain of our senses; instead, is taken over by cybernetic devices,
which operate on the basis of their own assumptions and in the end
produce tautologies.

Against this, reality must be defended. But merely capturing it isn't
enough; instead, it must be broken free and become fugitive. But what
could this mean? Where could documentary flee to? Ultimately, this
cannot be a polite question about the “appropriate use” of technology
but, rather, the opposite: How can we use technologies for things very
different than their intended purposes?

The machinic legibility of images makes it possible to treat them like
text, and to input and output them correspondingly. It becomes possible
to interrogate images in new ways, not just according to the immanent
relations of what they depict but formally — categorize, index, and tag
them, to search and to find. In this way, networked environments give
rise to an almost irresistible temptation to reduce the image to what is
or can be made legible. Anything that might remain unreadable in any way
is directly threatened with extinction — dismissed as incomprehensible
and useless, ignored and discarded.

That however can scarcely be said to tell us anything about reality.
Quite the contrary; after all, this is a really redundant undertaking.
Visualizing data as a means of rendering the given visible and verifying
what is anyway obvious leaves no scope for an exploration of reality
that could call into question the rules by which this reality is
produced, let alone assert a right to take production into one's own
hands. However, an exploration of this kind is exactly what would
constitute the importance of documentary: generating realities that free
themselves from obsessions and possessions; that resist the ways in
which all forms of living are captured by technical devices.

Today this kind of proposition is lurking below the noise threshold. Not
the image's ground but its underground is no longer to be found between
images, or in front of or behind images, but rather in their midst:
within or beyond the visible, in the static buzz of useless information.
Just as the beauty of the documentary film once lay in its graininess,
today this beauty is drunk on what is supposed to be the least
significant bit.

But when images become illegible and the actual, existing information
can't be compressed, truth is no longer the sum of probabilities. This
noncompliant remainder with its generative multiplicity of meanings is
the basis for a networked documentary that sets out to escape from an
tautological, menu-driven "reality." Documentary that aims to produce
surplus of reality confronts a paradoxical realization nowadays:
communication "over the net" tends to consume reality's store rather
than expanding it in the ways imagined (and partly practiced) in the
techno-utopias of the 1990s.

Social exchange, in terms of individual creativity and shared affect, is
subordinated to specious economic "laws" regardless of their ability to
generate profits (or, indeed, epic loss). As a consequence, images of
reality are diminished quantitatively — literally compressed — and their
"processing" is reduced to the endless algorithmic exploitation of
metadata in order to profile, monitor, and foreclose user generation.

The art of documentary is resistance to communication. It means
rejecting the imperative that everything must be communicated — and,
instead, to work with breaks, ruptures, and incomprehensible elements.
It means leaving behind the semantically homogenized space of "the net"
and delving into the underground beneath the threshold of what is
visible only because it is legible.

In the networked image of reality, change encompasses more than just
perceptions of space understood, in general terms, as the shift from
optics to semantics. It also encompasses the ways in which time is
imagined, toward a framework within which events unfold simultaneously,
in so-called "real time."

Traces of this transition, from similarity to simultaneity, can be
observed at many levels — as numerous commentators have noted from
particular perspectives. Immediate availability and exchangeability is
the sine qua non of both the production and distribution of images, to
the point where the two are almost indistinguishable. Rather than past,
present, and future, we are left with only real-time or "on-demand." The
advance of network technologies has driven and been driven by the
imperative that no time can be wasted, either in producing or consuming
images. Delay, any delay, means loss; whereas, instantaneous
availability is a profit — and much more than just saving time.
Instantaneous availability short-circuits not just the legal discourses
about images — their power, their ownership, and so on — and replaced it
with the act of appropriation here and now.

In the digital simulacrum, linear time collapses into networked
ubiquity; we no longer concern ourselves with whether or how an image
resembles its ideal. Autonomic surveillance, carefully staged
broadcasts, handheld serendipity: each has definitively become an act of
taking possession, immediately and indefinitely.

Documentary must search for false time instead of real time: too early
or too late, but never at the appropriate moment to capture an image and
take possession of it. This inevitable failure, which goes hand in hand
with false time, allows for insights that could never have been
calculated or predicted. We can glimpse the underlying codes — human
readable, not machine-readable — of networked reality. In doing so, we
recognize the idiosyncrasies of images that cannot be possessed, are no
one’s property, and therefore will be different every time they are
viewed.

False time is a time that never pretends to be real. It is just as hard
now to identify as it was to identify false cuts and continuities in
their day. Determining the right moment is comparatively easy. But one
of the great challenges of documentary is to decide what false time
could mean and how to determine it.


False time and the noncompliant, illegible remainder aren't new
approaches that became available only with the advent of digital
information and communication technologies. On the contrary, one could
easily demonstrate that documentary, in contrast to documentation, is
marked by two key refusals: on the one hand, to be reduced to the
legible, and, on the other, to conform to a flat notion of timeliness.

However, now, in defending the real, this remainder and false time play
a pivotal role. These two features of documentary can disrupt the
contemporary production of continuity. It provides the status quo with
the legitimacy it so desperately needs in the age of networking: to
justify its claim to the exclusive rights to reality.

Traditionally, continuity results from the fabrication of linear time
and a consistent space. Ambiguities were eliminated, contradictions were
reconciled, and the immediate was standardized in order to reduce what
couldn't be understood to a comfortable selection of endlessly repeated
facts. Cutting off all uncalculated or unpredictable outside influences
was a necessary condition for a cinematic self — one that, by losing
itself in such a protected environment, was constantly assured of its
continued and contained existence. Continuity served as a kind of
ideological workout in the fitness studio of the soul.

But what importance does continuity have now, in a seemingly
ahistorical, networked, and converging media environment? Continuity is
produced here in ways that are diametrically opposed to traditional
methods of film and television. In networked environments, the
perception of time and space is inverted.

Classical “continuity” established synthetic time and a consistent sense
of space, so that the viewer considered them to be both plausible and
seductive — and thereby made two worlds one. However, contemporary
continuity is no longer a matter of mechanics and geometry. It doesn't
present events in a logical sequence from an anthropomorphic
perspective. Instead, the aim is to produce both the event and its
representation simultaneously.

Networked continuity is based on immediate availability and
exchangeability. It demands unified semantic spaces and an insistent
real time with neither past nor future. However, a critical
understanding of continuity must sidestep these homogenizations. In
their place, we can envision a very different kind of continuity — one
that consists of something more than incessant self-reassurance, one
that struggles against the onslaught of repetition of the same. It would
demand an engagement with history that is more than mere entertainment:
one that proceeds through breaks and ruptures, standstills and sudden
movement. The result: a past that resists any form of “coming to terms"
with it, and a present seen as the beginning of the past rather than the
end of the past.

Networked reality can only be recorded as asynchronous, heterogeneous
data flows. There is no longer any synchronous time in the industrial
sense, whose interdependencies demanded a "pulse" to implement and
coordinate the assembly line, the mass media, and indeed the nation
state. Motorized simultaneity drove material production and media. It
was within thisscheme that the camera served as a “clock for seeing," as
Roland Barthes noted.

In contrast, networked global economies exploit asychronicity. Rather
than a binding, quartz-based time, there are only time-slices: the
principle — applied explicitly in operating systems, for example — of
the transient, discrete moments when actions are allowed on a constantly
renegotiated, ad-hoc basis. This constant reprioritization is called
multitasking. We cannot understand its effects; we can only accept them.
Criticizing a milliseconds-long "phenomenon" on historical or
ideological grounds is almost beyond comprehension.

The effects, which would otherwise run rampant, can only be mediated by
realizing real time. However, in the too-early or too-late of false
time, reality cannot be satisfied with the time-slice allocated to it.
It will necessarily occupy a longer or shorter interval — and give rise
to all sorts of endless discontinuities.

Ultimately, documentary need not fear the paradoxical illegibility and
polyvalence of the real. Instead, documentary must revalue the
heterogeneity of data flows — not only as an overwhelming chaos but also
as a plenitude of almost mythical extent. This superabundance of
political, social, and cultural scenes must be investigated and
re-created.

None of this is new.

Each time the documentary has undergone a renewal, its reinvention has
gone hand-in-hand with a radical change of milieu: from early landscape
photography to portrait ateliers, from “living portraits” of traveling
and fairground cinemas on to silent-film studios, then subsequently
returning into the factory, heading off to war, and back into the
natural world.

In the 1960s documentary, as camera and sound recording equipment became
portable and broke free from the studio, filmmakers and video artists
seized that opportunity. By moving into settings where they had little
or no control over the noise threshold in any sense, they engaged with a
lively, animate world, became aware of life in the public sphere, and
reclaimed realities that had once existed independently of mediated
images.

Now, we could lament how surveillance cameras monitor our streets, and
how are public spaces are becoming "mere" collections of semipublic
images on the net. But it also means that, for documentary, today’s
street isthis networked environment. Not just "the net," but a much
deeper investigation of what that milieu might mean.

It is just as risky and dangerous here, and the contrast to conventional
modes of filmmaking could not be greater. We have no choice but to find
new ways to see it.


Florian Schneider, April 2012

(Special thanks to Ted Byfield for his great help with the translation)


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