an essay by Neil Bahadur
edited by Pablo Núñez Palma
Juxtaposed fields
On November 28th, 2018, Jan Bot uploaded a video titled “28–11–28.005 — knickers_cow.mp4”. What struck me about it was –first off– it had little to do with the titular “bovine” other than the description. But even more impressive than that was the choice of material and its intercutting, transitioning in seconds from well restored color footage of cows grazing, to much older looking and degraded footage of workers chopping grass.
The combination of the two shots immediately seemed to me as though a sort of time-jump, à la Intolerance, because of the significant quality discrepancy between the two images.
But what was being juxtaposed exactly?
By this point I had also seen Jan Bot produce much more interesting and sophisticated material and was also aware that relatively advanced algorithms had been built into its program. Yet for someone who was unacquainted with the bot, one could surmise that the image choices, or juxtapositions, could be perfectly randomly generated.
And yet despite the apparent randomness, still there was something unusual about the editing of this post. One could believe the juxtaposition of images was either nothing at all, or perhaps something with a hidden meaning, beyond common sense –human common sense, that is.
Would the algorithm be about juxtaposing time over time perhaps?
The idea struck me that Jan Bot is essentially a machine recording a machine that recorded things which “exist” –here, humans, animals and nature.
Or is it “existed”?
Because time does not exist for a machine. So, for a machine, what actually exists?
The idea struck me that Jan Bot is essentially a machine recording a machine that recorded things which “exist” –here, humans, animals and nature.
Reviewing the short clip again, I focused on the other images — fire coming out of what appears to be a porthole, children pumping water, and what appears to be two goats fighting. What of these things can a machine do?
It then appeared to me that Jan Bot’s rapid-fire montage makes sensorial documentaries of things that once existed, and that perhaps one day will cease to.
A shaken twosome
What strikes more about Jan Bot isn’t necessarily the archive it’s drawing from –in a way its own achievement, drawing from silent-era footage from unknown sources– but both how the program manages to decide how to place certain images in relation to the algorithm’s it’s pulling from, and perhaps more importantly, how it utilizes the “cut” itself to simulate visceral reactions based on the information given.
A video from September, about “Bill Cosby Wife”, as the program states, intercuts two likely unrelated images of a wealthy man contemplating and a woman surrounded by alcohol, dancing atop a table. The juxtaposition of the two images, given the subject of the clip, is considerably ominous –however, it also implies a psychological sophistication which cannot merely be an accident.
A shot that follows is even more interesting: a man (seen from the back) and a woman move to embrace. But the shot freezes on an ambiguous expression on the woman’s face. Watching the short image closely, it’s likely that this was a simple embrace between the two people. However, not only does the shot freeze, but it begins to make a kind of jagged cut back and forth between the previous two frames and this one, taking this ambiguous expression and “shaking” it. What would appear as an embrace now appears as a prelude to assault.
This expression is doubly haunting. One is reminded of a similar technique in Jean-Luc Godard’s Sauve qui peut (la vie), where ostensibly ordinary moments were recontextualized by a frame-stretching technique (reprinting every second frame[1]) whose effect amplified their placement within the film’s thematic structure.
As Cosby was the initial subject of the piece, I realized that Jan Bot was essentially doing the exact same thing both in terms of the aesthetic choice of essentially “shaking” an image to draw attention to a nuance one would likely not perceive within the full context of the original image, and creating a new context with the full pieces relating to its subject.
But this wasn’t Jean-Luc Godard, was a bot!
Connotations of a game
Another clip, this time from November, purports to be on the World Chess Championship. Yet, never once do we see the game of chess being played, nor even a chess board.
What we do see includes a gun about to be fired, a woman and a baby, a party of military officials and war rubble from what looks to be somewhere in the Middle East, along with very brief (less than a second) clips of a religious procession and a crowd of people.
There is a short chain of connotations here –namely, Jan Bot will cut rapidly between the military officials and the war rubble, before cutting to the religious procession. Meanwhile, the brief intertitles allude to a game of victory and defeat –the only obvious reference to chess– however, would we even be aware it was a reference to the game of chess had we not known the title of this video?
So now we find ourselves in a unique position — starting with the back-and-forth cutting of a gun about to be fired and a woman with baby. This juxtaposition provokes a phenomenological response of fear, followed by the aforementioned military/rubble, before finally focusing briefly on the religious. We start with something which provokes phenomena or emotions to the conceptual, but the religion reminds one of the link between military and state and that of the church. Because of the title this becomes juxtaposed with the idea of chess itself, as a comparison.
Moral of the story? For those in power, war is like chess.
New early cinema
Beginning this piece I had wanted to note how many of Jan Bot’s little short clips had reminded me of early cinema, like the Lumiere’s, or Louis Le Prince, or Edison: primitive, but with potential.
Surely cinema made by a computer program is still in its infancy. Nevertheless, even the previous “Cosby” clip had only amounted to about 50% of the clip itself, the rest of which appeared impenetrable, or rather, detailed analysis would be pushing it.
That said, Jan Bot has one thing over the Lumiere’s, Le Prince, & Edison: none of them were the one to consciously discover the “cut.” Perhaps the Lumiere’s did, with their “Demolition of a Wall,” which replays the film’s action in reverse, and thus has to be cut in order for the reversal to play.
Jan Bot’s entire principle functions are based on cuts and juxtapositions — there is no original “shots” here, only leftovers from unidentifiable works that are at least 100 years old. Yet even in its infant stage, Jan Bot is clearly capable of some degree of sophistication and internal logic.
A machine made of machines
In our modern age, the idea of Artificial Intelligence has long been a subject of science fiction, before starting to become a reality in the manner of programs that are able to understand human speech and consider human emotions, as well as things such as autonomously operating cars and sophisticated video game enemies. Jan Bot does not interact with the human, but like all AI, it is founded on human intelligence.
We tend to be so obsessed with the word “interactivity” that if a new technology doesn’t react to our narcissistic drive of getting feedback from our immediate input we don’t see the point in using it. Would it matter anyway if a machine could interact with the human, if the point is to make its own films?
Jan Bot does not interact with the human, but like all AI, it is founded on human intelligence.
As the Hollis Frampton’s quote that titles this piece describes, cinema is mechanical. He precluded this in a 1968 lecture of how specific amounts of frames are needed to appeal to the simplest camera movement, and make images appear natural to the human eye. But Jan Bot is not a case of cinema making itself, but a machine now being able to make cinema with the same delineations a human would set if they had a given outline and goal.
And what is it that this can tell us about cinema? Perhaps we will miss the psychology, the nuance, as most critiques of Artificial Intelligence seem to postulate. Yet, some of these films made by Jan Bot seem to push us in a different direction.
We can have two possibilities here, either a machine is so skilled that it can mimic human behaviour or, and to my mind at this moment more likely, human behaviour is actually rather simple and easy to emulate given a set of nominations or circumstances.
That is why cinema is the most manipulative art form. As Eisenstein wrote in the 1930s, one must also be aware of one’s psychological responses to the phenomena of mere glimpses of things. Humanity rather, is easy to read.
Footnotes
(1) Frame-stretching was also a technique used by Chaplin when reissuing his shorts in 1958 to ensure they ran at an approximation of the correct speed.
