Auteur ex Machina (English)

Panel 1 “Anonimty, Amateurism, and Habitus of Moving Images” Forum Festival 2017, ARKIPEL Penal Colony. 

Rather than being said as an established thought, perhaps this essay is more likely to be categorized as a proposal of abstraction of an under-development speculative thought. This proposal was started by questions regarding the development of digital technology, the intelligence offered by it, and the impact on bodies of reality which, aside from being producers and users of that technology, are also part of it.

Today when digital technology grows more rapidly, the circulation of images in the digital world is also getting faster with also more various issues and topics. In the connection with moving image technology, today, the immersive experience of watching the moving image is made possible to occur in the most intimate spaces individually and such activity becomes part of daily. Cinema, which in its beginning can only be watched in a dark room on a big screen, now is present in the grip of a hand and able to be watched anywhere. Smartphone and their built-in apps supported by the development of digital technology allow someone watches, produces, and distributes images, both still and moving ones. The fast and massive circulation makes the boundary between producer, distributor and consumer get blurry, as well as the significance of amateur and professional works.

Similar to images which are able to circulate easily in the digital world of simulation, discourses can also easily circulate and move bodies of reality. Demonstration against the former governor of Jakarta, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, regarding the claims of religious blasphemy triggered by the circulation of an amateur video is one example that is, although problematic, sufficient enough to indicate how moving images circulating in the digital world ultimately have implications for the mobilization of issues in the non-digital world. In the context of inter-nation politics, the Arab Spring being amplified through social media, is also an important note on how the circulation in the digital world is connected to the circulation of reality.

In addition to those big narratives mentioned above, the circulation of moving images in the digital world also involves a style of language and gestures attached to the context of the location where and by whom the images are produced. The resulting image is still largely produced within the framework of consciousness as a user, which is not necessarily intended to criticize or as a counterpoint of the dominant discourse. Others, such as those produced in the Vlog Kampuang program by Gubuak Kopi Community and in the art project initiated by Pasirputih Community’s member Hamdani, called "30 Hari Pemenang dalam Bingkai Kamera" (‘30 Days Pemenang in Camera Frame’), bring up the maker's experimentation in articulating the local context through visual language as well as on its distribution through social media. Aside from those two examples, other unnamed practices which are visually diverse and displaying images captured by a camera that are no longer only the eyes but also extensions of the body. Such digitally produced and circulated images become one of the interfaces of the other knowledge, as well as being the knowledge itself, whose emergence is inherent not only to the development of recording technology but also to the baggage of knowledge that enables the subject to record.

Suppose I situate auteurism as a concept or idea of the production of knowledge, thus the auteur not only shapes and directs the representative image but also the presentation of reality, then in this case the intelligence of technology should be viewed as an active element and it is able to affect the pattern of image production, knowledge or works, both subtly or explicitly, and move not only images in the digital world but also the imaging bodies.

In the beginning was a work, technology, through its reciprocal process produces devices that make life easier. Universalization of methods on how humans respond to each of these challenges is general intellect[2] attached to that technological devices. Intelligence that was previously only manifested in human consciousness has been transformed into devices that conditioned the ease and automation of work. At the same time, as an interface to intelligence that simplifies and automates work, these devices also regulate their operators to work in accordance with its standardized intelligence mechanisms. Gestures, habits, and even ways of seeing or responding, among other things, are aspects regulated by this mechanism.

When the multi-function technology of smartphones emerges and enables the activities of recording and watching to occur anywhere, people can freely produce their own image, location, and discourse. We can also watch the moving images produced by whoever, celebrate them, and spread them again. But on the one hand, this freedom is not without risk considering the kind of subjectivity and knowledge it formed and to whom both are produced when the intelligence of technology used has also been made as a device of capital accumulation to benefit a few. If we see cinema as an opportunity for activism and communication of critical discourse through visual language, then the problem of the circulation of discourse mediated by images in the digital world which is accessible at any time, anywhere even in the most intimate spaces, becomes a discourse needed to be discussed. A critical aspect of the intelligence that has been attached to technology becomes a necessary intervention to make diversification and strategy over the regulation of technological intelligence.

Similar to cinema which put montage as an important aspect to tailor its entire sequences of images as one united film, what to put in the frame of the moving image in the digital world and how to put it, is also a crucial action both aesthetically and politically. If technology is the main mode of capital accumulation, and the images currently circulating in the digital world are the product of intelligence embedded in the mechanism of technology itself, then the imaging body and its knowledge is the potential that enables diversification of production on the language of the images itself. The language channels the critical potential and counter of dominant discourse which tends to put technology to side not to the public. 

In this regard, the collective knowledge accommodating that critical potential and counter of dominant discourse is a determinant on the balance in the feature of image production. Experimentation is emphasized, one of them, in the power of the collective to set in motion the ideas and knowledge about the use and even collaboration with technology which allows the production of counter-discourse which sides to the public through the circulation of moving images in the digital world. Thus, practices of moving image production circulated in digital media as done by Gubuak Kopi Community through their Vlog Kampuang, Hamdani in his "30 Hari Pemenang dalam Bingkai Kamera" and unnamed practices which are easily accessible in daily through the connection of internet, are also important to be included in the critical discourse of moving images today.

The mob has become citizens of the net world and immeasurable amounts of imagery data were uploaded to data storage drawers of Google, Facebook, Netflix, Youtube and etc. The subjects tap on the fence of digital land and sign in to be part of the gigantic farm of image and data, later perhaps all will try to become the auteur. The technology builds the stage for moving images, technology also unravels that stage and then pushes the image back to the public. Today, it becomes our homework as part of the public to keep perceiving critically without enclosing the opportunities to make strategy upon the intelligence of technology in the midst of our celebration toward the freedom that (as if) is present due to technological devices. ***




[1] This title "Auteur ex Machina" is part of my ongoing speculation and interpretation on the reading of the phenomena of technological and the politics of knowledge as well as the concepts about Machine and General Intellect which have been discoursed by Marx, Guattari, Deleuze, Virno and Harun Farocki.

[2] Referring to the term ‘General Intellect’ mentioned in Grundrisse (1858) by Karl Marx and in the note of Paulo Virno "General Intellect" (http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpvirno10.htm), which is the dynamic intelligence composed of combinations various intelligences as a living and non-individual concept which is then standardized for use within the framework of capital production.

[3] This essay was written as part of a presentation at Panel 1 Forum Festival 2017 titled “Anonymity, Amateurism, and the Habitus of Moving Images”, ARKIPEL Penal Colony – 5th International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival, August 18, 2017 at the Goethe Institute Indonesia, Jakarta. The coverage of the event can be accessed in "Notes on Forum Festival, Panel I".