An audiovisual essay inpired by an important text of the italian theorist and critic, Ricciotto Canudo, "The Birth of a Sixth Art".
"Commerce is our goal here at Tyrell," Eldon Tyrell once said, "'More human than human' is our motto." In the movie Blade Runner, the Tyrell Corporation sought to create flawless humanoid machines - replicans. Niander Wallace and his company tried to do the same later in a post-apocalyptic world. The imperfection of replicants was emotions, the lack thereof or their over-expression. Later on, it was also that the replicants could not... replicate themselves. To what extent can the emotions of the machines be random? To what extent can they be considered imperfections?
We want to have perfect control over machines, as well as over what they show us. Can we blame them if they have some emotional failure? Our emotions and imperfections are what make us human. If we imagined our friends, or even our loved ones as robots, would their imperfections be part of that imagination?
Rosa Menkman writes, "But somewhere within the destructed ruins of meaning hope exists; a triumphal sensation that there is something more than just devastation. The negative feelings make place for an intimate, personal experience of a machine (or program), a system showing its formations, inner workings and flaws. As a holistic celebration rather than a particular perfection the glitch can reveal a new opportunity, a spark of creative energy that indicates that something new is about to be created."[1]
Here is the moment when the device can create on its own, without a master, autonomously. But if we teach devices to feel and spontaneously create, even the digital matter, are they still just devices?
Life is defined by movement, movement means life. Jihoon Kim writes: "The term 'moving image' refers to a category of images in motion broader than the images that have traditionally been discussed in a discourse grounded in a sharp distinction between one art form and another."[2] Although Jihoon Kim is referring to intermedial fluidity here, we can also examine the fluidity of moving images literally. As such, the movement of the moving image gives rise to new meanings.
The project "Can Replicants ever be perfect?" is conceived as a spatial montage of moving images of the old and the new (film Blade Runner) through glitch, while the characters of the used films try to discern the (im)perfection of the devices and gain absolute control over them through emotional extortion of and by themselves.
[1] MENKMAN, Rosa. Glitch Studies Manifesto. Amsterdam/Cologne, 2010, pg. 5.
[2] KIM, Jihoon. Between Film, Video, and the Digital. 10. 1. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016. ISBN 1501304755, pg. 4.
I created a strategic war board game called Bastion. It is currently going through a testing phase. The introduction to its rules reads as follows: The game Bastion is set in the middle of Europe at the beginning of the tumultuous 19th century, when European powers were trying to gain supremacy and dominate both Europe and the world while the Industrial Revolution was underway. Each player chooses one of the powers (the French Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Kingdom of Prussia, the Austrian Empire, the Russian Empire or the United Kingdom) and tries to gain dominance over the territory represented by the game map, using the resources available on the map, because of course waging a war is expensive."
The photos displayed here are of the prototype for testing.
© 2024 MARTIN AUDRLICKÝ
