55 HAPPENING Video Vortex – Exhibition
ALGORITHMS ARE VERY OLD. AND MATHS IS VERY OLD. A LOT OF THE THINGS WE THINK ARE NEW ARE ACTUALLY BASED ON AGES-OLD BASIC PREMISES
happening in the generation of different scenarios: “I don’t know if it’s just randomness. It’s more like complicated causality chains that produce these different outcomes. I find it amazing. I could have been producing endlessly different scenarios.” MULTIPLE REALITIES ‘Algorithmic Oracle’ isn’t just Shtohryn’s attempt to come to terms with a trauma. It’s an exploration of deeper ideas she has been concerned with for some time. “At the time the fire happened, I was researching a lot into quantum theory and the idea of different possible world scenarios – it’s very science fiction-like. Essentially, our choices make up our reality. I believe in multiple realities and multiple worlds – a trope that a lot of superhero movies are using now! “I also started thinking about the different realities we each experience on our devices that have been designed for us by algorithms, which respond to our internet usage. That’s one of the reasons the piece is displayed on tablets and a mobile phone – it parallels this idea that nobody knows what the other person is experiencing on their other device. We act as if we have a single view of reality – although the content that is being fed to each of us is completely different.” Shtohryn’s other work also explores the conjunction of the digital and the ‘spiritual’. Is there a place for understanding and experiencing our relationship to higher realities through digital tools? Can the digital world be a spiritual space? “Algorithms are very old. And maths is very old. A lot of the things we think are new are actually based on ages-old basic premises, but that’s what spirituality is, too. It’s just a substitute for something else.” Shtohryn points to a piece where she programmed a room-vacuuming robot, holding burning incense and playing chanting from YouTube, to ‘cleanse’ a room – a kind of spiritual ceremony with only digital participants. “There are many people around the world getting paid to spiritually cleanse people’s houses, but what if it were just automated?” We dismiss the digital world as not real, but what criteria do we use to define ‘real’, especially when our digital realities are having a profound effect on our real- world lives – politically, socially and economically? “Lots of people gain empathy for the Sims characters in my piece – who are acting distressed – even with only the two or three predetermined movements decided by the game. You get to watch their different realities, but they can only experience one reality at a time.”
BRAM LOOGMAN & PABLO NÚÑEZ PALMA
Creative use of AI was an ongoing theme at Video Vortex. Netherlands-based filmmakers Bram Loogman and Pablo Núñez Palma worked with Amsterdam’s EYE Filmmuseum to turn an archive collection of unidentified bits of film history into an ongoing public performance. EYE’s ‘Bits & Pieces’ collection consists of more than 600 unidentified film items, collected by archivists over 20 years. There are some ground rules about what goes in the ‘Bits & Pieces’ collection, too. The fragments are shown exactly as they come out of the can, without beginning and end, and without translation. Nothing is allowed to be shortened or reassembled. According to the EYE, the aim is to share with the audience precisely the confusion and admiration an archivist feels when seeing these images for the very first time. Loogman and Núñez Palma used machine learning to create a filmmaking bot – Jan Bot, they called it – that selects top trending stories on Google News and autonomously outputs short films based on them, complete with silent film-style intertitles, all composed from elements of the ‘Bits & Pieces’ collection. The resulting films are posted automatically on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, and are also available at the EYE museum itself in a permanent Jan Bot installation. Operating now for two years, Jan Bot has at the time of writing produced over 15,000 films. Initially the project wasn’t focused on artificial intelligence. It was about
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