- Thisstoryoffriedrichkurzweiliwanttotellitmyself -
Narrated by the young Friedrich, at once both father and son of Ray Kurzweil, this story unfolds on the microscopic images of a blade cutting through metal . Filmed at the scale of a folding of matter, this cut is the axiom on which the first season of “The Unmanned” rests.
- In which genealogy is broken and the father-son of a son-father drifts in an emerging new world -
First episode of the series, “The Death of Ray Kurzweil” shows the wandering of Ray Kurzweil along with his father-son, Friedrich, in the vastness of a tropical forest. This film of anticipation, entirely filmed by drones, takes place in 2045, at the critical threshold of technological singularity.
- In which defeated he leaves the scene and the stage is left in search of its scale -
Second episode of “The Unmanned” series, “The Brute Force” reconstructs the minutes following Garry Kasparov’s defeat against the IBM Deep Blue computer on the 11th of May 1997. A camera with computer-programmed movements scrutinises the elements of an empty setting after the chess champion has left the scene, thus abandoning it to the disproportion of a world without its own scale.
- In which a storm breaks through in a computing division and its simulation is turned inside out -
Fourth episode of The Unmanned series, “ The Uncomputable” is the story of a failure : the building on the northern plains of Scotland of a giant climate prediction factory by meteorologist Lewis Fry Richardson. This enormous inverted terrestrial globe supposed to host 64 000 human-computers and able to forecast the world weather was never built. Partly shot in a wind tunnel (used for aerodynamics simulation) this episode shows the impossible attempt at building the factory and the collapse of its hypothesis. As a storm breaks through on the construction site for its simulation, the film itself and the entirety of its parameters are progressively turned inside out.
- In which predicting its past it lives working and dies fighting -
Sixth episode of the first season, La Mémoire de Masse unfolds during the second Canuts revolts in Lyon in 1834. These riots now known as the ‘bloody week’ came as a reaction to the automation of work in the silk industry by the Jacquard Loom and its implementation of the punched card – first historical ‘mass storage’ system allowing the inscription and replication of complex weaving patterns. This inaugurating event in the history of workers emancipation movements of the 19th century is actually the first revolt against modern computation. Fully computer-generated, the riot sequence that splits the film in two parts operates a reversed history by transforming a revolt against the algorithm into an algorithm of revolt. Beyond this simple historical vexation, La Mémoire de Masse deploys a dual simulation: both as the reenactment of a past history and the prediction of an entirely different becoming.
- Où une comecte revient en ceste année de sa predicion et tout ce qui avant à nous parloit retorne dedans le silence -
Set during the great plague of 1348 for which the passage of a comet in the terrestrial sky was deemed responsible, this seventh episode of The Unmanned series explores the consequences on our conception of history of the rational prediction of the comet’s return and the computation of its trajectory four centuries later, in 1759.
Bassae is an ancient Greek temple in the Arcadian mountains of the Peloponnese. “Bassae” is a film made by Jean-Daniel Pollet in 1964. Ever since 1987, when its restoration work began, the temple of Bassae has been covered by a large white tent, making it disappear. Forty years ago, Jean-Daniel Pollet described how stones had fallen back into silence, as the gods withdrew from the scene. “Bassae Bassae” shows the temple now made invisible by its very restoration. Like a contemporary reprise of the original work, “Bassae Bassae” is a film about that which has become mute and invisible.
Narration from the film “Bassae” by Jean-Daniel Pollet, first read by Jean Negroni in the original 1964 work reread here by his son David.
Entirely filmed with a timelapse technique in the archipelago of Svalbard(North Pole), La Mesure Végétale suspends our vision in the frozen vicinity of the Global Seed Vault, a seed depository buried in the arctic permafrost.
If the modern museum was historically conceived as the place for a vast operation aiming at reducing the unboundedness of the world to the scale of the human, La Mesure Végétale shows a full reversal of this paradigm. In this everted place of conservation, it is the climate itself, which while negating all form of life, ensures the possibility of its preservation.
If cinema came into the world as a means of recording its movements, setting its rhythms by the frequencies of life forms, then how should we film the mineral and the singularity of its specific time and unfolding? Shot with an ultra high-speed camera in the empty mineralogy department of the National Natural History Museum closed to the public for the time of its restoration, this film considers the museum as a stone in itself.
The Louvre is the first museum. Its opening in the late eighteenth century inaugurated the critical and political space for the modern sight. In 1989, a particle accelerator was built under the Louvre in order to analyse works of art prior to their restoration. This film shows a confrontation between these two machines of vision and the inevitable death that results from it.
Sixth film in a series of works that responds to a strict protocol: the sunset is filmed with a video camera but without any lens. Every time progress is made in image resolution and a new camera brought to the market, the film is shot once again. This process will meet its critical point when the resolution of the image overpasses the capacity of human perception.
Fifth film in a series of works that responds to a strict protocol: the sunset is filmed with a video camera but without any lens. Every time progress is made in image resolution and a new camera brought to the market, the film is shot once again. This process will meet its critical point when the resolution of the image overpasses the capacity of human perception.
Fourth film in a series of works that responds to a strict protocol: the sunset is filmed with a video camera but without any lens. Every time progress is made in image resolution and a new camera brought to the market, the film is shot once again. This process will meet its critical point when the resolution of the image overpasses the capacity of human perception.
Third film in a series of works that responds to a strict protocol: the sunset is filmed with a video camera but without any lens. Every time progress is made in image resolution and a new camera brought to the market, the film is shot once again. This process will meet its critical point when the resolution of the image overpasses the capacity of human perception.
Second film in a series of works that responds to a strict protocol: the sunset is filmed with a video camera but without any lens. Every time progress is made in image resolution and a new camera brought to the market, the film is shot once again. This process will meet its critical point when the resolution of the image overpasses the capacity of human perception.
First film in a series of works that responds to a strict protocol: the sunset is filmed with a video camera but without any lens. Every time progress is made in image resolution and a new camera brought to the market, the film is shot once again. This process will meet its critical point when the resolution of the image overpasses the capacity of human perception.
– Press release for The Unmanned exhibition at Casino Luxembourg, January 2014 –
“The first film shot did not occur with workers leaving a Lyon factory on 28 March 1895, but six months later, when at the end of another work day, the female workers walk once again in front of their employers’ camera, squeezing into the frame and speeding up their steps to adapt to the reel’s running time. It’s the invention of a new physics, operating by the pressure of time spans on the body, by the condensation of space within the frames. Cinema is thus not simply the invention of a rhythmic drive mechanism for film to render the world’s movement, but the act of producing new bodies and new rhythms. Cinema has nothing to do with representation. It is a point of morphological inflection. It was really invented in the fold of an autumn’s late afternoon, with the meeting of a gear’s teeth, a silver salt’s reaction time, and the body of a worker. (Fabien Giraud / Raphaël Siboni)”
Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni’s recent work is part of the historical parenthesis that separates these two factory exits. Starting with this latent period, they imagine the possibility of a cinema that would not subject bodies to the frame, nor bend gestures to time length, and in which the human figure would not be the only standard of measurement. Each of their films shares the same dynamic: to bring up to the surface of our present, temporalities that are radically foreign to it. Whether by reducing film to a pure quantity of light on the earth’s surface (“La Vallée von Uexküll”), synchronizing our experience of a museum to the immensity of geological time scale (“La Mesure Minérale”), confronting a camera with the destructive vision of a particle accelerator (“La Mesure Louvre”) or “doubling” the ruins of an ancient temple (“Bassae Bassae”), all of these films place us in a decentered position in front of the image and thus open to us the experience of a present that will not be simply for us but will be penetrated by the very possibility of our absence.
The new film series entitled “The Unmanned”, which gives its name to the exhibition, is constructed as an attempt to navigate within all of these excesses. Conceived as a non-human and backwards history of technics, it opens in 2045 with the death of Ray Kurzweil at the threshold point of technological singularity- and moving upstream, makes each stone, each inflection, the possible juncture of a completely different becoming.