Erhard Schüttpelz has suggested a useful distinction between “the complicated” and “the complex,” which
helps to understand what is at stake in such a scene. According to Schüttpelz,
“complicated” is anything whose operations can be computed, like train
timetables. A conversation at a bar, however, is “complex”: it is ambiguous,
and its many layers of meaning (and of animation) involve more factors than a
simulation can easily take into account. The difference between the complex and the complicated was and continues
to be the foremost frontier of modernization. By means of standardization and computation , modernity seeks to turn complexity into something that is merely
complicated. War has been the prime engine of advance on this frontier.
This scan of an actor's face was developed by the Avatar CGI team in conjunction
with the University of Southern California. Their objective was to produce
Emily, a hyperreal CGI character modeled exactly after the real-life actor
whose face enabled the scan.
But this critique rarely targeted the
phantasms of popular fiction directly (although sometimes it did); rather, it was
directed at the “magic“ that he identified in the seemingly inconspicuous
representations of purely operational processes. Such a dialectical inversion
resounds with Benjamin, and indeed I was often tempted to see films like Between
Two Wars or As
One Sees as a realization of what
Benjamin demanded from the Surrealists in 1929, namely, that they exchange “the
play of human features for the face of an alarm clock that in each minute rings
for sixty seconds.”
“Life” in Harun’s world and work is
diagnosed like a patient in critical condition. I would call the diagnosis “clinical
positivism,” a monitoring of life-systems at their critical margins. Capital’s
solution to the crisis of the absolute negation of life, it turns out, was its
techno-social reconstruction. The patient had to be reanimated, and in the course of this
reanimation (and thus de-alienation and de-objectification), the oppositional
matrix of the disciplinary society had to be undone. What followed from this was the well-known collapse of dichotomies , which Harun captured like few others. When he analyzed the links
between production and war, it was by way of an emphatic immersion in its
logic, a dialectics that put itself permanently, and empirically, at risk. He
then became a technician, one who relied, to paraphrase Benjamin, on an action
to “put forth its own image”—“as if the world itself wanted to tell us
something.” But when he portrayed the absurd theater of the grand de-alienation
of neoliberalism, he was not only truly Brechtian; he also delineated how desire, the dream of transformative mobility,
and psychic life as such had turned into a resource. The way people now had to
“put forth their own image”
demanded a rather different response.
This is why the image of the
motion-capture technique used in Avatar matters. This image, showing the actor in the lab and the
resulting digital character next to each other, is an image of the production
of images, and it represents the solution that was applied to the “problem” of
the technological negation and subsequent reconstruction of life. It is an
image that is paradigmatic for our current moment: humans pushing machines
across the uncanny valley, beyond the winter of artificial intelligence. The winter of
artificial intelligence: this refers to a period of several decades in which AI
and robotics failed to fulfill the horizon of expectations in reconstructing
and automatizing life. It describes the temporary inability of the machine to cross from the
merely complicated into the realm of the dynamically complex. The winter of
artificial intelligence: an allegory, also, for the reductionist, militaristic reality
principle of an “administered life.” But above all, it was a “problem” at the junction between technology and
imagery, one that demanded to be solved.
The solution is represented in the
image of motion-capture technology. Harun spoke of how digital animation hit a
limit (not unlike the “winter of artificial intelligence”) when it tried to
reconstruct the human walk (again referring us back to Marey). It always looks
mechanical, and never organically alive. Not only is it cheaper to use real
actors in motion capture than to produce characters from scratch in digital
animation, it is also the way to ensure that technology today has
always-already been pushed beyond the uncanny valley, because that valley
itself is now bridged by the investment of life into machines. In augmented
realities, “intelligent environments,” and “self-learning systems,” the organic
and the machine have formed intricate networks. Living beings now supplement
the machine and provide it with that part of animate intelligence which to date
it has not been able to (re)produce by itself.
Thus, the “frontier” between the complex and the complicated has
transformed: the complicated now “accommodates” and “frames” the complex, by
monitoring its flows and registering any deviations from the “patterns of
life,” using them to expand their scope by means of generative algorithms.
Harun referred to the data maps of operational computer animations that are
used to monitor complex systems—from factories to cities to battlefields—as
“ideal-typical” images, images that seek to outperform cinematographic and
photographic representations, and indeed the reality of life itself. Reality is then no longer the measure of an always imperfect image. Instead, the
image increasingly becomes the measure of an always-imperfect reality. It was
this inversion that Harun’s work never failed to put back on its feet.
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