A fake dome over reality says what is real for now
Information skies by Metahaven discussion, Daniel van der Velden w/ Krisztián Puskár 26 Oct, Toldi Klub transcript, edited by Szilvi Német
Krisztián Puskár: Actually I have a quote to begin with. „The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” It’s the first line of Neuromancer, the landmark novel of William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy. Your latest film Information Skies (http://www.informationskies.com) triggered similar effects and is also sequel to your film project “the sprawl (propaganda about propaganda).” Do you often associate your work to classic sci-fi aesthetics and literature?
Daniel van der Velden: We are influenced by interfaces as a world on the one hand, and in slow cinema language on the other. Our aesthetic stance feels much closer to filmmakers like Tarkovsky, than American cinema. I don’t think American cinema has any influence on us at all. Maybe some sort of early cyber writings, as it is mostly ideas that come into consideration. Obviously, our work is also a reflection of the times in which we live. We can not pretend to live in an other time, a pre-digital age, when everything is kind of pure. So we love the accidents or occurances that are happening when those worlds are being confronted with each other. By all means, it is a very beautiful citation and am very glad you’ve looked it up. There are endless resonances we can find in these subjects.
Krisztián: Even though the date of publishing of Gibson’s text (1984) has strong connotations, the lines in the novel are timeless in a sense. The tone of voice that you use in Information Skies also feels like a foray into literature. It’s almost poetic. Daniel: I would definately say there is a literary dimension to it and we were very conscious in doing so. I am really fed up with things like geopolitics and other stuff that tries to talk about an outside you can address or analyse, whereas the real trauma to all these topics is that they happen inside us. If we get that out, we become the filter for these events. Even you can have empathy with a suicide bomber on some level, as the film proclaims, on the basis that this person has a mother. You can say these connections are poetic, but we always try to address the reminiscences of humanity even inside a completely finctionalized or technicalized environment. Krisztián: You have distributed the film online, there was an open access to the whole piece on a dedicated url. On the first viewing, it stuck me that the original language of the film is Hungarian, while English and Korean (it was commissioned by the Gwanju Biennale) were just secondary as subtitles. Can this be attributed to the fact that your main actor’s (Georgina Dávid) is actually Hungarian?
©Metahaven, 2016 Daniel: Information Skies happened as a combination of drawing conclusions from the Sprawl in a sense that we wanted to get away from that film as far as we could. In the Sprawl it seemed like Georgina was Russian, and she is not. Simply because you always hear a Russian female voice when you see her. But she is not Russian. So it was very logical that we should do something in a language that is close to her, or in fact her own. We made a test version in English first, still we concluded, it’s much better in Hungarian. Also because of the particular language Hungarian is. Not just because it is a language foreign to us, but it stands also as a language that is kind of lost in the middle of Europe. Its closest relatives are in the Ural Mountains, Eastern Russia, Finland and Estonia. Hungarian is also under influence by the Slavic, Turkish, and for me its a georgeous language… It sounds a little bit satanic, but language is also how people think.
Krisztián: When you commissioned the translation of the script, you were not preoccupied that some nuances can get lost in translation? On the other hand, can it be apolitical to opt for Hungarian?
Daniel: It was clear from the beginning that it could never be the same in English and Hungarian. We even asked the translator to create a very archaic version of Hungarian. So it had to have the oldest possible feeling within Hungarian, despite being combined with worlds like Snapchat and other expressions that feel more neo nowadays. And of course, it is political in a way that Hungarian is from Eastern Europe, from a country that has a very, let’s say colorful political history.
Krisztián: And political present… – The film Hypernormalization by Adam Curtis has just came out a couple of days ago and there are lots of talking points that you two share. It seems to be in the air to treat the counternarrative of virtual reality as something not necessarily as a cyber thing, but as a means of political communication and perception management.
Daniel: I think that Adam Curtis as a BBC-based, BBC-turned-native filmmaker has an access to the entire BBC archive, with which he constructs everything. This means you have a cleared archive that goes back decades of all possible footage about all possible world events including the footages that were never broadcasted. So this is actually someone who is partially also a librarian of forgotten books in the BBC library. The urge to create a metanarrative that is so large, he also waited very long with bringing out the film because he wanted to include Donald Trump, ISIS, and all kinds of things that are quite recent. The way he develops these narratives is by using voiceover: his own voice. Thus he became the Werner Herzog of geo-political documentary making. Everything he says with that particular voice becomes an Adam Curtis narrative. So there is a format in his films that are so strong. He often uses the idea of comparing two distant things: New York, something happened here, meanwhile in Syria, something happened there as well… People didn’t think it was connected, but it actually was. It becomes something that is dashingly close to conspiracy narrative itself, which is actually what he is trying to unmask. Trying to unmask processes that were conceived by what he says by those in power. People that were ruling us. I don’t know, I think he is very very far on a point of no return in these films.
Krisztián: Conspiracy theories are the new mythologies in a way that they share a commong ground of being born out of a general distrust in the principle narratives that are around us.
Daniel: I think it is more arisen from the actual inability to address everything that is around us. There is so much, the vastness of available explanation of any events are so enormous that you can construct almost any narrative that fits a particular agenda, ideology or idea. So you can actually piece together conspiracies relatively easily. The distrust narrative we are referring to still talks about a world where there is order, there is a central power that emanates nonsensical stuff and we no longer believe it. There is an other line of thought coming from German philosophy.. With the dismantling of religion, metaphysics and the advent of objective science we find ourselves in a world where we are kind of nobody. And that’s a reality. We are tiny and we mean practically nothing when the scale is the universe. That means that people have started to construct other ways of creating wholeness again including all kinds of fictional or invented realities that seem to reconstruct a world, in which things have meaning and purpose. Putting a sort of fake dome over reality saying this is what’s real for now. Even though we know it’s not. But if we don’t have this dome if we don’t pretend that we have this wholeness, our lives seem to have no purpose. And I think that was very much an influence to the film. Not so much the philosophy, but examples of that.
Krisztián: In the initial phase of the internet it was conceived as a tool to make the world more transparent and reveal facts and unhide the truth. For now it became a place where you cannot really differentiate between all these things. What have changed?
Daniel: We haven’t developed an alternative. We may hate politics, we were still stuck with those procedures and forms that are kind of maintaining themselves. I think that the reinvention, especially in Europe of the nation state as a nationalist project… I think many people who had advocated the internet, or open society or whatever are looking at that with a kind of amazements. Like how is this possible? That you have the most archaic ideas about government and rule archers are coming bak. I don’t have an answer for that, it’s pretty much what happens in The Game of Thrones.
Krisztián: Is there a correlation between this rise of radical movements, its political advocates and a ‘cosmic disinformation’? In a post-fact era, figures like Trump are natural to emerge? He is a symbol of this era right now: it’s not important that what he says is not true. The disproof does not reach the people, who already clicked it, shared it or want to believe in it.
photo ©Neogrády-Kiss Barnabás
Daniel: If your principle strategy is to create bubbles, you’re undercutting trust in general. So you are not just creating your own narrative, but undercutting that people can have any narrative. In that sense there is a way in which we treshold for information to be believeable or credible, and is always changing with the bubble culture in a sense. I think Trump is very much dependent on the idea that he can actually manage to gambe his way to a big take over reality and as soon as people start to believe he can do that, it will also become a cascade. So there is a cascading disbelief in Trump as much as there was cascading belief that he is gonna do it. And people are superscared. Because it seems like he is a self-propelling mechanism. It’s sort of retweeting itself.
Krisztián: The best example for this bubble is Facebook, it’s a common thing to say that on Facebook you surround yourself with likeminded people. If you unfollow a fascist asshole or a liberal opinion leader it means that you detach yourself from that part of reality. These are the bubbles that caused the great surprise after Brexit. Your best guess was it can not happen. And it did. But you can also easily twist and turn mere facts and actual results. As it happened in Hungary a few weeks ago after the referendum that did not pass with the votes. Still, the government planted huge billboards saying that 98% of the Hungarians voted no for the migrant quota. It does not tell the truth, still becomes true because the billboards are there.
Daniel: You can have a very very strong virtual reality projection to actually create a new reality. There was Brexit, a lots of lies were told about the European Union: how much benefit people will get from Britain if they got out of the EU, how much health care extra per months etcetera and it was all not true. And people believed it, the Brexit was done and the reality is that they are going to leave. You can sort of design reality with virtual reality if you have scaling mechanisms for what you are saying. So I think that a lot of people on the left are now talking about how do we use the same strategy and tactics to actually further argue our agenda. Cause the counter-strategy to Brexit was to just have facts. Facts, which for people are not persuasive, they do not present a dream. They present reality as it is.