Futures and Fictions Read online

  AH: People being interviewed in the film were saying these really positive things about the future: that the future is under your nose, we are the future. But I think the conversation that The Last Angel of History would have now would be quite different if it responded to music coming out now. In my opinion, albums like Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo or Future’s track “Codeine Crazy” are exciting in their over-saturation and their sense of dissolution. It’s a very uncompromising look at anxiety, addiction, the emptiness of fame; a kind of failure of the future really, played out in exciting ways.

  But I’m still thinking of Kodwo’s response to Louis’ previous question, around the idea of relics and time.

  How this film does not seem to have aged very much and still seems very relevant. And a part of it I think has to do with its own relationship between the past and the future. As Kodwo has just mentioned the relics that the Data Thief who is not the Data Thief, the Data Thief who is separated from himself, is finding. Apart from that the images of technology in the film don’t seem to have aged either. I mean obviously the computers are old and the images are old, but these obsolesces are built into the film. The images are already pixelated and the computers are already outdated. The film is already acknowledging the passing of the moment of its own production. We might notice that the computer looks old, and that the images are pixelated, but the film is already in on that secret, isn’t it? I think that the film is constantly doing that.

  Figure 3. © Smoking Dogs Films. John Akomfrah (1995), The Last Angel of History. Courtesy Lisson Gallery.

  The quick scroll of images on the computer screen form an archive that the Angel is constantly going through, repeatedly. At one point in the film there’s a great interview that Nichelle Nichols, Uhura from the Star Trek movies, is giving. But after she speaks the film then cuts to a scroll of the Data Thief’s archival images and she’s in that scroll of images. Her present becomes a part of that archive, which I think is really interesting in a way as a kind of response to when Samuel Delany talks about how science fiction is a distortion of the present. They are distorting the present to accommodate the past that is simultaneously the present. The scroll of the archive is the presentation of the present and the past in one moment.

  KE: You are right to point to the interviews that are continually interrupted by rapid-eye montage. Whenever Octavia Butler speaks, a recurrent musical motif recurs and yet I cannot quite say if I ever actually registered its elusive insistence. These visual and musical interruptions perform the circulation of images in different ways. In the tableaus in which the Data Thief sits at a high chair, we can see three computers that scroll through imagery and the same imagery of planets and mathematical equations scroll within the slits of his sunglasses. These images travel at speeds too great to be grasped as anything other than fleeting moments. Slowed down, they begin to reveal themselves as depictions of Pharonic statues, the interiors of mosques and formulae that allude to the ancient algorithms from the Islamic Golden Age. We see black and-white photographic portraits of Ghanaian bourgeois families and African-American soldiers. These accelerated images constitute the internet of Black Culture that is entirely readable for the Data Thief. He is processing data and reading images at post-human speeds. What we see in this scene is a staging of the act of streaming in which the computational temporality and planetary trajectory of images are as important as their content. Last Angel dramatises the streaming of culture in the form of the circulation of images.

  AH: I think it’s interesting that you started off with responding to Octavia Butler’s clip and then you went to the rapid scroll of images, because one of the things I was interested in with all these interstitial moments are the ways in which this scroll of images becomes more and more of a character, more and more of a presence that, as you say, this Data Thief is processing. But I think it’s also interesting because really the film is about sound and music, and yet the Data Thief is wearing glasses and what we see is this scroll of images. And then you have this distorting audio background to Octavia Butler speaking.

  Actually the more I watch the film, the more I think about the audio in the film and one of the things is that when John Akomfrah made the film and Trevor Mathison did the sound design, that they worked together at the same time. It’s not like they laid down the visual track and then Trevor Mathison just scored it. So in a way the sound is performing a very similar archival gesture as the visual scroll, which is quite interesting because it’s predominantly his soundtrack. There are some very tantalising snippets of Sun Ra and A Guy Called Gerald and Kraftwerk. But the sound doesn’t keep you with them. It keeps you with these other sounds like a kind of tide of wavey music, and then this kind of rapidly moving scrolling sounds. And the sound that lingers at the end of the film is that of birds, except that they are not real birds, they are synthesised birds. And why did the birds predominate after you’ve had the last word in the film, Kodwo? What is happening? I think what is so compelling about the audio is that it doesn’t call attention to itself at all, but it’s just as complicated as the visual elements of the film itself.

  LM: Could we develop this a little? Aside from the direct engagement with music producers like Juan Atkins, Underground Resistance, Goldie, amongst others, the film’s soundtrack, ambient patches, glitches, are of course crucial. And it’s interesting because there’s a feeling of bliss in the film. But it’s a weird bliss. It’s not some kind of Buddhist introspection. It’s not the kind of utopian future where all conflict is neutralised. But there is a sort of power to the film which comes precisely through its original soundtrack, an ambience that’s cut through with all these shards of noise, these intense cuts and audio intersections. The sound of the film gives us a sense of a different, altered relationship to technology. But what is going on here, is it a signal of the kind of new anxious and paranoid relationship we have to social media, networked tech today?

  KE: The sounds that Ayesha describes have different roles. Ambient synthetic sound soothes and reassures and bridges and cradles. At other times, sound intrudes, interrupts and escalates. You can hear the tantalising opening passages of A Guy Called Gerald’s “Finleys Rainbow (Slow Motion Mix)”, of 4 Hero’s “Parallel Universe” and Rhythim is Rhythim’s “Kao-tic Harmony”. All of these tracks fade into and emerge from the ebb and surge of Trevor Mathison’s synthesisers, which continually modulate the affective tone of Last Angel in relation to its colour, its pace, its space and its syncopation. The scenes of the Data Thief that are filmed in the Mojave Desert introduce a digital chiaroscuro composed of burnt orange shadow. These chromatic temperatures were quickly imitated on British television throughout the 1990s to the extent that they now look thoroughly clichéd. It’s important to note that Akomfrah and the cinematographer Dewald Akeuma invented this aesthetic as a deliberately digital response to the overt digital drum ‘n’ bass produced by A Guy Called Gerald, Goldie and 4 Hero. The oversaturated colour creates an afterimage that is picked up and modulated by specific musical sequences. The artificial colour and synthetic music enter into a co-constitutive relation of synthetic sensation and artificial emotion that lingers with the spectator as an emergent structure of feeling that is never quite verbally articulated as such.

  AH: The film starts and you’re suddenly in the desert, you are hearing Robert Johnson, and everything is in this sepia tone. One of the things I noticed was that the anticipatory futuristic images were in sepia, which is normally a kind of nostalgic colour. It’s in the past. It’s also the colour that images of Mars are suffused with. In contrast the archival images are a cold blue. So there is a kind of switching of the kind of semiotics of what you would associate with these colours. Usually it’s the archival images that are the sepia-toned, brownish, receding, fading. Whereas here it’s the landscape of the desert, which is sepia-toned and looks like Mars. The dust that floats in the air is what makes all these images from Mars that kind of colour. So the anticipatory images look nostalgic.
And the archival images are not even a warm blue. There’s something that’s not nostalgic, that’s not soothing about that quality of blue. Or more accurately, it’s soothing, but in a kind of non-empathetic way. There’s a sense of distancing that is built into it. And you can see this as well in the black and-white archival images of the Ghanaian families. In this context, why are these photographs in black and white? And what kind of distancing, auratic quality is being created in this code-switching of colour?

  Figure 4. © Smoking Dogs Films. John Akomfrah (1995), The Last Angel of History. Courtesy Lisson Gallery.

  There’s always another layer to jump out at you. We tend to focus on the narrative provided by the voiceover. It is hard and rich enough to follow the narrative of the development of these three musical genres in light of Afrofuturism, but in addition to that there are these ancillary almost non-narrative elements. And all of these elements create a way to think about the future in a way that is code-switched with history, that creates a kind of remembering that is shot through with the future.

  KE: In Last Angel, you hear the narrator Edward George speaking about navigating the “land of African memory” and entering “the internet of Black culture”. It is at that point that you glimpse the figure of Kwame Nkrumah, first President of the Republic of Ghana, in black and white and in colour. George’s voiceover speaks of defeats and successes, failures and promises. For me, the critical reason to screen and to discuss Last Angel today is to situate the aesthetic-political project of Afrofuturism in a broader genealogy that extends beyond the 1990s and out into the Promethean Pan-Africanisms formulated throughout the twentieth century. At the same time, it is critical to direct Afrofuturism’s affirmation of alienation towards the range of contemporary cultural practices that have emerged and continue within and between the diaspora and the continent.

  Many contemporary artists and critics within the continent object to the perceived Americocentricity of Afrofuturism. They argue that Afrofuturism fails to account for the preoccupations that inform practices produced in the past and the present throughout the cities of the continent and the Caribbean. In Johannesburg, Nairobi, Lagos and Accra, novelists, theorists, bloggers, photographers and filmmakers are debating “the planetary turn of the African predicament”, which Achille Mbembe argues “will constitute the main cultural and philosophical event of the twenty-first century”. Watching Last Angel confronts contemporary viewers with the urgency of speculation and the necessity for extrapolation in order to navigate the dangers of the present and the threats of futures that will be continental, oceanic and archipelagic in their scale and their scope.

  1. Thanks to UCL Urban Laboratory’s Jordan Rowe, Andrew Harris and Rafael Schacter of A (b) P, for helping to organise the screening and discussion of The Last Angel of History on Sunday, 20 March at Somerset House, London.

  Works Cited

  Akomfrah, John (dir.) (1995), The Last Angel of History. London: Black Audio Film Collective, C4/ZDF.

  Attali, Jacques (1985), Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

  Dent, Gina (ed.) (1993), Black Popular Culture. Seattle: Bay Press.

  Diederichsen, Diedrich (1998), Loving the Alien: Science Fiction, Diaspora, Multikultur. Berlin: Id Verlag. Eshun, Kodwo and Anjalika Sagar (eds.) (2007), The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

  Eshun, Kodwo (1998), More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet Books. Fuller, Matthew (2016), “Black Sites and Transparency Layers”, Inaugural Lecture Goldsmiths, University of London. 15 March.

  Mbembe, Achille, (2015) “Africa in the New Century”, in Lien Heidenreich-Seleme and Sean O’Toole (eds.), African Futures: Thinking about the Future in Word and Image. Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag.

  Plant, Sadie (1998), Zeroes and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture. London: Fourth Estate.

  Reynolds, Simon (1998), Energy Flash: A Journey through Rave Music and Dance Culture. London: Picador.

  Tate, Greg (1982), Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America. New York: Simon & Schuster.

  FLICKER - TIME AND FABULATION: FROM FLICKERING IMAGES TO CRAZY WIPES

  Bridget Crone

  Introduction

  A single flash! A cut of light!

  This essay explores the flicker or flicker-image as a flash of light that has the potential to disrupt the mechanics of vision. The most elemental of images, the flicker is at the very basis of both vision and mechanical image production; it is the flash of light that makes an image possible, and it is the continuous flickering of light across the eye (or lens) that connects visual perception with time perception through the operation of critical flicker frequency: the speed at which the brain joins those flashes of light together and thus perceives the movement of time. Yet when isolated or disaggregated from continuous movement, the flicker-image disrupts the smooth space of both image production and time perception. The flicker-image therefore refers to a correlation between analogue cinema practice in which a frame of film runs flickering through the projector and the physiological mechanics of image production in which flickering light is perceived by the brain. To think of images in this way is to understand images as single elements, as flashes of light, frames of film, individual pixels — individual units that are joined together. Image. Followed by image. Followed by image. Yet to insist on the flicker-image as a single flash of light — a “cut” or “point cut” as Gilles Deleuze does in his writing on experimental artists’ films — is to isolate an image from the constant movement of images, and, in doing so, to break into the flow of time: interrupting, disrupting or re-routing time’s movement (Deleuze 2005: 207).

  Taking cue from Tony Conrad’s 1966 film The Flicker, aspects of Manuel DeLanda’s films produced approximately ten years later, as well as Russell Hoban’s novel Fremder (1986), the essay addresses the way in which radical editing techniques that cut or break the linear continuity of image movement offer the means for escape outside of existing space-time parameters. This escape from linear, chronological time is the time of the flicker; it is a time broken into a gazillion pieces, each with the potential for another as yet unknown or unmade relation. Each piece, each jump-cut, splice or broken edit, interrupts the flow of time as we know it and calls forth time anew. The particular form of time produced by the operations of the flicker-image (the image cut from movement) has much in common with the time of Aion or the instant, as that which cuts into the linearity of chronological time. In this way, flicker-time takes us out of the “no-time” and “no-space” of our continuous present, and thus from the continuity of time that is dominated by demands for constant productivity and progress on the one hand, and an entropic, unending present on the other, as Jonathan Crary observes in his book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep: “A 24/7 world is a disenchanted one in its eradication of shadows and obscurity and of alternate temporalities” (Crary 2014: 19). The flicker-image is therefore a resistant technology that breaks and remakes the relationship between time and the image in order to both occult the world and produce it anew, and flicker-time is a “fabulated” time-space. Here fabulation suggests an estrangement that is rooted in conditions of the “real” (that occur in real life; IRL) yet also gestures towards a form of speculative thought: the telling of stories, the weaving together of forms of speculation — the might be, could be, possibly. Fabulation is thus at the heart of an art practice that provides the means to “project — into things, into reality, into the future and even into the sky” (Deleuze 1997: 118). And so, focussing our attention on the operation of the flicker as a single flash of light — a single flash that cuts or breaks into linear time and space — rather than a continuum of flashes, enables us to explore the way the flicker acts as a launch-pad that takes us out of time into a fabulated time and space. This is a timespace that couldn’t possibly exist, might exist, probab
ly doesn’t exist, could perhaps exist through another understanding of time and space.

  There are three distinct operations of the flicker in the work of Conrad, Hoban and DeLanda. These are summarised as, firstly, an expansion of time and space; this is the case in Conrad’s film, where the operation of the flicker produces a journey into a world beyond the image, a world of psychedelic experience. Here the flicker acts as a launch-pad for entering into another dimension. In contrast to Conrad’s freedom through the flicker to a space outside of it, Hoban’s novel Fremder proposes that liberation might be found in the space between the flickering images that make up perception. In Fremder’s world, perception of so-called “reality” — a “reality” produced by the continuous flickering of light across the eyes — is controlled by a sinister organisation referred to as “The Corporation”. The potential for freedom therefore can only be found outside of the image. In a move that mirrors Crary’s remarks made twenty-five years later, Hoban’s novel proposes that in order to resist control we must enter into the world of “shadows and obscurity” (Crary 2014: 19), and where Crary explores sleep as the last bastion of resistance to the demand for constant production, Hoban proposes that this is to be found by slipping into the space (the darkness) between images. The forced conjoining of images that is imposed through continuity editing techniques and enforced by capitalist institutions is also addressed by Manuel DeLanda in his little-known films from the mid-to-late 1970s, and informs the third operation of the flicker. In the films, DeLanda uses radical editing techniques to produce a new relationship to time by completely severing the correlation between images and the continuities of time and space. Conrad, DeLanda and Hoban’s works acknowledge the potential of the flicker-image to re-forge our perceptual relationship with time (thus producing a form of time that is non-linear) and undermine or question the shared certainties of this so-called “reality”. This is to say, more explicitly, that the flicker-image harbours the potential for disobedience and resistance so that the forging of discontinuity is a resistant act that seeks to open up the possibilities for different inhabitations and understandings of time through its fabulation.