Immortality for All! | Hito Steyerl & Anton Vidokle

I just want to give you a very brief overview of what we plan to do actually I think I mean this exhibition may be rooted in the philosophical discussion of cosmos and but it is also rooted very importantly in Anton's video work in the three videos we people are able to see in the exhibition and this is where I would like to take the discussion so what we are going to do is to more or less show a couple clips show one longer clips from Anton's second video which is called the Communist revolution was caused by the Sun and then I will screen two short clips from my own work as some kind of response and in between in the dialogue between these video works I think we will try to have a discussion which may or may not resonate with many of the topics that were addressed yesterday and today and having said that I have to confess that I personally have no idea about cosmicism whatsoever and you can maybe if you have followed the discussion since yesterday evening you can reconstruct the sword of Terror which I am experiencing right now feeling sort of forced in a way to reproduce and also to respond you know to a lot of different topics that actually I have no idea of yet what it's like in school you know someone points at you and say you you know you have to do it so I will bravely volunteer to do it right now and I think that actually there are three constitutive tensions or paradoxes if you will in this discussion which probably cannot be resolved but that's probably also the fun of it let me summarize it so the first axiom is and I think no one can doubt it after this discussion of these past two days cosmicism may exist or not period thank you okay so the second one is a bit more tricky since it seems that cosmicism is for everybody and will redeem everybody and absolutely everybody except maybe if you're not Russian and the third one is actually maybe the most baffling one it is the proposition that immortality is something that may be desirable or not and you can intensify it and then you can escalate to the point that it becomes absolutely lethal how do you think this is the most baffling proposition of cosmicism the idea that immortality in a way can be something that is absolutely profoundly deadly it will immediately kill you and this is I remembered something it's a historical anecdote and I have absolutely no expertise in this area but something I remembered was this the fact actually it is a fact that immortality and the pursuit of it was a very very popular cause of death for Chinese emperors in fact of a period of 2,000 years a lot of Chinese emperors literally killed themselves drinking immortality and exist and they were convinced and this was a long-standing tradition in research medicine or and so on and so on that you know if they drank enough mercury laced with someone says that they would be immortal and there seems to be as interesting characteristics if you drink mercury then you get really elated and life feels great and you see almost did it you're almost immortal but and unfortunately you die and this seems to have become some sort of also I mean then immediately after this became more or less clear it was recognized and emperors who were you know who people thought should rather disappear they were forced to drink the immortality elixir so one could get rid of them if it suited so I think this idea that and this has actually also had very real consequences you know the idea of immortality and whether you want it or not and how to get it or not is one thing but this quest for immortality actually had sort of political real-life consequences because some of the Emperor's really instituted purchase including the burning of books and also of actual scholars you know to focus science on the pursuit of immortality so in that sense immortality was not only this sort of regulative idea but it had real political consequences and this is one of the most fascinating aspects for me is this for me seemingly constitutive tension you know between immortality and death in the idea of cosmicism and of course many of these paradoxes or you know strands and fragments of this discussion reappear in the contemporary discussion about transhumanism you know about cryonics the extension of life the evolution of death either as a sort of you know uploading of minds into avatars or the overcoming of biological barriers by all sorts of you know medical options and menus and this is why I think that considering this historical dimension is extremely important because actually it does open up this discussion about transhumanism into which of course many other traditional I'd say or historical elements come into play again which are tied with mortality or even consciously inflicting death on certain groups of people and exterminating people so basically in the idea that humankind has such or certain parts of humankind it doesn't really matter should be important should be immortal there is like a like like an undercurrent very often the idea that this involves the elimination what is called by its unique off for example the defective parts of the population so these should not survive and he is very very explicit in naming these supposedly defective parts as dark people so in that sense it seems to me that it's very very difficult to get rid you know of the element of eugenics of the planning of population of the sort of regulation of population in this question and before yeah on the other hand of course you know you cannot as I think no one can deny that transhumanism if you see it from the point of view of Neanderthals you know is a completely different proposition because from their point of view and they were humans as well we are actually the post humans right and this kind of post humanism we don't really know how it was achieved but definitely technology was involved you know into bringing about humankind as such by you know do mainly developing the technology of fire cooking and so on so basically all humans that exist today are sort of engineered have been brought into being by technology to a certain extent and if we see it from that perspective we could say that basically any intelligence today is artificial intelligence from that point of view so again there is this kind of tension you know between having to acknowledge that this kind of trying to bring about as the immortality of humankind or the improvement of it is always accompanied by this dark undercurrent of extermination yet it seems to be progressing anyway so before I wanted to yeah maybe we should just screen the first clip now and then I will ask you specific questions relating to that work so this is a clip of about 10 minutes from the video the communist revolution was caused by the Sun and maybe to launch more less immediately into a question I think you know we have thought people have talked a lot about immortality and it's theoretical historical religious foundation over these past days but what I find very interesting and striking in this work and also a question which hasn't been addressed as length is how can one deploy art as some sort of transhumanist strategy or device because I think that what we have seen in the video already has two different layers on the one hand there is a sort of conjuration on the level of content you people talk about immortality about wanting to bring about immortality the necessity of immortality and so on and then there is a second level and this is maybe the one I would like to you to comment on because throughout the trilogy you also there is also a layer in which film or video or the act of screening and watching a video has a sort of operative function on the person in the sense of basically intervening into the person's body and his or her health so maybe you would like to comment on this level first absolutely but first I thought maybe I'd go back to the Chinese emperor story because one of the things that was a very interesting byproduct of sending all of this emissaries to try to find the elixir of immortality is and sometimes poisoning the Emperor is this is apparently how Japan was discovered yeah maybe you shouldn't know but but but this is basically to say that a lot of times the way things happen are completely unanticipated for example viagra was discovered by looking for a high blood pressure medication but instead something else came in to being so a part of me thinks that if actually mortality if there will be the Alex here if there will be the medicine the treatment right it will it it's very likely that it will come about as a result of a complete unanticipated accident maybe while looking for weight control pills you know suddenly something I think it's more likely that it's the other way around that by looking for a multi-port allottee Alex in the accident there will be a way to control but but then basically too this is all to say that you know I think one of the things everybody has their own personal take on Kozma ISM as you had a chance to see over the last couple of days there is not the clear consensus and if it exists what it is is it more of a religious thing is it more of a philosophical movement is it more of a artistic movement you know it's and I think this is actually really wonderful you know as long as long as it stays open and defies clear categorization clear definition it's still alive in that way yeah but and but I am like everybody else and I also have my take wouldn't yeah and I think what has been getting becoming more and more interesting for me is almost like a kind of a very pragmatic very boring sort of approach to it that when one thinks about immortality one does not really need to imagine some kind of a miracle or or a kind of incredible miraculous religious event or grandiose scientific breakthrough or some kind of premonition like you know event yeah it could also come about by improvements in national health care system by improvements in quality of food by improvements in the condition of work of life of urban planning of shelter of very very very basic things that we use every day and you know if they could extend our life spends a little bit more and more and more and perhaps a point will come when it will be so long that for all practical reasons we are nearly immortal but it will this will be a chain of very kind of mundane events nothing too dramatic yeah and of course I can't help but you know at the moment in the United States health care has been one of the sort of things that have been in the news all the time and you know just out of curiosity I kind of looked into where what was the first country that actually had a nationalized health care system and it appears actually that it was Soviet Union interestingly enough yeah which was in early nineteen twenties this idea of a nationalized health care is implemented there whether it's fantastic health care or not but it's very important that it's for all you know in the Soviet Union and you know although absolutely I have absolutely no proof of that I would like to think that maybe one of the reasons for this may have been some kind of gentle influence of certain cosmic ideas again this is just a pure speculation right I really don't know I have not done historical research but but maybe now to come back to your questions about the films and about the film is health care yeah the well it's a kind of an idea but as I was it's not mean it's not a joke this is what the film in one of its other chapters declares that basically if you watch a certain color or wavelengths of light and this will have positive health effects and I'm just thinking about that I don't want to interrupt you but very briefly I'm just thinking about that because of course as we know and we discussed already all these sort of health care systems or sort of it's called it gentle reformist you know immortality project have been in large parts of the world completely savaged cut back been on the attack and so on and so on so basically that mean how do you comment on this we are not in a situation where nation States as the Soviet Union let alone the US would be able to take on even want to take on such kind of projects so I'm just to extrapolate on my question do you think that basically a sort of how do you call it how would you describe it constituency of video you know would be able to take on this question the international of film as a sort of health care system to compensate you know for for all these failing and dysfunctional and believe well operative health care systems well I think that the problem is with the world can't compensate yeah because I mean this was kind of a part of a discussion ten years ago when the other project that I did in Berlin which was called the United Nations Plaza which was a kind of a free experimental school that perhaps some of the people in this room have come to but one of the criticism of it or one of the critiques of this whole thing was that you know all of this are artists initiated experimental projects are compensating for kind of a lack of good education for a lack of state-run state-funded institutions yeah that would provide it and and as as you know maybe nice and admirable arrays to to organize projects like that at the same time that lets the government off the hook because then they don't have to do it so I would hate to for films to kind of short-circuit the actual health care system yeah and sort of create this kind of weak medicine that then would then you know some kind of a government official would use it to cut the subsidies to fund hospitals or something like that but putting all of that aside I think what was really interesting for me of course working with this material with Felder of you know all of Jeff's key all of this incredible writers and thinkers one thing I realized quite early on is that you know in a way of course it is a kind of a philosophy but of course it's a also one thing that unifies them in a certain way is that they were committed to immediate social activism to to sort of immediate practical action and it's kind of not an accident that even though Tchaikovsky was a biophysicist but he actually most of his research had to do with blood circulation with movement of blood and the human body that had medical applications Bogdanov incidentally was also a medical doctor he was like a psychiatrist and of course an experimental blood transfusion so a lot of people that were a part of this sort of intellectual movement and or yeah whatever you want to call it a lot of them actually worked with things that had medical applications because one of the ways to further the cause of immortality and perhaps even resurrection is to simply cure somebody who is ill at the moment and is an imminent danger of dying and for me this was a kind of a very important realization because I keeping that in mind I realized that that it would be for me personally totally futile to make a dark historical documentary about cosmicism and if I was to communicate any of its ëthis or any of its desires I would actually have to somehow make them a part of this video so so I was thinking about all kinds of things and then just very accidentally stumbled on a discovery that was made by the American space program NASA in 93 they were trying to solve a very simple practical problem because in conditions of zero gravity your skin heals very very slowly so if you have a tiny paper cut it continues bleeding for weeks so they needed something to to speed up the healing for astronauts for cosmonauts in space because of course any liquid that is circulated is a bit dangerous and it's not a good idea and I don't know exactly how but they stumbled on this very strange of fact that the red lighted by LED light source LED diodes in a very particular range in a very particular frequency which is exactly 670 Hertz has incredibly healing effect that expedites healing of human skin and first they started using this kind of treatment on spaceships and space stations but then of course it was very very quickly adapted by the military yeah because they need something to patch up wounded special for soldiers and things like that and cosmetics industry because of course a rejuvenating face the kind of rejuvenating skin or yeah making it younger and healthier is a very major concern of cosmetics industry so so but then I kind of realized that well essentially film is color light and sound and there is no reason why a screening of a film could not also be a kind of irradiation sir session that while you sit there looking at the film and maybe you're totally bored by it maybe you'll find it interesting or just you dislike it but it kind of doesn't matter because it bombard you of this particles of red light that are rejuvenating your skin that are having kind of a prophylactic effect on your body so the artwork actually addresses you as a physical object not merely a psychological subject so that was in the first film in the second film I kind of thought about psychoanalysis because one of the other things that I use in videos is the narrative yeah and the narrative can have healing potential and there is clinical psychoanalysis used for terminating certain kind of addictions yeah that are harmful and there is a very specific script that is used for this kind of sessions which is interesting because of course you always work with a script and but this script has the capacity to to actually yeah heal yeah I improved your kind of health so basically in the second film I used this clinical hypnosis to basically kind of suggest to convince you to become mortal and in in the third film it's again like a recent scientific discovery that was made at MIT just a few years ago that that that flashing of light in a particular range and particular intervals in a range of 40 Hertz yeah it has a very interesting effect on your brain cells and can it cannot cure Alzheimer's disease but it could reduce the loss of memory so it could actually stimulate or enhance your memory and so so yet so that's the third is here okay super I will make a point in progressed a point of the dialogue where I actually argue that there are two these two levels you know of the video which work in the sets but for me the most important is not the potential resurrection of humans or prolongation of life or whatever you wanna call it but actually the production of space in montage and in order to make this point I will show these short clips from my work and then discuss my thinking behind it and just to introduce it briefly I made I mean I I really had no even recollection of making a work which would connect in any way to the topics discussed but actually I did and it occurred to me but I came to it from a completely different perspective the perspective of media because I asked myself the question who is doing the outsource 3d modeling and rendering that today's advertisement industry and entertainment industry requires and I thought actually I would end up brief very quickly in India or the Philippines but I did not I ended up in Ukraine and it turns out that large parts of the former employees of the aerospace sector the rocket building industry are now employed in 3d modeling and in the creation of games very off war-related and also virtual casinos is one of the other main industries and also the 3d modeling of luxury real estate so in a way this is the trajectory of many actual people who were trained to work in space I mean to go to space to fly to space to build the machines to go to space this is what they are doing and I want to screen a short clip from a work called the tower which consists modis from the renderings that these people produce and a documentary interview with one of them what happens actually is that he made a video game about the Tower of Babel which in the video game is sort of invaded by zombies and I found this very interesting and important because the Tower of Babel of course is one of the first observatories of cosmos ever and I think historically very very important launch platform for the idea observe of the observation of the universe as such which speaking of that and also keeping in mind the sort of well hollowing out and devastation of space exploration as such the real question or one of the main question that I'm asking myself now in relation to the whole debate but also to that work is actually the question of ground control you know where is ground control actually in this work you see and actually in the next one which I'm going to skip to there is the ground Condor there is a very important location which is the former National Observatory of Iraq on a mountain somewhere in KRG and it's been devastated or actually it has two big holes in its roof one made by an Iranian rocket and the other by an American rocket so this begs to me the question you know we can talk about space we can talk about immortality we can talk about reaching things in the future but what happens to the ground what is the material base and how is it being devastated right now and one thing that occurred to me now is that actually if I ask myself what is ground control where is ground control then for me you know as someone who grew up in the West there's only one answer and the answer is of course ground control is in Houston Houston is ground control right Houston is in the mythical idea of space exploration is the place where engineers are able to solve every single problem right there our best minds and they will fix every problem indeed Houston is the place you call when you have a problem right so what happened to ground control is my real question I think it's a very important question that because maybe and everyone knows what happens in Houston right I mean Houston is a place that was basically engineered to the state it has been in now it is engineered so called artificial natural catastrophe it is engineers who produced you know the type of underground control you know which is Houston now and this seems to me a very important point because it seems to imply that maybe a thing we need to produce and I'm not going to use the word resurrect this less people then space and when I talk about space then the idea of ground who controls the ground what is the base of this kind of enterprise you know where are we launching it from isn't you know this ideas so far into cosmos already or outer space that basically people are flying off while ground control is being devastated so I think the production of space is a really important point maybe you would like to react to that well yeah because I mean what's happening in Houston is what's happening right now but as we were shooting this films actually Keisha Mukherjee is here who traveled with me to film the first of the trilogy and one of the places where we filmed this actually creamier it never made it into the film in the final version but this is where the ground control for the first space flight of men's best spaceflight of Gagarin took place and basically it's really incredible but it's a gigantic complex it's an array of this huge dishes and all of that but but they're so huge they're like 10 times the size of this building and they're kind of resting a and and kind of decrepit he sensed total entropy like the end of yeah and there are basically small towns attached to them of people that work there yeah and there are basically just some pensioners that cannot afford to move and there are no services there are no shops like they're kind of living in very very very strange condition and then of course you know where the space flight land that is actually karaganda where we shot the second film which was basically a gigantic labor camp with so it's it's very ironic that's cosmonauts went to orbit but where they returned as their they landed in prison yeah so it's I I don't know how to read all of this kind of metaphors and but they are quite strange yeah so I don't know where the ground control is due you know but I mean the the second film I think I know yes it's precisely about that I'm not going to show you because of time but it goes to that location to the former National Observatory of Iraq which is now actually a military base and it tries to it there's a sort of fictional story which tells a story of a space agency for intra territorial space travel implying that the sort of outer space and unknown and whatever that used to be imagine that the big unknown somewhere else is actually here and this is the place that has to be explored the existing space but you know seeing in this work from a different angle this is the this is the point of the interests really j'en see that actually it reconstructs it constructs even the space because the space is what seems to be missing I mean apart let's say from from the people if you say that they if you assume that they are missing the dead hmm well I remember you suggesting that city should redirect their arrays to look for intelligent life on earth yeah it seems you can see simply want to point everything back to this planet yeah it's a reflector strategy like traverse satellite you know the idea was you know I mean people spent so much time looking for extraterrestrial intelligence so why don't we look for human intelligence you know is there any could we find it you know there could be a mission it's even very cheap probably you know or maybe maybe even not cheap but it would be a fraction of the cost of looking for alien intelligence and I'm very sure you know I mean I know for a fact that the reconstruction of terrestrial space can be done at a total fraction of the cost and expense and speculation of the extra-terrestrial one so this is why I think it should be priority but to come back to this point and maybe I think we have to also open up the question in the panel for acini and Trevor to come back to my point about montage the point that I wanted to make is that given you know for me the importance of the production of space and also given the existence of these paradoxes which are not which cannot be reconciled apparently in the idea of cosmicism I think that actually the most important you know formal aspect for me is in the montage of the works because I mean in film theory it's a kind of complete no-brainer but space is actually being constructed if by montage if you have more than two perspectives then you do not only represent the filmic space you make you produce a filmic space right and for me it's very interesting how you articulate these very very different spaces which at the first glance seem nothing to have to do with either cosmos and nor Russia whatsoever and that they are allowed to co-exist and also video can do something that text in a way can't which sometimes especially in its academic versions has to you know for either head or tail towards one theory or not video can actually accommodate you know these paradox are by you know you have these guys in the film who come riding on a horse and ask what is crazy for Atlas so video is able in a way to articulate these these contradictions which could also be read you know as the contradictions between let's say a Russian originated idea of universalism and the cosmos and others like the one Trevor mentioned a Western American to be more precise idea of cosmos of spaceflight you know to and I think that the space that needs would need to be constructed would need to be an articulation actually of all these different paradoxes next to one another without trying to sort of sub laid them because it doesn't seem to be possible heavy I mean would you like to react to that and then I think we should know it just as you were talking I remember that there was I don't remember the quote specifically but apparently Eisenstein wrote something quite specific which is usually cited as his connection to kosm ISM which has to do with montage but sadly I did not remember the quote I think it's in the timeline in the in other gallery but it's it's very close to what you were just saying yeah so as I said the solutions are in the gallery yeah they're they cannot be here in my view

Channel: HKW 100 Years of Now

Views: 6,775

Rating: 4.8315787 out of 5

Keywords: Ausstellung, Diskurs, Kommunismus, Konferenz, Kunstgeschichte, Russland, Science Fiction

Id: b5nlxkbrnP8

Length: 35min 59sec (2159 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 19 2017