First, the camera presents a world for the song to take place in. A spike of sky above a statue that reaches upward forever, a monkey walking nowhere. Then a cut to an excitable audience, the object of their devotion unknown, the light on their faces purple-cool, as if reflected from a screen. This the world of “REALiTi,” abrupt cuts and all, and once the vocals begin, the camera alights on the singer. She lip syncs, zhuzhs her hair, looks up, looks away. The cuts continue, but the singer remains a central fixation of the camera, usually framed in medium. She looks back at the lens even as locations, sensations, and feelings change. To watch Grimes’ self-directed music video for “REALiTi” is to entertain a central cinematic illusion: the appearance of an unbroken gaze across time and space.
If talking about Grimes in 2024 is more complicated than talking about Grimes in 2015, it’s not due to the appearance of unexpected or unexplainable objects. Maybe it’s a question of accelerating forces — the artist has always maintained a ready engagement with the technological, a synthesis of illusory synthetic and pop-glob synaptic. When Grimes began dating the tech-troll magnate Elon Musk, when she released an album avatared by the “anthropomorphic goddess of climate change,” when she invited creators to make content using AI-generated audio of her voice, it all had the feeling of finessing prior interests in technology as a changeable and turbulent forum for artmaking. Grimes represents the problem of commingling the human voice and the technological impulse. Where this intersection used to mean “technological” in a cyborgian way, a corporeal crisis of machine and flesh, in 2024, technology reproduces itself in consciousness itself — the terminator is coming from inside the house.
Beyond separating the artist from the art — microwaved postmodernist dictum simultaneously boring and necessary to rehash — lies the 21st-century challenge to separate the artist from the machine. A crisis of auteurism (“were you you when you were plugged in?”), it’s also a neat byproduct of attention itself becoming the commodity de rigeur. Artistic instrumentation finds itself allied with technology. This has, perhaps, always been the case, though a general acceleration of formats has yielded a certain instability of forms: the camera lives inside the smartphone, the pen inside the “online publishing platform,” the brush inside the generative artificial intelligence.
Film, especially, is no stranger to the technological bargain. More than its cousin artforms, it exists alongside the limitations and developments of market-controlled technologies, sometimes more, sometimes less easily. Did the proliferation of digital filmmaking render every eye a director’s? So long as the right subscriptions and purchases are made to the right tech companies, can a human being become a factory system? More pointedly: once film doesn’t live in a canister or camera chamber anymore, does it live on the Internet? The Internet (what an absurd reduction of feelings, anxieties, and gems encased in those words!) has always depended upon a screen a spectator sees. And so, if it is tempting to call Adele Tulli’s itching, scratchy collapse-y new documentary work Real an imagination of what the Internet “looks like” in 2024, it’s also a rendering of what and where cinema resides in the same epoch.
Real presents a partial case history of how humans look and see. A lot of that gaze interplay takes place because of and inside technology. The film begins, perhaps inevitably, with AI as a young boy living in the Busan Eco-Delta Smart City stares at a camera eye, asking the AI behind (inside?) his smartphone if it exists, how it exists. More than his school-age questions — who hasn’t wasted a few hours asking existential inquiries of BonziBuddy? — Tulli is interested in his face. The digital camera eye lingers on his expression, partially at rest, partially engaged. It’s a look many of the film’s characters reproduce over its 84 minutes, whether they’re at work or rest. Real’s ensemble are united only by edit of a film and the fiber optic cables that enable their hookups and includes, among others: a group engaged in joint meditation via video chat, leopards and hippos and hyenas under night vision surveillance, a streamer performing kink work, a parade of English-speaking influencers confessing their depression (live on video), a VR community of friends and intimates who communicate mostly on the platform ‘VRChat,’ and first-person POV workers (arms and hands and no faces) submerging those fabled fiber optic cables deep underwater.
Fittingly, the feeling a spectator takes away from Real is one of overwhelm and awe. There’s no unifying narration because narratability depends upon the steady knowledge of something, or at least questions that are able to encourage knowing. Techno pessimism, like its opposite, is doomed to forward itself as a narrative, rather than the non- (or maybe extra-) human forces at work in the machine. For every mini-portrait of a young man medically addicted to screens, quarantining like vaporwave Hans Castorp in a tech-free retreat (“…to be among the real people, just to feel human again…”), is the testimonial of a human only ever seen through a VR avatar, confessing and insisting that it was only in seeing that avatar that they truly realized they were trans. For every line of influencers sobbing to their followers, daring the spectator to utter ugly phrases like “deserved,” is a delivery cyclist using late-night streams to ward off the crushing alienating of anything resembling a functioning economy being cannibalized by the temporality of gig. “I don’t know what I would have done without the Internet,” someone demurs at one point. It’s not a value judgment, just the gravity of reality.
That Tulli largely reserves her own judgment is a balm for a spectatorship assaulted seemingly daily with a seemingly endless stream of media takes on “the intersection of culture and technology.” Like Grimes’ video, it’s in the space between the polemics that Tulli exerts a thesis: this is what being alive looks like. There is a pure pleasure on the part of the film in its various frames and shapes. A sperm whale sinks next to slowly submerging Internet cables. A jellyfish appears, unexpected. Two VR avatars nuzzle, make a little glitch in graphic between them — it feels pretty close to the fissure and fission of “real” connection. A camera strapped to a drone makes a real-time map of cities, trees, waves while pirated POV of GoogleMaps depicts a city impossibly from underneath while a 360° photosphere depicts every perspective spiking off an impossible image. The film is experimental in so much as it is full of cameras and lenses poking at reality, pranking it, occasionally instigating new shapes.
Amid the obvious formal joy the film finds in laying pieces of glitch and streams of warping ephemera next to each other is the palpable terror of reality being subsumed to gesture at a price. At its midpoint, the documentary cracks open in a sequence of frankly unnerving and irreal images, all replicating and mirroring and repeating themselves. Here are human faces… kind of. It’s where the human interacts with the network’s infinity camera that Real shows our modern consciousness to be dominated by sharp, restless, overstimulated feelings. At its most despairing, Tulli’s film suggests that our image occupies a kind of permanent unrest. Even as we switch off the stream, get back into comfortable clothes, bid our followers a tearful goodbye, we are scrutinized. Sometimes this is literal surveillance: security camera footage litters the end of Real, an exclamation point reducing bodies to “PERSON.” In this sequence, every person gets caught, data in the stream, but whatever artificial intelligence labeling the bodies in the frame keeps flanging on a small entity in the bottom right corner of the screen. “CHAIR,” it guesses, then “HANDBAG.” Then “CHAIR” again, then “SUITCASE.” That it never succeeds in recognizing the object in question — a security camera — feels like the prank on the self-knowledge of Vertov’s old “I am an eye, a mechanical eye.” Uttered another way, the Real way: “When I get up, this is what I see: welcome to reality.”
Published as part of Locarno Film Festival 2024 — Dispatch 3.
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