2023/8IEME-PARIS

BLACK BOX

[Modern Anaesthetics]

Text 2974/Image 4

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NEVER 0DD OR EVEN

I

“Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.”

These are the instructions we receive fifteen minutes into the 2020 blockbuster TENET, an anticlockwise film in which explosions cause hypothermia and Robert Pattinson plays it straight.

Needless to say, our invitation to sensory abandon comes with strings attached.

This clinical directive to ‘feel’ is offered to the protagonist, an otherwise anonymous secret agent portrayed by John David Washington, as he is being introduced to the uncanny physics that characterise the dimensions of a hidden, temporal war, one that is taking place behind the scenes of the 21st century’s globalised stage.

The war in question is almost imperceptible. It is only gestured to by an ominous tide of matter: objects, weapons, even masked agents, moving backwards against the flow of time. Their entropy has been reversed by technology that has not yet been invented, and as a result they are only indicative of conflict that is yet to come, foreshadowing the actions and attitudes of an unknown future towards its past.

And so from the film’s topsy-turvy visuals— of bullets being subtracted out of walls by pistol fire and wrecked cars flipping back into drive— to the tangle of theoretical physics that underly them, the advice of leaning back and engaging with the film at a visceral, intuitive level is certainly compelling, not least as a rule of thumb for the enjoyment of any article of big-tent cinema.

Which is what makes TENET’s spectacle all the more perplexing, bogged down as it is by arduous, Wikipedia-style exposition— with characters explaining a hive of definitions and philosophical thought-experiments to one another beneath the fuzz of bad of audio mixing— as well as in its refusal to adhere to the only actual tenets it does offer up as worth holding onto. Characters variously extol the importance of humanity, opacity, absurdity; even as the film grimly charts a course through its own mechanics, overriden by its desire to explain everything that undergirds the action with all the self-seriousness of a movie trying to have its Schrödinger's cake and eat it too.

The resulting affair is one that seeks to seal itself within a vacuum of its over-calculated spectacle, in an image of hermeticism that ironically evokes the particles of contaminated air that nevertheless ended up making their way into the film’s proceedings.

As the first major Hollywood release of the coronavirus pandemic, TENET was heralded as an emissary from a better future just ahead, something that would save cinema and its broader economies from the grip of COVID, only to find itself unable to reflect in its box office results the film’s attempt at constructing an edifice that would rise above the viral and temporal vicissitudes that plague our own reality.

As a result, TENET is a movie that is both more and less than the sum of its resoundingly interlocking parts, an artefact of rationality and prophylaxis in a chaotic, uncontainable world.

II

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, the cerebral, sartorial stalwart of the 200-million dollar epic, TENET operates in the self-contained fictional vein of a main character finding themselves on an impossible mission to save the world.

Washington’s fresh-faced protagonist is recruited into a web of unknown powers and operatives and left to discover the stakes at the same time as the audience, in a ticking of information that clocks with the nature of spy-craft as well as cinematic suspense. Using deduction (the charismatic cousin of logic) to progress from scene to scene, continent to continent, the protagonist is a dashing stroke of navy against an otherwise muted tonal palette, one comprised of pale brushstrokes that make synthetic gestures towards dynamics such as friendship, power, love and evil.

The first of these is developed through a budding camaraderie between the protagonist and fellow agent Neil, played with rakish flair by Robert Pattinson, which succeeds with all the ease and unspoken codes of masculinity and quiet luxury, standards stirred only by the occasional ripple made by a charismatic black man moving through the stuffy halls of wealth and tradition. When the protagonist orders food at a members-only club, or an espresso in the high-corporate antechamber of a Freeport, we catch a glimpse of the webs of power illuminated by those commands, or just the mere reality in which food and drink are more than just set-dressing. These orders do a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to conveying lightness and familiarity; the idea that these characters are real people with personalities and appetites. “He’ll have a diet coke,” says Pattinson, coyly. “I ordered my hot sauce an hour ago!” quips Washington before dispatching some henchmen, James-Bond-style, in a stainless steel kitchen that underlies the aesthetic of the film entire.

These outlines would all be polished enough, were it not for the film’s insistence on raising its dramatic and personal stakes to match those of its overwrought plot— a move that thuds with the presence of Sator, the clunky Russian villain, and Kat, the pallid damsel in distress, played by Keneth Branagh and Elizabeth Debicki respectively, who’s frosty relationship is held up against the increasingly vague spectre of the end of the world.

The threat, as we are constantly being reminded, is somehow even worse than nuclear holocaust. It is worse even than the ravages of climate change, a shadow that the movie alludes to but still discounts as secondary to its ultimate peril. Because those nefarious forces in the future are revealed to be attempting to use their entropy-reversal technology in order to flip the direction of all of linear time, an intervention which would precipitate the end of history itself.

The pile-up of these overlapping armageddons reaches a histrionic anti-climax with R-Pat’s grave warning that absolutely everyone who has ever lived will cease to exist if Sator’s plan goes ahead. “Including my son?” asks Kat, in disbelief. It’s the perfect response to a world in permacrisis, in which the amount of doomsday scenarios we’re meant to continuously bear in mind becomes a fucked-up maths equation to which the only answer is, yes sure, but what about Maximilian?

As such, the result is that the film’s melodrama is matched only by the audience’s apathy— both of which being the only rational responses to the threat of literal nothingness that the film sketches out.

These are also the extremes that inflect a far more nuanced register of nihilism and absurdity familiar to anyone who has grown up with the internet, in a world beset by existential peril and our seeming inability to do anything but watch. This current mood has been widely expanded upon by the ultra-pointue coiners of cultural criticism, with Shumon Basar’s Endcore summarising the hazy confluence of digital memes and doomscrolled politics amidst the dystopian economies of late capitalism, explaining the recent proliferation of silver screen multiverses as scaled imaginative escapes from the depressing state of our own reality, where there’s always another timeline, crossover or Taika Waititi production credit to get us through to the next CGI-melting instalment (1).

But once again, here are TENET’s cold-hard blackboard diagrams to remind us that parallel-dimension theory is wishful thinking and that this is the only reality we’ve got. And as if to insist on this point, the movie spends the bulk of its 150-minute runtime retreading the same diegetic terrain, as it doubles back into itself, tying itself up into a modernist bow shaped like a möbius strip.

III

Taking into account that you might not have seen TENET (judging by its failure to save the multiplex), while also recognising that there are no longer many decontextualised encounters with new pieces of media, thanks to endless reveal trailers, internet discourses and the bankability of recognisable I.P., the film can be best summarised as a series of dress rehearsals, each containing the real production embedded somewhere within.

It opens in a Ukrainian opera house, charged with the uneasy strains of string instruments being tuned, as heavy soundproofing doors descend around the theatre in anticipation of the performance. But before it can truly begin, the instrumentation is interrupted by a terrorist raid; one that is quickly revealed as a smokescreen for an assassination attempt, as well as for those seeking to foil it. Meanwhile the audience lie unconscious, gassed into slumber, peppered with stray bullets, waiting for the show to start.

The protagonist goes out of his way to save the audience as he completes his mission, before being captured and swallowing a suicide pill under interrogation— only to have the whole thing revealed as a test, an audition, recruiting him into a metafictional afterlife where he can continue to ‘save the audience’ by going behind the scenes, into the realm of espionage and symbolism that produces reality as a stable fiction. This limbo is where the film remains, taking place in the liminal infrastructure of our contemporary globe— in wind farms and shipping containers, highways and airports, booming megacities and Soviet ruins.

What he encounters here is the spatial and temporal evidence of his own actions as they themselves have been scripted, revealed across the two heists that he finds himself having to pull off. The first involves infiltrating a climate-controlled vault, one that sucks all the air out of room to protect its contents from fire, leaving any bystanders suffocating on the floor. In this case, the protagonist knows that the Goya painting he is trying to steal is a fake. It is only when he discovers that the plutonium that he has initiated a high-speed chase in pursuit of is not plutonium at all— just a literal algorithm for the villains’ plan— that the abstract lines between art, reality and fiction start to become as thick as lead-lining.

Because not only are these objects held up and announced as McGuffins, symbolising nothing other than the artifice and formula of fiction, but it is soon revealed, as the protagonist reverses his direction through time, that he himself was the mysterious agent that he encountered in each of these sequences— once again confirming that all of his actions had already been dress-rehearsed and that the real operation was being determined elsewhere.

It all builds up to one final battle reenactment taking place in a brutalist desert sandbox. This proves to be an unintelligible skirmish of temporally-reversed soldiers and blaring explosions—with the real resolution buried at its centre, behind a locked door, through a collapsed tunnel, and beneath any reasonable attempt at following what in the hell is going on.

At this point it is clear that we might as well be the audience in the opera-house, gassed into unconsciousness while the hole in the fourth wall is restored; the cinematic equivalent of the airplane announcement that tells you to fit your own oxygen mask before helping the person next to you, or the prompt on X that reads ‘What is happening!?’ before you start typing up your tweet. We are the unfortunate bystanders passed out in the airless art vault while the coffee gets cold, waiting to be woken up by a merciful bullet or accidental sex scene.

And this is all rather a shame, because the film is fairly punchy and intriguing up until it starts going back inside of itself, where it loses the thread and begins to operate in the constant register of anti-climax, leaving a metallic aftertaste, like surgical tools left inside of a body. It feels almost like half of a film, a piece of stainless-steel scaffolding in the shape of a blockbuster, where the scale and layers of misdirection within the movie can only point us back out of it, as we search for the real film in the parallels it strikes with its own production.

IV

Christopher Nolan is well-known for eschewing CGI in favour of practical effects, preaching this form of cinematic realism with enough evangelism to warrant some genuine concerns that he might detonate an actual nuke for his Oppenheimer biopic, like some kind of military-budget Nathan Fielder. The Hollywood marketing machine regularly churns out film-purist headlines from his productions, such as the real Boeing 747 he bought for TENET in order to drive it into a wall, as well as the hundreds of miles of IMAX film he shoots, not to mention his tendency of locking actors in vaults so that they can securely read his scripts before he casts them. The spectacle of his productions, coupled with the secrecy with which he guards them, inevitably adds another layer to the proceedings, another impure context to vanquish with the sheer force of the movies themselves.

His filmography, especially the Dark Knight Trilogy and Inception, has broadly come to stand as a grand stage across which the age-old conflict between order and chaos, fiction and reality, calculated diagram and unpredictable terrain takes place. A post-9/11 mood of terrorism, anarchy and decay is addressed via labyrinthine plots, monumental architectural blueprints, and massive technical undertakings, reflected in the scale of the film productions themselves; where the power of ‘legendary’ fiction to contain and overcome the mess of reality is asserted by their aesthetic ‘realism’, alongside the conceptual and narrative complexity of the entertainment— with the intellectual blockbuster representing an apotheosis of early-2010-capitalism’s claim to global dominance and ultimate consumer fulfilment. Nowhere is this mode more evident than in the way Nolan turned a comic about a billionaire who runs around in a bat-suit into a dark, gritty trilogy of realpolitik and myth-making, complete with an abortive class revolution and the saving graces of mass surveillance.

And yet in the face of a world in which the balance between reality and fiction has become utterly fragmented, amidst threats so diffuse and yet so dire that they can no longer be contained by a single sweeping plan or narrative, TENET empties itself of any real substance or superstructure and instead lets the machinery of fiction become its content, where even the threat of the world ending becomes abstracted to narrative idiom itself.

Because not only is the main character literally called the protagonist— but the film closes with narration about ‘the bomb that doesn’t go off’ being the one that really matters. This is such a glaring echo of Alfred Hitchcock’s rule for cinematic suspense, in which a bomb hidden under a table is only creating tension so long as it doesn’t explode, that the film essentially defuses itself by explaining its own physics as a fictional device for creating and resolving suspense. It is equally so committed to the logic that a narrative must resolve itself via its own inner mechanisms, rather than rely on accidents of fate or deus ex machina, that the second half of the film is a literal revision of the first, an exercise in tracing just how prefabricated it all is.

The resolution that the movie eventually provides, where it is revealed that the protagonist is the one who has been pulling his own strings all along, writing his own script from the future, is the final screw in the film’s own postmortem of itself; succumbing entirely to main character syndrome. We are left with the assurance that the real film happens before and after the one we just saw, as the agents continue their work, tying up any loose ends, closing the gap in the plot fabric, so that the seal between fiction and reality might one day be restored, and the audience may be woken up from their slumber to watch a different movie, one that is free to make contact with the world we all live in.

At first glance, TENET appears to be an anticipation and rejection of the future of cinema in the era of digital media and narrative collapse. But this is just the edge of the void that the film traces, the black hole at its centre, one that in trying to draw a circle around, it only succumbs to— cancelling itself out like some sterile sketch of a future that remains to be imagined.

100I

I

In his 1976 Artforum essay, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, Brian O’Doherty writes:

“Life is horizontal, just one thing after another, a conveyor belt shuffling us toward the horizon. But history, the view departing from the spacecraft, is different. As the scale changes, layers of time are superimposed and through them we project perspectives with which to recover and correct the past” (2).

He goes on to describe how the flux of this historical vantage is contrasted by the architecture of the white cube gallery— which situates itself beyond time, space and even history, sealed within its own airlock like a tomb. Through its combination of devotional and minimalist aesthetics, as well as claims to neutral conditions akin to those of a laboratory, the white walls of this space produce a limbo-like “eternity of display”. Visitors are murmuring ghosts at best, and in most representations of these spaces are absent entirely. The idealised purity of the white cube is that of an unpeopled vault, one that preserves ‘art’, and the fixed historical perspective that frames it, from the world beyond.

O’Doherty’s essay brings us to this point by tracing the literal frames that surround paintings and once authoritatively declared their contents as discontinuous with the world around them. These frames were solid, firm, functioning to demarcate the paintings as windows into illusory spaces possessed of great depth.

Yet over time, these borders began to find themselves lapsing, no longer able to assert a rigid difference between the contents of these artworks and their surroundings. This shift— ushered in above all by the compositional language of the camera, as well as the overlaps between photographs and the real world they depicted— was accompanied by new ways of asserting the singularity of these paintings as art objects, both through their arrangement in their exhibition space as well as through new painting styles that played off of the recognition of paintings as textured surfaces, rather than fixed windows, where like their frames, paintings themselves were now seen as mere containers for meaning, at a moment when almost anything was beginning to be able to be classified as art. The white walls of the gallery came to stand for a final institutional authority, declaring what was and was not art, just about maintaining a distinction between foreground and background that the mass-cultural upheavals of the 20th century were beginning to erode.

Because as time passes, context becomes content. Everything comes to form a part of the record, which in turn becomes the materials through which we access and reconsider the past. Objects that we once considered banal attain new resonance as historical artefacts, and as a result are constantly taking on different frames, reflecting the shifting cultural definitions of art itself. The white cube represents an escape from this progression, suspending art objects in a void and treating the traditions that frame and value them as such as a matter of inevitability. History becomes a teleology, a totalised zenith that necessarily extends into the future, preserving the values of the society that entombed them, in a closed system faced towards eternity.

This process is mirrored across the walls in TENET, as they undergo a sweeping process of restoration. Bullets are sucked out of the mortar and explosions are swept away, leaving the concrete intact and clear. The mess of action and reaction that comprises the events that will one day become history, the context that becomes content, is cleansed by the technology of the film. The specific becomes the general and the background is preserved as such.

It’s as if Nolan has taken the forensic gaze that has distinguished his previous films to its logical conclusion, where instead of examining the remains of a bullet hole to authoritatively uncover what has happened in the past, TENET involves the use of available data to analyse events in the future, before they have even happened. The only way to do so with certainty, rather than predictively, lies in extending the past into the future, programming what is to come so as to abolish ambiguity, producing a smooth, linear ‘progression’ of events; one that is actually based on a repetition of the past. TENET means ‘contain’, ‘master’, ‘preserve’, where the word itself is a blueprint of how to enact this control.

If you understand the film’s titular palindrome as the word TEN spelled forwards and backwards, almost simultaneously, this means it can also be read as I00I. Binary code baby; a doubling that situates us in between words and numbers; the analog and the digital; something and nothingness. Sharing their essential qualities with those of computer algorithms, palindromes go one step further, containing both their instructions and their results all in one package— where the first half programmes the second. Extended to a way of controlling and producing the future, as a dataset rather than a sequence of uncertain events, this optic would supposedly allow the anticipation, and therefore prevention, of apocalyptic events in the future. Or to put it in less linear terms— it reflects a desire to see what happens after the end of the world.

At the centre of the film is the image of a plane crashing into a hanger, again and again. It cannot do so multiple times in reality, because it is a real Boeing 747, but in being filmed by many cameras, it can be reconstructed from all kinds of angles and temporalities. In the movie, this event happens both forwards and in reverse. The plane is empty, and it only crashes on the ground. It is like a dress rehearsal for a real failure up in the sky, a way of gathering information about a future malfunction, like a ritual sacrifice, repeating over and over as if to commune with a crash that is yet to happen, building a bridge across space and time with an endless stream of data.

And at the heart of the vehicle, is the black box.

II

Black Box is a World War II phrase. It was used to describe navigational devices in combat aircrafts, such as radar and radio, because of the secrecy that shrouded them, as well as their non-reflective casing. These days the term refers to the recording instrument in aeroplanes that is built to survive a crash in order to provide information about what went wrong. They are possessed of a dense, almost transcendent physicality, where they can withstand temperatures of over 1000 degrees as well as cataclysmic g-forces. The boxes are opaque, illegible in themselves, but contain the analog metadata, the universal code that can then be decrypted in order to find out what went wrong.

This is the negative silhouette that underpins TENET’s non-specificity as a film, its cold globe-spinning and cog-like plot, dressed up in the boilerplate of spy films. But if this empties out the story and the characters into mere vessels of information, it is also where the movie succeeds at an aesthetic, technical level, embodying the factory settings of the black box and its borderline-abstract state between illegibility and universality.

Because for one, black boxes aren’t actually black. In fact they are painted a luminous orange in order to make them more easily identifiable. This is reflected across the high-vis jackets worn in the film by those working in the background of docks and airports, as well as in the uniforms and vehicles of emergency services, which are essentially the same across the globe. This universal visual language extends to the aesthetics of street design, from traffic lights to road paint, as well as to the stick-figures and skulls of warning signs— such as those that warn people away from nuclear waste sites, which are designed to be legible for thousands of years to come, in case future generations no longer speak the languages of the past.

It is also where TENET’s bad Russian accents can be explained, where the the movie evokes the Black Box at a sonic level, as inverted voices speak against the flow of time, in a garbled dialect that is universal in its illegibility, like raw data yet to be decrypted. (It also happens that English, when played backwards, sounds vaguely Eastern European).

Composer Ludwig Göransson extends this space-blanket distortion to his score, using retrograde compositions— melodies which sound the same forwards and backwards— and industrial drones to harmonise with the auto-tuned voice of Travis Scott, which itself is warped to the point where it blends into the asphalted soundscape, along with the recurring motif of string-instruments being tuned— in another texture of unprocessed sonic information.

It’s as if film is aspiring to be metadata rather than content, turning opaque and scrambled in order to insulate itself against uncertainty; looking to survive the crash instead of confronting the tenuous moment we live in. Bracing itself for the End of History.

Not only does this reflect a denial of the moment we are living through, in which the forces of ‘history' supposedly vanquished by the neoliberal world order have returned with catastrophic consequences, but it also speaks to another fear— one initiated by the digital revolution and its dissolution of reality into pixels; a yawning, dimensionless void of data into which we are all steadily slipping.

Beyond the prevailing concerns about Artificial Intelligence, another current of pessimism surrounding this sequel to the End of History is based on the threat of a new Dark Age, one resulting from the gradual loss of the physical records that connect us to the past, due to an over-reliance on digital technologies that leave everything that came before them obsolescent. This anxiety is embedded in every frame of Nolan’s movies, coiled in the canisters of analog film that they are recorded on.

Such concerns, of essentially being erased by a future that can no longer see us, are both reasonable and overblown, adding weight to the need for investment in archival infrastructure while otherwise representing a solemn response to what appears to be an ongoing erosion of enlightenment values, i.e. the contradiction of our extreme uncertainty in this age of information.

The second, even more sweeping fear, is of how digital media and the internet represent an end to time as a single, linear progression, and instead offer up a constantly expanding horizon of the past and present; one that has no order other than the one we give to it, collapsing time and space into a dust of 1s and 0s.

And so, caught as we are between a monolithic order and a chaos of particles, we return once more to the palindrome— as something that represents an awkward attempt at reconciling these two opposite realities while clinging to an artificial ideal of progress and unity. Because on the one hand palindromes appear to depict control and programming— a way of being certain about the past and future, where you can pick one up and get the same information from either end. But on the other, the strictures of the palindrome form tend to result in strange, nonsensical phrases that in themselves have no greater meaning beyond their collapsible outlines. Their attempt at creating a tenuous, balanced whole only draws attention to the individual letters that make up each word, resulting in a contained version of linear time through its deconstruction; a denial of chaos and imagination in favour of cold mechanical calculation; a future that gives up on being the future and instead falls back entirely on the past.

This is the impasse that TENET, and its coeval ideologies of progress and purity, find themselves at. In the face of a strange and messy reality, they resolve themselves instead to the image of a Black Box, floating in space, containing the instructions for an ordered world that never was, one that can be decrypted in the millennia to come like some petty, multi-dimensional I Told You So.

But you know what? I watched TENET backwards on YouTube, and it sucked.

Yet at the same time it felt like a step in the right direction.

0.10

I

“Number will come to replace faith.”

This quote is attributed to the Russian Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov, a man who wrote strange and wonderful poetry that ticked and whirred around the impossible ideal of a pure, transparent, universal — what he called a ‘stellar’— language. He experimented with palindromes and made squares out of the binary oppositions that confine human thought to its shallow dimensions of morality and perception, producing work that seemed to exist on a plane of both absolute reason and utter madness. One example is his use of Zaum, a non-referential language which makes no sense at all and yet reflects a Babelian desire to demonstrate that certain sounds and symbols possess singular meanings that are equal in themselves to the things that they describe.

The total sum of his work can be understood as a desire to uncover the universal, mathematical order behind all things, an ambition made solemn, desperate even, by his experience of the incomprehensible mechanical violence of World War 1. Khlebnikov sought to somehow explain a higher reason behind these horrors in order to prevent them from ever happening again, internalising the machinic intensity of such an endeavour to the extent that fellow Futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky would remark how “Khlebnikov is not a poet for the consumer, Khlebnikov is a poet for the manufacturer”.

The futurists were pioneering these radical new forms of spiritualism in post-revolutionary Russia, at the end of centuries of orthodox tradition and amidst the many technological upheavals and utopian aspirations of the era. Nowhere is this break from the past more on display than 1915’s Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings, or 0.10. Pronounced ‘Zero-Ten’, this was an exposition made up of strange, minimal forms at the geometric intersection of reason and abstraction. Floating against their canvases, as well as the drab gallery walls, these shapes— a constellation of rectangles and pluses— must have appeared like relics of a future language, one comprised of symbols as opaque and jagged as alien spacecraft.

One figure above all emerges from this ‘Last Exhibition’, a man for whom it truly did come to represent an ending, not only for himself but for all of art, as well as the modern world that his artwork heralded. He even placed this painting at the ‘icon corner’ of the room, the space traditionally held by objects of religious symbolism, to assert this new paradigm. This artist’s name was Kazimir Malevich. And his artwork was the Black Square.

The founder of Suprematism, the art movement for which Zero-Ten was the world’s first introduction, Malevich spoke of painting as a pure technique of destruction and creation, where Suprematist works would depict new forms that had nothing to do with the representing the earthly world, espousing a manifesto of non-objectivity that launched the notion of abstract art into orbit. One such expression of this came in the form of his Architectons — futuristic drawings of sleek, rocket-like buildings, which bore no fealty to the laws of gravity and instead conjured a higher plane of existence beyond the limits of planet earth. Such visionary conjectures were a staple of the futurist programme, with Khlebnikov writing essays that pictured towering glass buildings and mass communication systems that could circulate information around the world.

Alongside the other Russian Futurists, Malevich staged an opera entitled Victory Over the Sun, a performance written in Zaum and presenting an outlandish narrative in which reason is abolished, time and physics are usurped, and the sun itself is knocked off its perch. Malevich’s role in the production was that of set-designer, for which he made a curtain marked by a square symbol, one that would eventually be drawn beyond the boundaries of the stage and across the entirety of the Western world.

Because not only would he use this backdrop as the basis for the Black Square, producing the world’s first piece of abstract art by bringing the background into the fore and upending centuries of representative art, but this symbol would eventually be draped over his coffin upon his death in 1935, at the edge of a world about to be engulfed by another impossible tide of darkness and global violence.

“It is the thing that is obvious, it is the thing that is ordinary, it is the thing we see everywhere and it is the thing we do not understand. It is the thing that is dark, seems empty and yet contains everything”, intones the introductory speaker for a talk by the YIVO Institute entitled Black Square: Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism (3). Writing for the New Yorker, Tatyana Tolstaya is even more specific and sweeping in her description of the artwork as “the most frightening [event] in art in all of its history of existence” (4). These characterisations stem from the overwhelming fact that the Black Square is irreducibly itself— a simple shape, painstakingly filled in with a single colour, set against a white background— and at the same time seems to speak to nothing other than the rest of the universe that surrounds it. The painting looms there, in all its flatness and depth, containing within its darkness an atomic truth about everything, about art, about existence, painted at the dawn of the cascading scientific, technological and spiritual upheavals that forged our new millennium.

Malevich spoke of this work as the ‘zero point’ of art. Neither inherently good or bad in itself— where to Malevich it represented a ‘pivot for renewal’— the Black Square is the inescapable canvas upon which everything has since been placed, casting the act of creation against a shadow of nothingness that at any moment risks overwhelming the frame. To remain there is to remain within the corpse of modernism, producing epitaphs for its grand designs and ideology of the ‘new’. It was the fate of these artists to predict such an end-point. But beyond it, there can only be nothingness.

II

“To rewrite modernity is the historical task of this early twenty-first century: not to start at zero or find oneself encumbered by the store-house of history, but to inventory and select, to use and download.” (5)

This is the call to action delivered by Postproduction, the essay by Nicolas Bourriaud, as he outlines the future of both the production and spectatorship of art in the wake of the 20th century’s digital democratisation and coeval death knells of originality and authorship. Using DJs and internet-surfers as literalised examples of how data is programmed and sampled for creative ends, Bourriaud extrapolates this logic to a conception of art-making as inherently an act of remixing. In this paradigm, the individual artist emerges as merely one node in a chain of production that extends all the way to the audience, as active participants— or ‘manufacturers’— of an artwork’s meaning. Such a dynamic is an elaboration of Duchamp’s utterance “it is the viewers who make the paintings”, holding up the possibility of an equal exchange between an audience’s response and the artist’s intentions, and yet one that will always result in something akin to the expression 2+2=5. Because no matter the artist’s programming, the individual spectator’s response will always be formatted through their own experiences, their own references, their own vernacular. This hinges on the understanding that no artwork is the final result of the creative act and its crystallisation of meaning, but the material point of many intersecting narratives, uses and codes that are rewritten by an active spectator.

The arrival of AI models such as MidJourney and Dall-E have sharply reflected this understanding of de-centred authorship and programmed creativity, with language models like ChatGPT extending this even to the discipline considered most immune to mechanisation; most emblematic of the lone act of creation— writing. The first domino here is the understanding that the written word is essentially a remix of letters in the first place, towards ends that are filtered through inescapable layers of formal and creative influence, and which ultimately constitute a dialogue between writer and reader that has no fixed outcome. The final domino is the black box, looming beyond the image of an Alexandrian archive of everything ever written or produced within our internet-accessible civilisational store-house, as a monolithic computer server containing it all yet inaccessible in its entirety to any one of us. We can only prompt, search, copy and paste. Or as the philosopher Vilém Flusser puts it— envision.

In his seminal treatise Into the Universe of Technical Images, Flusser locates society at the cusp of this meaningless state of abstraction. In explaining how we got here, he outlines how the technology of writing— as something that is read in one direction and dimension— precipitated the linear, progressive concept of time that constitutes ‘history’, realised in effect by the advent of the printing press and the organisation of societies with this media as their operating system. He then diagnoses the decay of this linearity as something that is both accompanied and reflected by the infinite profusion of digital images that are increasingly comprising and denaturing our reality. Flusser writes: “we owe these images to a technology that came from scientific theories, theories that show us ineluctably that “in reality,” everything is a swarm of points in a state of decay, a yawning emptiness. The science and the technology that developed from it, these triumphs of Western civilisation, have, on one hand, eroded the objective world around us into nothingness and, on the other, bathed us in a world of illusion”. (8)

Confronted with this void, Flusser condemns a search for explanations, calculations, extensions of linear thought that pursue a unity where there is none, reflecting our desire to comprehend this void of particles in the same way that a machine might. Instead he extolls a “new, visionary, superficial mode of thinking”, in the form of the ‘technical image’. This casts the digital image as an imagined surface that is projected onto the emptiness of the void, a new kind of ‘false depth’ that can only be regarded superficially— for otherwise it would merely testify to the pixels that comprise it; the banality of a universe of decaying particles. Situating these images beyond categories such as real, fictional or illusory, instead they chart a direction away from a universe that is all of these states at once, towards the concrete realm of human experience that defies computation.

Between Flusser and Bourriaud, and the way they articulate how enmeshed we are with machines; how modern technology has not only revealed the granular reality upon which the objective world is premised, but also reflected all the ways in which our individual creative faculties are mere elaborations of an automated ability to accumulate and remix data, the question of the black box takes one final turn.

III

We spend our lives pressing buttons, setting off chain reactions beyond our comprehension which compose the oceanic void of particles into legible form, all while having little to no understanding of the inner mechanisms that facilitate such processes; continuous as they are with the inner workings of the universe; of the depths our own minds. These black boxes present us with a constant provocation to leap beyond the idea of the self, of linear time, of our desire for control, towards a plane of information exchange that will set us free from the empty objectivity of the universe.

And so what does it mean if, in trying to envision this, I am unable to picture it? If computers are becoming more like us, unlike Flusser, I am willing to consider a future in which we only grow more attuned to the pixels and particles that reality is comprised of, using our machinic prostheses to treat these as materials that can be threaded through the digital architecture of our world, rather than obscured by the images upon the screen that pretend this substrate doesn’t exist. Rather than starting and ending with our subjectivity, I’m more interested in a middle point— between our human perceptions and those revealed by machines, a way of not taking the black box at face value, but viewing it as only one node within endless chain of particles just like it that can be brought to bear on the way we see and act within a universe as equally unknown to us as ourselves.

Writing this piece, I started to feel both robotic in the awareness of my mind going through its rote ordering of points and references, reaching conclusions predetermined by its current dataset, while also catching a strange, fretful sense of liberation resulting from the suspicion that writing itself was somehow already obsolete, and could therefore be approached via entirely different terms than those I had previously held sacred.

I had a few dreams about Christopher Nolan during this process, none of them very interesting but all vivid in the impression that he knew I was no longer as enamoured with his films as I once was as a kid, their totalising visions now just stray breezes in my sleeping mind.

If that aside isn’t enough of a flow disruption, I might as well break the fourth wall entirely and acknowledge this moment right here, the ephemeral strangeness of someone else reading these words across time and space. Somewhere between these horizons — the mechanical, the subconscious, the intersubjective, is the dimensionless future that I’ve spent this essay gesturing towards. If, in tracing those outlines, it has only managed to collapse in on itself, then I can only hope that it is not an end, but a starting point on the way towards embodying, rather than explaining, that unknown direction that we all seem to be headed in.

There’s a scene in TENET in which Elizabeth Debicki’s character is appraising a painting’s value, speaking about its provenance, the use of microscopes and X-Rays to ascertain its veracity. “But what does your heart tell you,” asks the protagonist, in another muffled echo of its mathematical, self-contradicting tenet of ‘feeling’ > ‘understanding’. Later on, I came to learn that Malevich’s Black Square was subjected to a variety of forensic technologies itself, the results of which revealed a racist joke underneath its layer of paint. Beneath this still, there was another, rainbow-coloured artwork, upon which Malevich had added his avant-garde masterpiece. Strangely enough, I think that even more than the dark shape that it depicts, this fact of its hidden, subterranean layers conveys the painting’s meaning better than it does as just a plain, monolithic surface. In its various negations and claims to being a tabula rasa, or frame within a frame, the impossibility of containing its own messy relationship with the world becomes literalised by the contradiction of its flatness, depth, and what actually lies beneath it. Zero becomes an act, not a start or end point.

And there is a world on the other side of the void.

1. Author/Sam Harding

Marginalia
[1] Basar, Shumon, “The Dawn of Endcore,” Flash Art, December 2022, https://flash---art.com/article/endcore

[2] O’Doherty, Brian. “Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space.” Artforum. 1976.

[3] “Black Square: Malevich and the Origins of Suprematism.” Youtube. Uploaded by YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. 05.12.13.

[4] Tolstaya, Tatyana. “The Square.” New Yorker. 2015.

[5] Bourriaud, Nicolas. “Postproduction.” New York. Lukas & Sternberg. 2002.

[6] Flusser, Vilém. “Into the Universe of Technical Images.” Minneapolis. University of Minnesota Press. 2011.