Hysteresis, the award-winning five-minute film by Berlin-based artist Robert Seidel, is an exemplary experiment in the symbiosis between human consciousness and AI machine-rendered play with form and texture. The film has just returned home after a two-year tour of screenings on the indie film circuit that included Berlin, Taipei, Taichung, Ann Arbor, Rio de Janeiro, and Glasgow. In the latter venue, Hysteresis was part of a festival: Rise of the Empathy Machines: Do You See What (A)I See? And this is as good an entry as any into what Seidel’s current project is all about.
The festival featured human intersections and interactions with machines, of which AI is a sub-product. The ALT/KINO festival website tells us:
How does artificial intelligence see the world? And how does it interpret and process what it sees? … As the discourse becomes ever more infatuated with the output of machine learning, this selection of films seeks to understand how what it yields is a reaction to what data has been fed into it. Ranging from the reflections of a machine poet about human-shot footage to the existential musings of a self-driving car, this programme wonders what is going on in the mind of an AI as it observes, processes, interacts with, and, ultimately, remakes the world.
Hysteresis is the feature short of this festival.
The notion that one can be an empath with machines, or, as Psychology Today has referred to them, «synesthetes” with «a rare form of mirror-touch synesthesia—profound empathy extending to machines», is shocking and profound in its implications. I am especially interested in this phenomenon, as I have been doing research in the area of the technological singularity for a doctoral dissertation and recently published a piece in The Conversation that examines the merge of mind and matter that takes place with brain-computer interfaces (BCI) that allow a person to engage with a computer (by way of a bluetooth AI) strictly through thoughts. For these engagements to work, the BCI has to translate brain signals it reads to digital commands, implying that thoughts can be digitised. This possibility has some BCI company executives, such as Elon Musk, enthusiastic about a future when humans will possess machine-mediated telepathy. What one wonders is whether such «mediation» amounts to machine consciousness.
But what is hysteresis? In his upcoming book Hysteresis, Maurizio Ferraris argues that hysteresis is a fundamental feature of human experience. He writes, «hysteresis is the ability of effects to survive even when their causes have ceased to exist.» This means that the past is never truly gone and can continue to shape the present in ways we may not even be aware of.
For artists and cultural producers, this understanding of hysteresis can be a powerful tool. It can help us see the connections between past and present and use them to create new and innovative work. It can also help us to challenge the status quo and to imagine new possibilities for the future.
HYSTERESIS | Robert Seidel | Soundtrack by Oval from Robert Seidel on Vimeo.
In Hysteresis, Seidel uses digital technology to explore the ways in which past events can be reactivated in the present. On Seidel’s website, the artist tells us that he is «Unveiling a frenetic, delicate and flamboyant visual language that speaks to the hysteria and hysteresis in this historical moment» and that he «wants to open a discourse about these unique modes of AI creation – with implications beyond the film and other media, to that singularity, where history collapses into a single point in the present.» Have we reached the event horizon at which civilisation and its experiment in light and bio have begun to be pulled into the hole we dug for ourselves? This would account for the hysteria of eschatological vibes in the air.
The short film is intense and frantic, and full of the light of reason. Chaos and incoherence, too. It’s a melting pot for the interpenetrability of all being, or, as David Finkelstein, author of Stem Cells of the Mind, is quoted at the site saying of the film, «…such a web fascinates us because it resembles so closely the way that the mind works all the time, whether we’re aware of it or not, reflecting the dense interconnections of all existence.» And I agree.
For artists and cultural producers, this understanding of hysteresis can be a powerful tool.
The viewer is warned of graphic imagery and flashes that could affect epileptic viewers. I had a strong visceral response; felt pulled into a process I didn’t understand but was fascinated by. And though it has, at first, the confronting energy of a hot spanking Yoko Ono primal scream, Hysteresis happens in a space where no one can hear you scream. Seidel writes, «No origin, no responsibility, no clear bias – just a primordial soup that can be transformed into any form without questioning knowledge systems and hierarchies.» Absolute Possibility. It brings, for a moment or two, vertigo.
A token narrative has «queer performer» Tsuki dancing ritually and gesturally, embodying aspects of theatre, including Ballet, Butoh and Berlin club culture. This is a strange combination to me at first, as when I consider Berlin club culture, for instance, I recall watching the splendid TV series Babylon Berlin, with its kinky nightclub doings darkly juxtaposed with the growing tension in Germany between Communists and the nascent of fascists of the National Socialist movement.
Seidel writes of Tsuki, «In a fusion process, her image is recorded, fed back through Seidel’s devices and then projected onto her body.» It’s fusion, and it’s fugal. One question I had was whether this re-centring unfolding is the exclusive product of queer thinking or an opportunity to come to terms with the next paradigm shift ahead. Seidel writes, «The resulting Muybridgean silhouettes, baroque textures and bursting painterly structures fluctuate between the second and third dimensions, unfolding free-floating gestures that unhinge the laws of nature.» The word ‘unhinge’ is rather strong.
Hysteresis seems to describe the way a machine might have lucid dreams. It’s an alien language, but to the sensitive viewer, it presents an internal logic that is not necessarily exclusive — and is rather provocative in the same way that the aliens are in the sci-fi film, Arrival, where a linguist is able to empathise with the internal structures of meaning proffered up by the creatures. Beyond the linguistic angle, I’m reminded of my readings in phenomenology so many years ago — in particular, the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty.
Hysteresis happens in a space where no one can hear you scream.
In his seminal work, The Primacy of Perception (PP), he describes an oft-neglected aspect of seeing that is not common to most people but there as a default for the artist. He writes in the PP, «Since things and my body are made of the same stuff, vision must somehow come about in them; or yet again, their manifest visibility must be repeated in the body by a second visibility.» I submit that it is this second visibility that Seidel invites the viewer to participate in. It may well be the essential make-up of machine consciousness understood as the sum of all possibilities.
Hysteresis features an excellent soundtrack from Oval (Markus Popp), itself an aural fracturing and reordering that incorporates oriental motifs and jazz sprays and sound effects of glass breakage that suggest a fantasia wherein nothing matters or, at least, where there is no permanence. Seidel writes of the Oval music: «The soundtrack by Oval (Markus Popp) incessantly corrodes this dense web of associations, threatening to dissolve the remaining fragile points of reference.» I agree.
