Interfaces 01: Metric Imagination

One of the defining features of late capitalist society, which we inhabit whether we like it or not, is the penetration of quantification into all areas of its functioning. With the growing pressure for measurable performance, the proliferation of all sorts of statistics, rankings, and data analyses, and the constant evaluation of others as well as ourselves, we are all dealing with it. Even more disturbing, however, is the spread of metric logic into spheres that have long been considered relatively immune to it - primarily artistic creation and the humanities, meaning the fields that are presumably nearest to the audience of Artyčok.TV.

Contemporary artists cannot get by without competing for grants, fighting for as many spots as possible at “A-list” festivals and major galleries, and unpaid self-promotion on increasingly opaque social networks. Art historians and theorists are no better off: They fight for scraps of public funding in a system tailored to the natural sciences, publish in journals indexed by the exploitative global databases Scopus and Web of Science, and adapt their research to whatever buzzwords happen to be in vogue. Perhaps most frightening of all, however, is the internalization of metric ideology - the ways in which it penetrates our conscious and unconscious minds. Even those who are critical of the given system allow themselves to be drawn in by the dopamine-fueled logic of citations, likes, and festival appearances, measuring their own worth by metrics that they themselves reject.

How can artistic theory and practice address this system, let alone resist it? First and foremost, it would help if its actors joined forces and utilized the tools offered by contemporary artistic research or its subfields (e.g., videographic criticism and the creation of audiovisual essays). Even so, we cannot assume that it is possible to stand outside of the neoliberal metric ideology - even critical audiovisual essays inevitably operate within a system oriented toward quantification and make use of production and distribution channels that are part of it. However, they can return to the idea of subversive cinema proposed by Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni and attack the tyranny of metrics at the levels of both form and content simultaneously. The once avant-garde strategies of distortion, defamiliarization, and disruption can still prove effective if they attack “from within” the forms of seeing, hearing, and depicting that embody the dominant ideology and if they also impart knowledge that is well-argued and based on primary sources explaining how this system works and how it can be confronted with the means that we have at our disposal.

We selected five audiovisual essays that explore the limits and paradoxes of the metric society from various angles. They demonstrate how the fetishization of quantitative data influences our perception of history, memory, archives, emotion, and corporeality. They search for its historical roots as well as its current and as yet unrealized manifestations, proposing possible tactics for exposing, confronting, and potentially overcoming our obsession with metrics. They do not offer clear lines of escape but rather traces and hints that can zigzag in any direction. However, they provide a wide range of expressive means that reveal or directly create flaws in the foundations of a system that has set out to challenge the existence of any flaws whatsoever - as well as a research base that allows their function and meaning to be analyzed.

The film Constant (2022) by Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner explores the historical origins of measurement. The authors link the birth and development of metric logic to three key turning points in Western history: the privatization and enclosure of land in the early modern period, the introduction of the metric system during the French Revolution, and the emergence of “Big Science” after the Second World War. These processes are connected to the instrumentalization of reason - its reduction to a means to an end, such as greater productivity or standardization - as well as the abstraction of reason, meaning its separation from concrete human experience, and its dematerialization, that is, its detachment from physicality and the material world. One of the ironies that the essay takes delight in is the fact that the unit of the meter itself is inaccurate: It was created at the end of the eighteenth century, at a time when science was still unable to incorporate the human body into its calculations. Litvintseva and Wagner expose the blind spots of metric ideology using an inventive form that is playful yet organically connected to the theme and argument. Means of technology, such as 360° cameras and photogrammetry, prove to be not just forms through which the metric society represents the world but also tools which can be used to stretch this logic to its limits, bend it beyond recognition, and thus (at least in the realm of imagination) begin to overcome it.

Noah Teichner’s film Comedy Objects #1: Slapstick Speculation (2024) offers a more synchronic view of the history of metrics at a turning point. We find ourselves in the era of the Great Depression at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s, when the crack in metric thinking has become fully apparent. This crack is happily filled (though not necessarily overcome) by the comedy genre of slapstick, for which the theme of the stock market crash is a welcome opportunity to revive its waning renown - augmented by the gradual advent of sound film. At this moment of uncertainty and loss of balance, comedy and the stock market find common ground in the ebbs and flows that cannot be completely controlled, only “spontaneously” reacted to and their further development speculated upon. The film nevertheless reminds us that neither slapstick comedy nor a stock market spiraling out of control are external to metric logic - quite the contrary. The financial crisis arose in part as a consequence of attempts to insure against market volatility using mathematical models that proved inadequate. Depression-era comedy is therefore spontaneous and lively only to a certain extent as it is itself subject to market logic and hooked into the nascent multimedia industry. Teichner plays out these paradoxes by combining various media formats - slapstick sketches, gramophone recordings, and period visualizations of price trends. Metric ideology thus once again reveals itself to be a network permeating seemingly unrelated areas of human activity.

The incursion of metric thinking into unexpected spheres of imagination - including dreams, fantasies, and hallucinations - is explored in Gala Hernández López’s film for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world (2024). While in her previous film, The Mechanics of Fluids (2022), the author convincingly showed how the world of metrics can serve as a last refuge for lonely and emotionally deprived incels, here the metric imagination materializes as another form of (false) escape - in the world of cryptocurrencies. Based on the story of Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney, the essay reveals the hidden charm - but also the inevitable failure - of all efforts to control the future by calculating risk and, through this, to detach oneself from physical reality. What seemed like a farce in Comedy Objects #1: Slapstick Speculation is experienced here as a melancholic tragedy - nostalgia for a future that was supposed to be incalculable and at the same time collectively emancipatory. Split-screen recordings of negative images and data visualizations of reality show merely the flip side of this possible future: Until the conditions for its realization are met, all one can do is - in an allusion to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” - float in a tin can far above the world.

The intimacy of experiencing metrics is taken to extremes in Occitane Lacurie’s essay xena’s body (a menstrual auto-investigation using an iphone) (2024). A mobile application designed to track the menstrual cycle allows metric logic to creep directly into the body - into its most intimate, often taboo sphere. For instrumental reason, even living bodily matter becomes a mere set of data intended for extraction, collection, and behavior prediction. Through the format of a desktop documentary, which is based on the simulation of user experiences in the online space and was popularized, for example, by the films of Kevin B. Lee and Lého Galibert-Laîné (or in the Czech context by the films of Tomáš Svoboda), we observe the author’s experience of the tracking app staged in real time. This form - its intimacy heightened by the use of a smartphone instead of a computer - convincingly captures the paranoid and self-destructive rhythm of doomscrolling through an algorithmically curated feed that is induced by contact with the app. Yet the author manages to say “enough” at the right moment and redirect her energy elsewhere - for example, to reading tarot cards with a friend. While it is difficult to resist the metric logic of tracking applications entirely, there are cracks in it that allow for reflection and a different temporality.

Is it possible to immobilize and destroy metric logic? This potentiality is explored in the film Machines in Flames (2022) by Thomas Dekeyser and Andrew Culp. The film searches for the fragmentary, almost indistinguishable traces of the activities of the terrorist group CLODO, which carried out bombings against computer companies in Toulouse, France, in the 1980s. Like Lacurie’s film, it takes the form of a desktop documentary (with a traditional computer instead of a smartphone), but instead of the excesses of obsession with metrics, it focuses on the lacunae and cracks that can slip through the online regime unnoticed. One can engage in more or less productive debates about the legitimacy of CLODO’s activities, yet Machines in Flames shows that many of the warnings about the consequences of computer technology - specifically quantification and ubiquitous surveillance - were justified; today similar risks are being discussed even in the mainstream press. The mode of (non)seeing that the film constructs - through a combination of desktop sequences and shots of nighttime cityscapes - suggests one of the paths that criticism of metric ideology can take: hinting without showing, floating between traces that do not necessarily conceal anything, but could. The manifesto of “destructionist film” that the authors compiled in connection with the project under the banner of The Destructionist International then offers inspiration for expanding this critique to the deeper structures of the metric society.  

Occitane Lacurie is a PhD student at the École des Arts de la Sorbonne in Paris, a film journalist, as well as a video-essayist. Her academic work like her videographic practice are interested in media archaeology and the way hardware or software can be used to unveil invisible phenomena and untold chapters of the history of ideas. As a film critic, she is a member of the editorial board of the French film journal Débordements and appears in Mediapart's cultural podcast, "L'Esprit critique". Her articles are focused on the forgotten history of feminist French criticism and the way images could be considered as crystallised political discourses. As a video essayist, her works have been shown in several international festivals such as Pesaro Film Festival (ReEdit competition award 2022), Cinéma du Réel (Parallel selection 2021), En Temps Réel (2024), Mariendbad Film Festival (Video Essay selection 2024). They explore the way in which the material history of media can be told by reusing the images produced by the audiovisual fabric of reality.

Noah Teichner is a filmmaker, artist, and researcher. His feature-length essay film Navigators (2022) has screened internationally at venues and festivals such as the Centre Pompidou, ICA London, Light Industry, Svenska filminstitutet, and Cinéma du Réel. As a film and media historian, his fields of research include comedy and popular entertainment, film technology, sound studies, and media archaeology. He is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris.

Gala Hernández López is an artist, filmmaker and researcher. Her work analyzes new subjectivities produced by computational capitalism, imaginaries of virtual communities, desires and futures conveyed by disruptive technologies, as fictions populating our collective unconscious. Through poetry, intimacy and dreams, she dissects fantasies of unlimited techno-scientific control over reality. Her work has been presented at Cannes, Berlinale, DOK Leipzig, SEMINCI, Raindance, IndieLisboa, Cinéma du Réel, Palais de Tokyo, Punto de Vista, transmediale, Winterthur, among others. Her film La Mécanique des fluides won the César for Best Short Documentary in 2024. She regularly gives workshops and performative lectures at venues such as the Locarno Film Festival, Harvard University or Goldsmiths.

The Destructionist International is an experiment in negation. It is driven by a shared inclination: a taste for the fury of destruction, away from the dull submission of situations to reasoned judgement. The Destructionist International finds this passion across a variety of themes (militancy, sabotage, technology, liberation), and gives expression to it via multiple mediums (text, image, video, sound). Part of The Deconstructionist International are Thomas Dekeyser and Andrew Culp.

Dr Thomas Dekeyser is a cultural-digital geographer whose work examines digital technologies, negative affects, and the politics of refusal. More specifically, he examines how the politics of resistance shift in relation to changing technological and urban conditions, and how, in turn, such negative politics push us to rethink geographical understandings of power, affect, and the human. His research, while grounded in cultural and digital geography, is inspired by critical theory and pessimist philosophies. Methodologically, his work draws on Creative and GeoHumanities methods, with a particular focus on film. He has recently co-directed Machines in Flames (2022; 49 min), an experimental documentary about a group of French computer workers who bombed computer firms in the early 1980s, and Breached(2024; 15 min), a chronicle of modern-day cargo looting. His current research investigates refusal in the face of the deepening saturation of artificial intelligence technologies in everyday life, a position he refers to as “AI-Pessimism.”

Andrew Culp is a Professor of Media History and Theory and Program Director of the MA Aesthetics and Politics program in the School of Critical Studies and in the MA Aesthetics and Politics Program, California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). In his first book, Dark Deleuze(University of Minnesota Press, 2016), he proposes a revolutionary new image of Gilles Deleuze’s thought suited to our 24/7 always-on media environment, and it has been translated into eight languages. With his second book, A Guerrilla Guide to Refusal (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), he arms the reader with critical theory as part of a journey through anarchist infowar, queer outlaws, and Black insurgency. He is currently working on two projects: a new structuralist theory of the state’s arkhḗ, and a critical history of cybernetics from those subverting it from its inside. Culp’s writing on these and other topics has appeared in Flügschriften, Radical Philosophy, symplokē, parallax, angelaki, Deleuziana, The Alienocene, and Boundary 2 online. As part of The Destructionist International, he also makes films and other media. His most recent is the experimental documentary Machines in Flames (2022), which explores the legacy of techno-sabotage.

Beny Wagner is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and lecturer working across moving image, text, installation, and lecture formats. His practice constructs non-linear narratives that explore shifting thresholds of the human body in time, engaging with histories of metabolism, measurement, waste, and scientific imaginaries. Since 2017, much of his work has been produced in collaboration with Sasha Litvintseva. Wagner’s work has been presented internationally at major festivals, exhibitions, and institutions, including Berlinale, IFFR, CPH:DOX, Tate Modern, and the Venice Biennale. He lectures in Fine Art Critical Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. 

Sasha Litvintseva is an artist, filmmaker, and writer born above the Arctic Circle in a country that no longer exists and based in London since 2004. Since 2018, much of her work has been produced in collaboration with Beny Wagner. Her films have screened widely at international festivals including Berlinale, IFFR, CPH:DOX, and Cinema du Réel, and her work has been presented at major institutions such as Tate Modern, the Baltic Triennial, Seoul Mediacity Biennale, and the Museum of the Moving Image New York. Her films have received numerous international awards and are distributed by Square Eyes and the Criterion Channel. She is a Reader in Film Practice at Queen Mary University of London and the 2024 recipient of the Philip Leverhulme Prize.

Jiří Anger is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Queen Mary University of London and a researcher at the National Film Archive in Prague, where he also edits the journal Iluminace. His work explores media theory, videographic scholarship, and archival methods, with a focus on the media archaeology of video-editing practices. He is the author of two monographs, three edited volumes, and numerous journal articles and video essays in Screen, NECSUS, [in]Transition, Film-Philosophy, and other platforms. His 2024 book Towards a Film Theory from Below: Archival Film and the Aesthetics of the Crack-Up won a BAFTSS Runner-Up Prize.

Veronika Hanáková is a PhD candidate in new media studies at Charles University in Prague. Her research examines the materiality, memory, and preservation of digital images, with a focus on DVD features and interfaces. She has published articles and video essays in NECSUS, [in]Transition, Iluminace, and Tecmerin, and recently guest-edited the 2024 special issue “Configuring Computer Labor in Film and Audiovisual Media” for Iluminace. With Jiří Anger and Martin Tremčinský, she co-authored Cycles of Labour: In the Metaverse, We Will Be Housewives (2023), which won the BAFTSS Award for Best Videographic Criticism. She also co-curates the Audiovisual Essay section at the Marienbad Film Festival.

Publication: 16. 1. 2025