✶The Fourth Secret of Internet Cinema✶
Guest post by 0nty: Notes After Dana Dawud’s Open Secret Program
This is a guest post by 0nty, whose fascinating mind and work have previously been featured in ULTRA.
“We go to the cinema in order to suspend for a moment our usual modes of communication.”
— Felix Guattari, "Le divan du pauvre";
Quoted from Signs & Machines, Maurizio Lazzarato
✶The Open Secrets of Internet Cinema 2023-2024
In the heights of 2023 there was a minor explosion of what some call “internet cinema”.
A year after the mass-DIY metatrend of experimental online found-footage filmmaking referred to as ‘CoreCore’ had passed the peak of its online-halflife, and prefigured by earlier works such as Nick Vyssotsky’s 2021 Cobwebs Spun Back and Forth in the Sky, a number of projects of independent origin appeared online. By way of example, in no particular order — Nicholas Sanchez’s IS THIS CRINGE, Poorspigga’s Please Don’t Skip, Dana Dawud’s PalCoreCore” CoIncelpro’s “Coin Celleil”, Angelicism’s “Film01”, Redacted Cut’s RNG series, and at risk of self-promotion, my own Ultra-Core Anxiety 2023 — all initiated premieres or more traditionally-online episodic releases between January and December of 20231.
Now midway into 2024 and several months into Dawud’s ongoing “Open Secret” curation, we can call this our ① first ① ‘Open Secret’ — the open secret that internet cinema exists — it goes without saying that we have all known something is going on, some sort of methodology or context or crisis or event or - God forbid - ideology is at play, and we have all litigated, interpreted, and advocated various positions.
But what we “all know” remains dubious. Superficially we can identify a reliance on internet found footage, a disregard for narrative and often even for theme, a blasé attitude towards copyright law, the use of collage, increasingly, the use of Artificial Intelligence (such as in Machine Yearning’s upcoming, almost entirely AI-produced Ways of a Swamp), and a focus on ‘post-net’ aesthetics and late-capitalist, anthropocenic images and affects. But we also might be tempted to repeat qua Internet Cinema what Dawud has said about her own work, namely that “[it] does not touch on, interpret, or dissect anything at all...”. It is not so simple, however: even this nothing is contested — as we have seen for something like CoreCore (the people’s Dogme 95 of internet cinema), the question of what kind of nothing something is remains precisely what is at stake.
So asking what the ‘Open Secret’ of internet cinema is begs the question of how it ought to be unveiled, how one ought to ‘say the quiet part out loud’. Substack posts, Instagram DMs, DIY Zines, essays and counter-articles, Indie publication houses and soon, academic journals, conferences, and so on are all throwing their hat in the ring.
Like all internet culture, the ephemera of online art both demands and rebukes this imminent and ongoing archivization. These interventions have largely remained critical, in the technical sense, of addressing what the genre is ‘about’ — the various “obvious” contents of Internet Cinema — its methods, style, its themes, all that “goes without saying” in that it’s already been spoken for by the genre itself and exists, for us, without saying in everyday life (after all, what goes more ‘without saying’ than the various automatic x/acc processes which are aesthetically reiterated in much of this genre?) — this is the ②second② Open Secret of internet cinema, the contentful speaking of Internet Cinema, its content, its proposition.
But to paraphrase proposition 2 of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, the form of each language remains a secret to said language, a secret which cannot be spoken, only shown. The very form of a medium remains intractable qua the content of said medium — form is a blurring expert. But it is also this secret form, this secret showing which allows a medium to “feel” and “reach” the facts at hand, it is the form which unveils, which reveals the secrets of the world2. There are ultimately two ways to “unveil” something's form, two ways to deal with an ‘Open Secret’, these being saying and showing ; and this is the difference between art about the internet, and internet art, respectively.
In 2024, Open Secret answers this question — of how to ‘unveil’ by staying silent whereof it cannot speak, it unveils by showing3 — “showing the quiet part out loud”. This is the ③third③ Open Secret of internet cinema, that which ‘goes without saying’ in that Internet Cinema cannot speak its own form, its form proceeds in silence. The splitting between the ②second② and ③third③ Open Secrets allows for the genre’s typical objects of association (technology, collapse, etc.) to inhabit two contradicting positions — on the one hand, Internet Cinema speaks of these objects, these objects which go without saying, which inhabit the form of everyday life; on the other hand, it is arguable that they are precisely what the genre cannot say (and thus go without saying), since they partake in its conditions of origin, its formal, genetic properties. In my personal view, it is only in this latter, subtler sense that Internet Cinema has anything necessarily to do with technology.
The program advances by way of autonomously organized live screening events — so far, held in Sweden, New York, Budapest, and Vienna. Each of these shows features a revolving door of artists and productions including works from Dawud herself, Redacted Cut, Y7, Machine Yearning, Poorspigga, Carmen Lin, Sulaiman Majali, John-Robin Bold, KIRAC, Assi Abogado, Alex Mashtaler, Panos Aprahamian, Ai Dubai, Anastasia A, Marble Index, Zoey Solomon, Xafya Lovecraft, Maria Lilconova, Elsie Lappoh, Syryn V, Soglyadatay V, and others, including myself.
Through this loose network of artists and a collectivized system of online posting, Open Secret’s method of communication is continual advancement and accretion, a sort of ebbing and rising tide from which one launches and grounds ships.
This method reminds me of internet artist Chaotic Rhizomatic’s ongoing project ‘The Museologization of Art be Like’ which inhabits various Instagram posts, galleries, and books, gathering and shedding material as it advances. Several of the projects internal to Open Secret follow this same logic of continual development, including Dawud’s Monad series (which expands and contracts as it incorporates online footage, live actors, webcam footage, screen recordings, and quite original use of projection mapping) and Redacted Cut’s continuously evolving and expanding RNG project. Open Secret has so far shunned any precocious compulsions for a hagiography, manifesto, authorial flag-planting or seminar; it has refused the formation of a cellular membrane, there is no clique btw. It has so far remained a productive vector, all transformation, no annihilation, all territory, no map — there is no program, btw.
✶The Fourth Secret of Internet Cinema
Every ‘Open Secret’ is something which goes without saying. The root of secret –secretus– to separate, to set aside – refers not only to something which is hidden, but also that which is gained by virtue of omission. To secrete is to have an opening, and an opening is — the psychoanalysts knew this — a sort of interface, something already halfway technological. In this way an Open Secret is similar to an ‘axiom’ — it animates and scaffolds a frame of reference without recourse to being ‘spoken’ within the context of said coordinates, it is self-evident without recourse to justification.
The interpreters of Internet Cinema have so far remained within the arena of critique, litigating its internal logic, its origins, its context, its historical trajectory, its ‘meaning’ or particular brand of non-meaning. So much for the first three secrets. But what has remained unspoken is a proper philosophy of internet cinema, a treatise on how internet cinema is distinguished in terms of how it comports with signs, sense, and so on... and this is our last, ④fourth④ Open Secret — the Open Secret of Internet Cinema as a material, ontological process, a novel4 event in the trajectory of signs and sense. Our little Wittgensteinean analogy doesn’t carry us far enough — restricted as it is to his early ‘picture theory’ which casts semiotics and meaning in terms of an oppositional relationship between a representational map and an external world of facts, this forecloses from the outset any investigation of internet cinema as a proper “semiotic operator”, something which does not merely picture with its form, but also functions.
— I believe there is something to be said about Internet Cinema as a sort of “Guattarian Cinema”, cinema operating in the form of the power sign, that is, an asignifying cinema5. When asking what is at stake in ‘internet cinema’, we are perhaps asking whether or not a genre which is so intricately caught up in negativity can also be generative6 — as Paige Bradley puts it in her 2023 essay “Band of Outsiders” for Artforum, the jury is still out on whether ‘capturing the collapse of meaning as form’ is productive, or voyeuristic. My intuition is that it can be the former, but only insofar as it doesn’t re-territorialize capital, itself a semiotic operator, to the theatre of representation. If internet cinema is to be generative, it must first be asignifying; lest it simply participate in the compensatory re-capturing of individual subjectivation that Deleuze & Guattari identify as the “second hand” of capital designed to allow its deterritorializing trajectory to sustain itself without descending into total auto-cannibalization.
But nor should we be satisfied with understanding internet cinema as fully automatic, i.e. casting its asignifying character as just another non-representational, deterritorialized process of what Guattari deems “machinic enslavement”. What is at stake is a philosophical understanding of how Internet Cinema couples signifying and asignifying processes, how it, to paraphrase Deleuze, is not in the business of images, but rather diagrams, how it is “semi-automatic” in all the connotations of the term. As Maurizio Lazzarato puts it in his Signs & Machines, Guattari understood the cinema of the 1960s as already ‘semi-automatic’, caught up in machinic processes that produced linkages and de-linkages of sound, texture, and light – all asignifying elements – thus allowing for an experience of a ‘pre-signifying’ context in a post-signifying world7. It is thus the semiotic status of the internet’s infrastructure and its corollary algorithmic and language-model tools which might first be at stake in a properly philosophical reading of internet cinema; as well as -as Redacted Cut has noted8- the radically transformed role of the ‘camera’, replaced now with the ‘editor’ in internet cinema.
— in these brief notes we have barely begun to even pose the question of this “④fourth④ secret”, it is maybe already enough to place it on the board. Until then, there is no Open Secret, btw...
0nty is a pseudonymous writer and artist focused on ‘post-net’ art and internet culture.
Their audiovisual productions have been featured in the Wrong Biennale, Millennium Film Workshop, the New People’s Cinema Club (NPCC), Forum Stadtpark, SoundPedro Sound Art Festival, and WIP Gallery, among others. In 2023, they completed an artist residency at Foreign Objekt’s Posthuman Art Laboratory; and served as lead organizer for the first conference on the subject of CoreCore, ‘All Things are Nothing to Us’, held at New York’s School of Visual Arts.
Their essays, reviews, and visual work have been published and discussed in print through Becoming Press, and in online journals including ULTRA and OnMyComputer, as well as Stimulant and Ethics (forthcoming). In 2024, they served as lead editor of an anthology volume entitled ‘Dialogues on CoreCore & the Contemporary Online Avant-Garde’ published by Becoming Press.
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Go further:
CoreCore & the Return of Speculative Irony
Ultra-Core Anxiety 2023 began an episodic release in January 2023 and was released as a complete anthology in July ; Film01 premiered in June 2023 ; Please Don’t Skip released in July 2023, IS THIS CRINGE released in August 2023 ; Coin Celleil in september 2023 ; and both PalCoreCore and a first preview of RNG were shown in December 2023. This is by no means an exhaustive list, or even necessarily an ‘event’ in any strict sense — but nonetheless, since the first Noel and Rising edits appeared on TikTok in the dusk of 2020, there has undeniably been some sort of opening.
See Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, proposition 2.1 ; in particular 2.17-2.18.
As I have argued elsewhere (see 0nty, ‘CoreCore & the Return of Speculative Irony’ Becoming Press, 2023), something like CoreCore, which remains, in my view, by far the most universally recognized form of ‘internet cinema’, cannot be said to “have any secrets” in the sense of containing some hidden meaning ; the logic of a surface hiding some deeper, authentic layer is consistent with ‘Core’, which CoreCore rejects. But this should not be confused with the much more subtle notion of an ‘Open Secret’, which is something that a medium can show, but not say — and this is something that even CoreCore admits of, which is to say, it admits of its own form.
This remains to be seen.
Four decades now from the publishing of Deleuze’s Cinema II, it seems almost too obvious to answer this “fourth secret” in terms of the deleuzo-guattarian philosophy of signs and cinema, in a recursive turn to address a genre already saturated with post-D&G influences.
See, Persis Bekkering, “On CoreCore, Negation, and the Unconscious”, and 0nty “Come Look, the Shitposters are Relitigating the Negative”, from “Dialogues on CoreCore & the Contemporary Online Avant-Garde”, Becoming Press 2024.
See Lazzarato, ‘Signs & Machines’, pp. 109-110 ; Semiotext(e) 2014.
See “About Redacted Films: Prompts by Dana Dawud” in “Dialogues on CoreCore & the Contemporary Online Avant-Garde”, Becoming Press, 2014.