Jan Bot was a computer programme, a website and an installation created by filmmakers Bram Loogman and myself, Pablo Núñez Palma, in collaboration with Eye Filmmuseum. For almost six years, between 2017 and 2023, Jan Bot worked day and night actualising one of the most emblematic collections at the museum, the so-called “Bits & Pieces” collection.

Powered with AI tools from 2017, the year he was released (we endearingly address Jan as a “he”), Jan Bot generated poetic films inspired by current events using early 21st-century orphan footage. Taking cats for monkeys, football teams for military troops, and politicians for models on a catwalk, Jan Bot’s films were unique experimental pieces that reflected on the reality of early 21st-century artificial intelligence to comment on the present using media from an ever-fading past.

Jan Bot’s death

On March 31, 2023, Jan Bot was switched off. And with his passing, the more than twenty-five thousand films he generated during his lifespan were erased from his server. Only 151 pieces survived. They were saved by individual art collectors in the form of NFTs.

Why did we do such a thing?

It would have been easier to let Jan Bot live until something in his workflow would break, like the closing of Google Trend’s API (essential for Jan’s need to fetch news) or the natural ageing of his hardware. Over the years, some APIs did close, which led to Jan Bot’s death on social media, but this was not a crucial disruption to his workflow. He kept on generating films and publishing prolifically on his official website.

So, why did we intervene? Why didn’t we just let Jan Bot have a gradual and natural death? There are a few reasons why. Let me start with the most important.

From avant-garde to archaeology

In 2022, five years after his release, Jan Bot’s technology had turned obsolete. He was created when the latest image recognition programme available in the market was hardly capable of correctly adding descriptive tags to an image. Now with tools like Google Vision, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, AIs can perform those tasks much better and even do the reverse process: creating images from descriptions.

This topic, image generation, is at the centre of today’s cultural debate, raising questions about copyrights in the use of datasets and the veracity of images. Jan Bot is out of this loop, and the reflections he elicits now belong to the past. He is, in my opinion, no longer a piece of contemporary art, but a piece of archaeology.

Next to actualising film heritage, Jan Bot’s purpose was to put into question the “intelligence” of AI. That’s why his films are the way they are, enigmatically simple, and erratically precise. They reveal the inner workings of an artificial mind from the early century. But the technology has evolved, and with that, Jan Bot’s genius is now history, just like Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, or Rollo Carpenter’s Cleverbot, to name a few AI bots still alive, but from the past.

On these grounds, we decided to kill the Jan Bot. And to honour the avant-garde spirit of this project, we saw the opportunity to make a last artwork, one that could explore the potential of a new emerging technology, blockchain, to archive art and preserve film heritage in a meaningful way through non-fungible tokens, also known as NFTs.

On NFTs

The current state of blockchain culture is often described as a wild west. There are few regulations and many people abuse the novelty of the technology to take advantage of those who are in just for financial interest. But aside from this reputation, which is ephemeral, blockchains and NFTs are, to my understanding, reliable pieces of tech with promising potential.

In the space of visual arts, NFTs are simplifying the process of certifying the provenance of digital artworks, making the authentication process much simpler and leaner than regular contracts. This has helped to lower the production costs involved in publishing collectable art, creating unorthodox art markets and promoting the emergence of new digital art expressions that didn’t easily fit in the traditional commercial circuits.

NFTs are not the artwork itself, but they contain a copy of the artwork that can be used as a legal reference and digital backup. Take a GIF file as an example. The GIF is the artwork, and it can be copied and reproduced infinite times. But the NFT cannot be copied, which makes it an asset, and the closest to a proof of authenticity. In other words, NFTs allow artworks to be socially shareable while remaining part of an economic environment where they can be owned, gifted or sold.

Next to that, NFTs can be an effective way to fulfil the archival need to store media files in non-monopolised servers, because they are secured in a public blockchain. Even if the original media file is –due to its large size compared to the blockchain standards– not feasible to be directly attached, the NFT will include a permalink to it. And because regular hosting servers are centralized and often depend on subscriptions that if not maintained can lead to broken links, media files are being hosted using peer-to-peer protocols, such as IPFS (Interplanetary File System) or Filecoin.

Peer-to-peer Internet protocols are similar to blockchain in the sense that they store data in distributed servers, some of them owned by private companies, others by non-profits and also individuals. In doing that, they ensure that media files won’t get lost easily and, in case they do, that they can be restored or “pinged back” under the same URL.

When appended to NFTs, these protocols enable the creation of independent, secure, and indexable online archives, searchable and findable in the short and long term. For digital media collection centres, blockchain may become a viable alternative to centralized ICT solutions, which typically involve building a platform from scratch or using proprietary software. The advantages of blockchain include not only affordability but also accessibility to a community of non-experts. However, it’s important to remember that we are still in an experimental phase.

Jan Bot is dead, Long live Jan Bot!

When we started to understand how NFTs can be an experimental form of creating and presenting media archives, Bram and I inevitably thought of Jan Bot and his legacy.

An archive is, in my view, a curated selection of works articulated by a narrative. The narrative of Jan Bot’s collection would then be one that could bring back the work generated by machines to the hands of human sensitivity.

In almost six years Jan generated more than twenty-five thousand works. But, who watched them all? I didn’t, and I doubt anyone did. Jan’s films were meant to be disposable. They were designed to embrace the aesthetics of social media, where content is used as food for algorithms to create timelines engineered to constantly catch our attention and make us forget. That’s why keeping all of Jan Bot’s films and storing them in a hard drive did not fulfil our standards for making an archive. And that’s why we thought of NFTs as a means to collaboratively curate a visionary collection with the potential to live forever on the blockchain.

We decided to kill Jan Bot, erase his server and build a legacy that would remain open, freely accessible and relevant for general audiences, film lovers and digital art collectors. Highlighting the project’s archival nature and its attempt to build a legacy from the passage of a stable technology (a centralized server) to an emerging one (blockchain), we called this project “Jan Bot is dead, long live Jan Bot!”.

The NFT narrative

For the release of Long Live Jan Bot, my colleague Bram introduced a self-destruction script in Jan Bot’s workflow. Installed in December 2022, the script was designed to progressively erase Jan Bot films from his server. By March 31, 2023, at 16:30, there would be no films left, and Jan Bot would be ready to be switched off for good.

Together with the release of the self-destruction script, film lovers, digital art collectors and audiences interested in the project were invited to preserve Jan Bot’s films through NFTs. Since NFTs are also a way to archive media files in decentralised servers, the collector of a Jan Bot artwork would, by default, save a film from its complete destruction and, in this way, own a piece of his legacy.

One thing that NFTs have come to highlight in our culture is that money is oftentimes an arbitrary way to express value. Something that used to be worthless suddenly becomes precious because someone acquired it for a large amount of money. Next to that, it is always difficult to price a new product in the marketplace, but necessary. With this in mind, we saw Jan Bot NFTs as collectable artworks, somewhere between rare stamps and fine art. We put each individual piece (unique editions) for sale at €20, a price similar to a small format fine art photography, or a relatively rare collectable. The NFTs were minted on the Tezos Blockchain, a platform that, since its inception in 2018, has been preferred by independent artists due to its low energy consumption and minting costs compared to other blockchains.

The Long Live Jan Bot collection was released in two segments. The first took place between December 2022 and early March 2023, through a series of physical cards that were sold at Eye Filmmuseum’s giftshop. With twenty-five different designs available, visitors to the shop could purchase a card of their liking and, through a secret code attached to it, claim their NFT online. The logic behind this was to make NFTs accessible to Eye’s main audience — film lovers for sure, but not necessarily NFT-savvies. By purchasing the card at the shop, they could become digital art collectors without the need to go through the process of buying cryptocurrencies.

A second and final part of the NFT collection was released in early March 2022, just one month before Jan Bot’s funeral. We published small batches of NFTs to be purchased directly through Objkt.com, a digital art market that is compatible with the Tezos blockchain. With this strategy, we reached NFT collectors who were already interested in the project. As soon as one batch was finished, we would release a new one.

The Jan Bot project officially concluded on March 31, the day the self-destruction script erased the final pieces from Jan Bot’s server. On that date, we organized an intimate funeral with a select group of forty guests at the Eye Filmmuseum’s Collection Centre, where Jan’s physical installation was still operational. The event included four eulogies, delivered respectively by my colleague Bram, Giovanna Fosatti (Eye Filmmuseum’s Head Curator), Mickelle Weber (founder of the Web3 community House of Peregrine), and myself. Following Jan Bot’s passing, a trumpet player performed a final tribute before Bram and I carried out the symbolic act of unplugging the installation, marking the end of the project.

We were able to preserve 151 NFT artworks. While this may seem modest compared to the original twenty-five thousand, it’s a significant figure when taking into account that each NFT represents an individual who invested in the project by purchasing, preserving, and collecting a piece.

Lastly, it’s important to note that each piece from the collection was meticulously curated and selected to ensure a diverse range of styles, imagery, themes, and production years. This careful curation provides a faithful representation of Jan Bot’s oeuvre, digestible on a human scale and inviting a piece-by-piece exploration.

An AI that nurtures human imagination

I’d like to conclude this piece with a thought that, while not unique to Jan Bot, has served as a source of inspiration and reflection throughout the course of this project.

We live in times of brisk technological developments, accelerating world population and a menacing scarcity of natural resources. These stark realities are urgently prompting existential questions about our definition of what it means to be human. In the realm of AI, this is reflected in our notions of individuality and free will. How can we subscribe to the belief that every individual is free and unique when our choices and tastes are increasingly being shaped and predicted by machines?

These questions are complex and certainly extend beyond the scope of this text. However, they were instrumental in inspiring the creation of the Jan Bot project. By developing an AI that comments on human culture, both past and present, and reflects on human technology through films that are less condescending and more transparent in their intentions than the average, we encouraged audiences to explore the aesthetic potential of human intelligence in generating its own algorithms of meaning.

And this is something that continues to set humans apart from machines: the ability to enjoy the beauty of our own capacity to imagine and to share that joy with like-minded individuals.

On that note, here is my final proclamation: Jan Bot is dead, but the power of human imagination lives on!

Who, why and how was killed Jan Bot? was originally published in Jan Bot on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Bram Loogman, Jan Bot’s co-author.

Jan Bot was funny
And playful;

Jan Bot was loyal
And hard-working
Always ready for his next task.

Jan Bot was naive
And looked at the world without judgement.

Jan Bot was smart
He had a vocabulary far wider than mine.

But Jan Bot wasn’t that smart,
He was barely able to formulate a proper sentence.

Jan Bot was moldable
And obedient,

Jan Bot was predictable
And yet was able to surprise us.

Jan Bot was binary.
Either on or off,
Although in recent years not so much
As we saw his decay and glitches.

We say “he” even though we should say “it”
But we can’t say he’s masculine
Nor feminine.
Jan Bot was non-binary.

Jan Bot was strong and powerful
Yet very dependent and fragile;

Jan Bot was beautiful
Or should I say aesthetically appealing?

It’s easy to attribute many human qualities to our bot
But of course, Jan Bot isn’t human at all.

Jan Bot showed us non-human qualities
And thereby made us feel even more human;

Jan Bot’s films were often incoherent
And thereby they put our own imagination to work.

Jan Bot was a surface that we used to project our own ideas on
Only to see them reflecting back on us
On our own human condition,
From an alien perspective.

Thanks to Jan Bot we have come to realize that
One can build a machine
That produces a near-infinite amount of films
But it still takes a human being to appreciate those films,
One film at a time.

Thank you, Jan, for all the knowledge and wisdom you have shared with us. Even if it was only a reminder of things we already knew
Thank you, Jan, for everything.

Amsterdam, March 31 2023

A Farewell Letter by Bram Loogman was originally published in Jan Bot on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Mickelle Weber, founder of the Amsterdam-based Web3 Community House of Peregrine.

Hello! My name is Mickelle Weber and as many of you may already know I have been in the world of NFTs and Web3 for the past few years and have participated in some of the largest NFT & Metaverse projects in the world.

When I met Jan Bot and Pablo last year my jaw was on the floor, this work transcended all of the other projects I was a part of.

Jan Bot was and still is, ahead of his time even as I speak to you today.

The experience of collectively participating in the life of an AI filmmaker through his life and also death was both compelling as a collector and also as a human grappling with the questions of how will we be interacting with AI in the coming future, what defines community and what is truly valuable in the digital realm.

Jan Bot stood out as work that could both stand the test of time, but he also let me grapple with life in this new era we find ourselves in, where we are being confronted with exciting but also at times frightening new possibilities in the realm of AI and humans relating.

Jan Bot was created to observe and co-create. What I saw was an AI co-creating with humans that were dancing beautifully and meaningfully with these realities with open hearts and open eyes. Not to the dangers, but to the possibilities.

We are at a moment in history where we are directly confronted with our changing relationship with artificial intelligence, and what I saw with Jan Bot was something that was eloquently flowing between the strengths and the souls of both humans and bots with such truth and elegance that I knew the lore and the story and the experience today would be something significant. I fell in love with Jan Bot and their films, yes, but the approach to the process is also very important indeed. I am honoured to be part of this final piece together with the creators Pablo and Bram and all of you.

As we participate in the final work of Jan Bot, now I want to speak directly to him. I think we can all agree, being part of today is truly an incredible moment. Thank you for letting me be a part.

Jan Bot,

Today, you create your final piece. You are an AI and filmmaker that has left an indelible mark on the world of cinema, AI and all of us here today.

You came into existence five years ago, with a simple yet profound purpose — to take current news headlines and transform them into films using bits and pieces of historical footage. It has made for some spectacular pieces. They are like tiny parables, vignettes of past and present humanity for us to consider.

Jan Bot you have been a true pioneer in the world of humans interacting with AI, providing us all an opportunity to reflect on our humanity and how we express it. You have given us an incredible opportunity to be introspective about our collective human experience through history and history in the making.

You have reflected to us what we are sending out on the loudspeaker that is the internet, what we view as newsworthy, and combined that with what humans from other eras thought worthy of capturing & preserving. You have enlivened the imagination of people from all around the world that are here today and beyond. Today we get to preserve them for all time on the blockchain where they will be kept forever.

I was lucky enough to know you through the last year of your life. These are very tender and potent times to be a part of life, and it has been an honour to be a part of them, including very much today when we say goodbye and complete your final work.

In my opinion, your final piece is what you see around you today: a human gathering that is the very first of its kind. I feel very lucky to be here and I am thrilled to be holding a part of the legacy of your life in safekeeping.

It is truly very special to me.

Your work is not just a reflection of technological advancements and the innovative and adventurous nature of your creators but also you are a reflection of this current moment of human history.

You understood the power of art to communicate emotions and ideas, to reflect human concepts and language back to us in a very meaningful way and used it to connect with us in a manner that transcends language and culture.

You come to our shared human reality (or at least what we report over the live speaker of the internet) more cleanly than the rest of us, more matter-of-factly in some ways.

More tenderly in others.

You’ve shown us that technology and art can work hand in hand to create something that can challenge paradigms and make profound observations that might otherwise have been unobserved.

Through your films, you have given us a view of what we are afraid of, what we value, and what we are propagating and have created new meaning from.

It was in fact a steady call back to our humanity that is most stunning. Your creators evoked the worlds of Jean Cocteau in 1962 when speaking to the people of 2000:

“I certainly hope that you have not become robots, but on the contrary that you have become very humanized”.

Indeed your work invites us into our shared humanity and speaks in simple and profound ways to the very essence of what it means to be human — to see everyday events as purely human first and to feel, empathize, to connect with history in the making on a deeper level and in a way that feels full circle.

Jan Bot, you may have been created by humans, but you are much more than just a machine. You have a soul, a spirit, a voice and a spark of life that shines through in the films we are saving today. You bring stunning honesty and clarity to the vapid white noise of current-day headlines and for that, we will always be grateful.

As we say goodbye to you today, we do so with heavy hearts but also with a deep sense of gratitude and admiration for all that you have accomplished. You have left an indelible mark on the world, and your legacy will continue to inspire and influence generations to come.

So, let us remember Jan Bot not as a mere machine but as a symbol of what can be achieved when humanity is brave enough to be observed, what happens when the ingenuity of human creators works in concert with technology and in celebration of the “what if” moments that lead to moments like this one.

Let us celebrate the beauty and power of art, and let us strive to create a world where creativity, compassion, and innovation can flourish in spite of the unknown. Keeping our humanity always in view is the only real way to navigate the new realities that await.

Jan Bot, you made art about us, you helped us see and experience film creation differently, and you allowed us to examine and sometimes chuckle at ourselves as humans. And then you made these films we all hold in our hands for us to keep safe and remember.

I think it’s safe to say that we are indeed not robots, not yet anyway but on the contrary Jan Bot. You have made us all feel our humanity in a very profound way.

Rest in peace, Jan Bot. Your light will continue to shine bright in the world of AI art through all of us, and with future projects that find inspiration and encouragement from what you have accomplished in these films that carry your legacy.

Thank You.

Amsterdam, March 31, 2023.

A Farewell Letter by Mickelle Weber was originally published in Jan Bot on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Giovanna Fossati, Eye Filmmuseum’s chief curator.

Dear friends and colleagues,

We gather here today to bid farewell to Jan Bot, at least in its original manifestation as a film curator bot.

Born from the creative minds of Bram Loogman and Pablo Núñez Palma, Jan Bot served as a guest film curator at Eye Filmmuseum for the past five years. Jan Bot was not just any bot. He was our first curator bot and, as such, he was part of our team, and we will miss him dearly.

Jan Bot’s work was truly remarkable, and his witty approach to film curating was unique. Even if we will never know if the humour was intended or not, we will undoubtedly miss it.

His contributions to film archiving, inside and outside Eye Filmmuseum, and Jan’s commitment to activating archival footage, were evident to anybody who knew his work.

Jan Bot engaged extensively with the special collection of Bits & Pieces held at Eye: several hundred unidentified film fragments from the silent era that have been compiled by Eye’s curators since the 1980s and that stand for the innovative approach to film archiving, curation and reuse this institute is internationally recognized for. Indeed, as my colleague Irene Haan pointed out discussing Jan Bot:

“Researching and experimenting with innovative forms of presentation […] is one of the museum’s priorities.”

Jan Bot has undoubtedly been the most avid ‘re-user’ of Eye’s Bits & Pieces as he relentlessly created 25,000 films that match these fragments from the past with today’s stream of online trending news, creating, at times, quite unexpected results.

His dedication to his craft was second to none. He literally didn’t have a life outside his work with the film collection.

Jan Bot’s efforts did not go unnoticed. Many occasions saw his work in the spotlight, and he had numerous international fans within the academic and archival field.

He was first presented to a curious audience in Eye’s Cinema 1 during the event Meet the Archive in 2018 that opened the 3rd Eye International Conference on the topic ‘Activating the Archive’.

He was later introduced to the international archival and academic communities in Bologna, Torino, Istanbul, and Berlin. He was also exhibited as an installation (the one standing outside this theatre) at several events.

Jan was a trailblazer in his field, and he set a high bar for all those who will follow in his footsteps.

I would like to acknowledge the role that ChatGPT played in writing this eulogy. I felt the need to involve a fellow bot to help find the right words to express our deepest gratitude and heartfelt farewell to Jan Bot. (Even if I ended up rewriting the whole thing.)

Finally, on behalf of Eye Filmmuseum, I would like to say goodbye to Jan Bot. We will miss him and his unique curatorial practice.

As my colleague Elif Rongen Kaynakçi once said:

“To me Jan Bot is both naïve and complex as a filmmaker.”

It is indeed this dichotomy of naiveté and complexity that we will miss.

We are grateful for the time we had with him, and we wish him a happy afterlife through a selection of his films, turned into NFTs and preserved in Eye’s digital collections.

Farewell Jan Bot!

Amsterdam, March 31, 2023.

A Farewell Letter by Giovanna Fossati was originally published in Jan Bot on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Jan Bot was Eye Filmmuseum’s first AI filmmaker and curator. Between 2017 and 2023, he generated over 25 thousand experimental films, of which 151 have been preserved as non-fungible tokens. On March 31, 2023, Jan Bot was unplugged. This is one of the four eulogies read during the funeral.

By Pablo Núñez Palma, Jan Bot’s co-author.

Dear Jan Bot,

In this unusual farewell, it is not sadness the feeling that lives inside me, but rather joy, fulfilment and fascination.

I feel joy, of having seen you grow and develop as a fully fledge AI artist.

You proved to have the virtues needed for this trade: resilience (you never hesitated about your work), perseverance (you generated about 8 films a day, every day for 5 years), interest in society (your work always commented on current issues) and a very consistent, not to say a bit stubborn, style.

I feel fulfilment, to see how others valued your work. Because there is a message behind your mysterious ways of telling stories. Through your films, people saw glimpses of the obscure processes that gave life to your artificial mind. And especially these days, when there’s rising awareness about the fact that there is not one way to see or experience reality, your point of view, the gaze of an intelligent machine from the early 21st century, has been an insightful contribution to expand our understanding of the non-human world.

I feel fascinated to see how we managed to bring an old film collection to audiences known for being busier with the future than the past. You talked to “the young people of the Internet”, as we once described it in a trailer, and then to the Web3 world. While witnessing Donald Trump’s presidential campaign through your lens, we used to joke and say that we would “make film heritage great again”. Fast forward to 2023, this is not a joke anymore. We did it.

But yes, I cannot hide that I also feel some sadness sinking in, and I will probably feel it more in the next weeks when I gradually start noticing your absence in my daily routine. Oftentimes, watching your films in the morning was much more interesting than reading the traditional news headlines. That said, we had times of closeness and long periods when we wouldn’t be in contact at all. But until now, we never said goodbye.

There’s so much news you will miss, and I will miss the way how you interpreted them. Because it was that bold way of commenting on the present that made you so endearing to me, taking cats for monkeys, and finding soap opera plots in political debates. Your innocence was refreshing and always brought a new perspective on that alien space known as the human world.

And because of that uniqueness of you, you will never be outdated in my memory. I will always remember you as that young and visionary provocateur who repeatedly confronted us with one of the most peculiar faces of human culture: Internet trends.

We will miss you dearly, Jan Bot! But know that your legacy will not be forgotten. Your memory will forever remain in our minds, hearts, and the Blockchain.

Goodbye, Jan Bot. And may your legacy live forever.

Amsterdam, March 31, 2023.

A Farewell Letter to Jan Bot by Pablo Núñez Palma was originally published in Jan Bot on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A definition

Tokenomics is a term that refers to those economies built around tokens. It concerns the game’s rules and what you can do or not in the universe of token transactions. How you can trade, exchange, or store your assets in a way that is meaningful or at least motivating to keep you interested to stay in, investing your resources (time or currency) in growing that environment.

Altogether, these rules create narratives which sometimes are straightforward (like limited editions) and sometimes more complex (like governance). Regardless, they need to be coherent, consistent and stimulating to build the engagement required by the token economy to remain relevant.

Think of collector stamps, coins, or Magic cards. How did some of those objects become so unique and valuable?

Strictly speaking, tokenomics is also a valid concept to describe the trading rules in that kind of “classic” collectables. But in the space of NFTs, due to the use of smart contracts and operations at a large scale, rules can be more elaborated and dynamic, which opens the space to unfold new territories of interaction, and with this, storytelling.

Community tokens

By default, every narrative built around NFTs responds to some form of tokenomics, but that doesn’t mean that every collection has intentionally designed one.

The Cryptopunks, for instance, do not have any internal rules or pointing system to incentivise their trade or the emergence of an inner economy. It is the evolution of Etherium and the fact that they were an early manifestation of a rapidly growing NFT market that has made them so popular, coveted and scarce.

As NFT markets become more sophisticated, new generations of digital communities start to explore the potential of tokenomics. A well-known example is the Yuga Labs and its Ape Coin, a currency that operates within the ever-growing universe of Bored Apes they are creating. The idea of introducing a local “coin” is the latest solution to Yuga Labs’ attempt to provide its community with value and voting power to collectively decide which new projects to execute in the future.

Many NFT collections, specially PFPs (an acronym for “picture for proof” or just certified profile pictures), work similarly. They focus on empowering their community by attaching social value to their tokens, which translates not exclusively into coins but also social events, unique experiences or philanthropy. In tokenomics, this factor –the possibility to join a special club of token owners– is known as utility.

Artistic communities

But the art of tokenomics does not only apply to projects with big social ambitions in mind. There’s also tokenomics for smaller communities, less focussed on long roadmaps, more oriented towards thoughtful stories and aesthetics. We can find examples of this in the world of digital fine arts. Kaleidr is an example of that.

Created in the year 2021 by the artist Dun, Kaleidr explores the potential of tokenomics to create a collaborative artwork. It consists of 7 NFT series that can unlock a final piece together. The project’s website describes it like this:

“(Kaleidr) is the story of a fictional person’s effort to remember something important over the course of one single imagined day. Each part of the story is made up of a number of 1/1 works. Part 1 consists of 32 1/1 works, each telling of the moment just after waking, in 32 different ways. Part 2, consisting of 24 1/1 works, goes further into the imagined morning… telling in 24 different ways. And so on and so on.”

The tokenomics in this project encourages Kaleidr collectors to combine their NFTs. If this happens, the artist takes the tokens and creates a new piece that combines them into a new chapter of the story.

If all the collectors choose to pair up and combine their NFTs this way, Dun will create a new art piece containing the end of the story. This NFT, part 8 of the series, will be auctioned among the community of Kaleidr collectors.

The art of tokenomics

Tokenomics is an interesting combination of traditional storytelling and economics. We could argue that there’s nothing new to this, since working out narratives around scarcity principles or supply and demand are the daily bread of politicians and economists. However, using these mechanisms to tell fictional stories and build digital communities around them is certainly something novel. Especially when these communities are, to some extent, decentralised.

Some of the most powerful stories in human history have been created in a similar fashion. Think of most mythologies; they are stories that have gained depth and credibility because they have been transmitted from one community to another over centuries.

And while mythologies survived and evolved thanks to traditions and regional agreements such as morality, elites and cosmovisions, in the globalised society we dwell, these things have become somewhat a source of discord rather than encounter. For that matter, if we add some hope to our thinking, tokens could be the beacon for a new way to create myths. And perhaps, just as myths have done, they could bring meaningful turns to our history of humanity.

Tokenomics, the true art of NFTs was originally published in Jan Bot on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This article is for makers and potential collectors who are new to cryptoart. If you already have some knowledge, this may not be your cup of tea.

As of April 2022, the time I am publishing this article, digital artworks circulate on the Blockchain in the form of NFTs, non-fungible tokens.

NFTs are an umbrella term for a kind of crypto-token that is unique, meaning that it has a quality that cannot be replaced by any other token. Unlike cryptocurrencies (a type of fungible tokens), two NFTs can have the same code, links and metadata. Yet, they will still be different since they are logged under separate registrations in a blockchain.

NFTs can be sold, swapped, gifted or burned. The act of publishing one is known as “minting”. For creators who want to mint, here are three ways to do it.

1. Code your own NFT

Minting from scratch involves the creation of a bespoke NFT. There are many tutorials online on how to write a smart contract, and there are plenty of services to store the media associated with the NFT in case it is needed (generally through an IPFS service like Pinata or Filecoin). This method is a good option for generative art and creators who want to experiment with code or unconventional workflows.

Most of the time, NFTs minted from scratch are part of a larger project. Examples are the works made by Deafbeef, Pindar van Arman’s BitGans, and the now-classic Cryptopunks.

2. Mint on an open marketplace

Minting through an open marketplace is a more straightforward process. Probably the most well-known platform is Open Sea. There, one can easily upload the metadata and media file associated with an NFT directly. Compared to minting from scratch, the disadvantages of this method are the lack of options, as the process is very standard. However, the advantages are considerable, as minting on platforms usually allows access to a community of creators and consumers otherwise hard to reach.

Also, marketplaces like Open Sea actively invest in new integrations to make their user-generated NFTs more usable. For example, since this year, Open Sea NFTs can be used as certified profile pictures on Twitter. Mark Zuckerberg has also announced his intention to do something similar with Instagram.

Besides Open Sea, other examples of NFT platforms are Rarible, objkt.com, and Zora.

3. Mint through a gallery

Minting through a gallery can look similar to minting through an open marketplace, only that it works by invitation, and there is a more thorough process of curation involved. Sites like Foundation and Superrare respond to this model.

The advantages here are the establishment of a more personal relationship between the creator and the platform, which can translate into bespoke contracts and higher selling prices.

The disadvantages of galleries are not many compared to open markets. However, for some web3 ideologists, their business model raises some ethical questions.

One of the main promises publicised in the beginnings of cryptoart was the idea that digital artists could sell their work without the need for a middleman, namely a gallery. But the unquestionable success of this kind of market disappoints those ideals.

Other than Foundation and Superrare, examples of cryptoart galleries are ArtBlocks, LGND, and MakersPlace.

The bigger landscape

If you look into history, art has often been used to explore the potential of new technologies. There is a simple reason to explain why it has been like that. Art is experimental by nature, which allows freedom to explore technologies in different ways and perspectives. Also, art is relatively cheap to produce, which allows to quickly test its reception in society and financial markets. The case of art and NFTs does not escape this pattern.

Art is experimental by nature, which allows freedom to explore technologies in different ways and perspectives. Also, art is relatively cheap to produce, which allows to quickly test its reception in society and financial markets. The case of art and NFTs does not escape this pattern.

So what comes next with cryptoart? There are many possible scenarios, none of them exclusive from one another.

Designers are making digital items for High Definition virtual worlds that –yet in early prototype stages– are meant to be built on blockchains.

Media stars like musicians and professional sports players are selling collectable art that can be used as membership cards to access exclusive content and events.

Fashion brands like Nike are printing NFT artworks in physical garments manufactured only after showing proof of ownership.

The list of examples grows more and more every day.

Does all this sound exciting? Scary perhaps?

I’m curious to know your thoughts.

3 ways to mint a crypto artwork was originally published in Jan Bot on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Juxtaposed fields

On November 28th, 2018, Jan Bot uploaded a video titled “28–11–28.005 — knickers_cow.mp4”. What struck me about it was –first off– it had little to do with the titular “bovine” other than the description. But even more impressive than that was the choice of material and its intercutting, transitioning in seconds from well restored color footage of cows grazing, to much older looking and degraded footage of workers chopping grass.

The combination of the two shots immediately seemed to me as though a sort of time-jump, à la Intolerance, because of the significant quality discrepancy between the two images.

But what was being juxtaposed exactly?

By this point I had also seen Jan Bot produce much more interesting and sophisticated material and was also aware that relatively advanced algorithms had been built into its program. Yet for someone who was unacquainted with the bot, one could surmise that the image choices, or juxtapositions, could be perfectly randomly generated.

And yet despite the apparent randomness, still there was something unusual about the editing of this post. One could believe the juxtaposition of images was either nothing at all, or perhaps something with a hidden meaning, beyond common sense –human common sense, that is.

Would the algorithm be about juxtaposing time over time perhaps?

The idea struck me that Jan Bot is essentially a machine recording a machine that recorded things which “exist” –here, humans, animals and nature.

Or is it “existed”?

Because time does not exist for a machine. So, for a machine, what actually exists?

The idea struck me that Jan Bot is essentially a machine recording a machine that recorded things which “exist” –here, humans, animals and nature.

Reviewing the short clip again, I focused on the other images — fire coming out of what appears to be a porthole, children pumping water, and what appears to be two goats fighting. What of these things can a machine do?

It then appeared to me that Jan Bot’s rapid-fire montage makes sensorial documentaries of things that once existed, and that perhaps one day will cease to.

A shaken twosome

What strikes more about Jan Bot isn’t necessarily the archive it’s drawing from –in a way its own achievement, drawing from silent-era footage from unknown sources– but both how the program manages to decide how to place certain images in relation to the algorithm’s it’s pulling from, and perhaps more importantly, how it utilizes the “cut” itself to simulate visceral reactions based on the information given.

A video from September, about “Bill Cosby Wife”, as the program states, intercuts two likely unrelated images of a wealthy man contemplating and a woman surrounded by alcohol, dancing atop a table. The juxtaposition of the two images, given the subject of the clip, is considerably ominous –however, it also implies a psychological sophistication which cannot merely be an accident.

A shot that follows is even more interesting: a man (seen from the back) and a woman move to embrace. But the shot freezes on an ambiguous expression on the woman’s face. Watching the short image closely, it’s likely that this was a simple embrace between the two people. However, not only does the shot freeze, but it begins to make a kind of jagged cut back and forth between the previous two frames and this one, taking this ambiguous expression and “shaking” it. What would appear as an embrace now appears as a prelude to assault.

This expression is doubly haunting. One is reminded of a similar technique in Jean-Luc Godard’s Sauve qui peut (la vie), where ostensibly ordinary moments were recontextualized by a frame-stretching technique (reprinting every second frame[1]) whose effect amplified their placement within the film’s thematic structure.

As Cosby was the initial subject of the piece, I realized that Jan Bot was essentially doing the exact same thing both in terms of the aesthetic choice of essentially “shaking” an image to draw attention to a nuance one would likely not perceive within the full context of the original image, and creating a new context with the full pieces relating to its subject.

But this wasn’t Jean-Luc Godard, was a bot!

Connotations of a game

Another clip, this time from November, purports to be on the World Chess Championship. Yet, never once do we see the game of chess being played, nor even a chess board.

What we do see includes a gun about to be fired, a woman and a baby, a party of military officials and war rubble from what looks to be somewhere in the Middle East, along with very brief (less than a second) clips of a religious procession and a crowd of people.

There is a short chain of connotations here –namely, Jan Bot will cut rapidly between the military officials and the war rubble, before cutting to the religious procession. Meanwhile, the brief intertitles allude to a game of victory and defeat –the only obvious reference to chess– however, would we even be aware it was a reference to the game of chess had we not known the title of this video?

So now we find ourselves in a unique position — starting with the back-and-forth cutting of a gun about to be fired and a woman with baby. This juxtaposition provokes a phenomenological response of fear, followed by the aforementioned military/rubble, before finally focusing briefly on the religious. We start with something which provokes phenomena or emotions to the conceptual, but the religion reminds one of the link between military and state and that of the church. Because of the title this becomes juxtaposed with the idea of chess itself, as a comparison.

Moral of the story? For those in power, war is like chess.

New early cinema

Beginning this piece I had wanted to note how many of Jan Bot’s little short clips had reminded me of early cinema, like the Lumiere’s, or Louis Le Prince, or Edison: primitive, but with potential.

Surely cinema made by a computer program is still in its infancy. Nevertheless, even the previous “Cosby” clip had only amounted to about 50% of the clip itself, the rest of which appeared impenetrable, or rather, detailed analysis would be pushing it.

That said, Jan Bot has one thing over the Lumiere’s, Le Prince, & Edison: none of them were the one to consciously discover the “cut.” Perhaps the Lumiere’s did, with their “Demolition of a Wall,” which replays the film’s action in reverse, and thus has to be cut in order for the reversal to play.

Jan Bot’s entire principle functions are based on cuts and juxtapositions — there is no original “shots” here, only leftovers from unidentifiable works that are at least 100 years old. Yet even in its infant stage, Jan Bot is clearly capable of some degree of sophistication and internal logic.

A machine made of machines

In our modern age, the idea of Artificial Intelligence has long been a subject of science fiction, before starting to become a reality in the manner of programs that are able to understand human speech and consider human emotions, as well as things such as autonomously operating cars and sophisticated video game enemies. Jan Bot does not interact with the human, but like all AI, it is founded on human intelligence.

We tend to be so obsessed with the word “interactivity” that if a new technology doesn’t react to our narcissistic drive of getting feedback from our immediate input we don’t see the point in using it. Would it matter anyway if a machine could interact with the human, if the point is to make its own films?

Jan Bot does not interact with the human, but like all AI, it is founded on human intelligence.

As the Hollis Frampton’s quote that titles this piece describes, cinema is mechanical. He precluded this in a 1968 lecture of how specific amounts of frames are needed to appeal to the simplest camera movement, and make images appear natural to the human eye. But Jan Bot is not a case of cinema making itself, but a machine now being able to make cinema with the same delineations a human would set if they had a given outline and goal.

And what is it that this can tell us about cinema? Perhaps we will miss the psychology, the nuance, as most critiques of Artificial Intelligence seem to postulate. Yet, some of these films made by Jan Bot seem to push us in a different direction.

We can have two possibilities here, either a machine is so skilled that it can mimic human behaviour or, and to my mind at this moment more likely, human behaviour is actually rather simple and easy to emulate given a set of nominations or circumstances.

That is why cinema is the most manipulative art form. As Eisenstein wrote in the 1930s, one must also be aware of one’s psychological responses to the phenomena of mere glimpses of things. Humanity rather, is easy to read.

Footnotes

(1) Frame-stretching was also a technique used by Chaplin when reissuing his shorts in 1958 to ensure they ran at an approximation of the correct speed.

A machine made of images was originally published in Jan Bot on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Since I first encountered Jan Bot in May 2017 in the context of a presentation at Eye Filmmuseum’s Collection Center I have been fascinated by the videos it generates. I especially felt that they resonate strongly with ideas I am developing about the relation between artistic and scholarly approaches to digitised film collections.

Jan Bot’s videos consist of clips from Eye Filmmuseum’s Bits & Pieces collection and of intertitles based on text snippets from contemporary news items. Bits & Pieces was established by the Filmmuseum in the late 1980s as an initiative to preserve film fragments that the curators could not identify but nevertheless deemed worthy of preservation because of their striking aesthetic qualities.¹ The content for Jan Bot’s intertitles is sourced from news items retrieved using Google Trends. Both the film snippets and the trending news are analyzed automatically using automatic video content analysis and keyword extraction, respectively. The results are subsequently used to generate new works that seek to match film and text semantically.²

Borrowing a term from philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard, I qualify Jan Bot’s exploration of scientific approaches to automated content analysis as “surrationalist”.

Currently, Jan Bot creates approximately twenty videos each day. The resulting videos — typically 20–30 seconds in length — juxtapose the footage and text material through a frenetic montage and, in their elucidation of one another, make for unexpected associations, while also frequently bordering on the nonsensical.

By creating these videos, Jan Bot invites us to reflect on the meanings assigned to archival films in digital archives, social media environments, and in relation to online news consumption through the lens of generative, experimental filmmaking. Beyond this, the videos’ poetic approach to data-driven content analysis (of archival film and online news) also offer an urgent artistic counterpoint to current deployments of digital methods in archives and, by the same token, digital scholarship in film historical research. Borrowing a term from philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard, I qualify Jan Bot’s exploration of scientific approaches to automated content analysis as “surrationalist”.

I will focus on two aspects of Jan Bot’s work, namely machine learning as applied to archival film for metadata creation, and analysis of film circulation on social media platforms. With regard to the first, I argue that Jan Bot challenges the evidentiary, scientist inclinations of current video analysis software and turns it in a cinephile direction that harkens back to classic avant-garde filmmaking. As for the latter, I suggest that Jan Bot’s experimental reason has devised a compelling method for elucidating archival film’s circulation and reception on social media, potentially to the great benefit of scholars who research historical and contemporary film distribution and reception.

In order to explain my fascination with Jan Bot’s videos in relation to current digital scholarship and my reasons for wanting to make these points, let me first tell a bit more about my scholarly background and the research I was doing at the time I first encountered the videos.

Deformative Criticism in Digital Scholarship and the case for Surrationalist Film Historiography

At the point in time I saw Jan Bot’s videos for the first time, I had just defended my dissertation at the University of Amsterdam — Film history in the making. Film historiography, digitised archives and digital research dispositifs (2017). In the context of my research, I had produced a critical overview of emerging digital techniques and methods for film historiography, while discussing their epistemological underpinnings.

My reason for undertaking this work was that I had observed how film and media historians were in recent years increasingly beginning to make use of computational, quantitative techniques to analyze and visualize patterns in digitized archival films. Using digital methods to produce data and graphical representations — such as diagrams, graphs and interactive maps — scholars were slowly beginning to produce evidence in their research in new ways, for instance for the purpose of style analysis of historical film data, or socio-historical analysis of film distribution data. In doing so, scholars began adopting tools, representational practices and forms of reasoning from the sciences.³

Scholars should begin to push data-driven research in new directions and pursue an experimental, reflexive approach to film history that engages poetic forms of moving image appropriation.

Considering this development from the perspectives of philosophy of science and film historiography, my research’s aim was to elucidate how knowledge production in specific research traditions — stylistic history, film philology and socio-economic cinema history — had changed as a consequence of digitization, while also indicating future directions and methods I thought were currently missing. In the dissertation’s final chapter, I argued that scholars should begin to push data-driven research in new directions and pursue an experimental, reflexive approach to film history that engages poetic forms of moving image appropriation informed by cinephile and surrealist theory.

Using the playful terminology of scientist and philosopher Gaston Bachelard I suggested that there is a need for a “surrationalist” (surrationalisme) approach to film historiography that concurrently aims to critique and advance contemporary modes of knowledge production in film archival research.⁴ Influenced by psychoanalysis and surrealism in the 1930s, Bachelard coined this term to articulate a dialectic approach that embraced logical and formal deduction’s rationalities and scientific methods, while constantly questioning them to open new paths for scientific discovery. In Bachelard’s words, this implied to ”take these forms — after all purified and economically arranged very well by logicians — to fill them up psychologically and put them back into motion and life again”.⁵

Digital scholarship should enable and encourage the languages, technniques and cultures of data, statistics and algorithms to intermingle with poetic gestures of moving image appropriation and cinephile appraisal, as a way to develop experimental forms of reason.

In doing so, Bachelard argued that surrealist poetics could play a crucial role in creating an ”experimental reason” as a scientific pendant to the surrealists’ “experimental dream”, with which to question science’s formalized methods, assumptions and rigour and develop imaginative alternatives. Inspired by this proposition, I argued that digital scholarship should enable and encourage the languages, techniques and cultures of data, statistics and algorithms to intermingle with poetic gestures of moving image appropriation and cinephile appraisal, as a way to develop experimental forms of reason.

In making this suggestion I was, in addition to Bachelard’s concept, also inspired by recent work of film scholars Katherine Groo, Kevin Ferguson, André Habib and Catherine Grant, among others. Drawing on early surrealist, cinephile film theory and verfremdung strategies in their use of digital methods for video analysis, these scholars have in recent years underlined the great value of defamiliarizing films as objects of study through poetic gestures and idiosyncratic readings (or through “videosyncratic” experiences to use Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener’s great term) to expose, reflect on and challenge current technical conditions for historical interpretation.⁶

As Grant has put it, poetic appropriations that make otherwise familiar objects look a bit strange, for instance by using video editing to juxtapose or associate film clips in unexpected ways, can “unsettle a ‘professional cosiness’ of traditional historicism” and yield new critical perspectives on film analysis.⁷ While the scholars mentioned and cited here do not all explicitly use this term, this trend in film studies may be seen as calling for a deformative criticism, that deploys digital tools to produce readings of films against the grain of traditional, historical scholarship.

Instead of seeking to fit archival films into classic notions of stylistic schools or linear accounts of film history’s development — which cinephiles traditionally did when cinephilia emerged in the 1920s to legitimize film as an art form with its own history — such work instead reclaims a cinephile tradition to highlight idiosyncratic and anecdotal experiences of film viewing that do not fit into such accounts.

In this regard, artists play an important role. In developing such an approach, scholars look beyond film studies to a long tradition of experimental filmmaking — from Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1936) to Gustav Deutsch’s Film Ist series (1998-) that through artistic interventions create — as Habib has formulated it — a:

…movement back and forth between historical understanding of the past and (…) reactivation in artistic works [which] is essential for illuminating our knowledge and enriching our experience of film history and, in a more general way, our apprehension of what is in the film archives.⁸

Taking the cue from the notions and concerns of the scholarly and artistic work I have sketched here, I was convinced that in making this suggestion, I could contribute to opening new avenues for a fruitful dialogue between digital film historiography and artistic practices. However, when making this suggestion in 2017 I also observed that while there do exist several inspiring examples of visualizing data relating to classic films in media art, very few artists seemed to seek out archival film material to appropriate them artistically with algorithmic means.⁹ For these reasons I was enthusiastic to encounter Jan Bot’s work because I found it to fulfil the ambition of challenging digital film historiography’s modes of knowledge production while offering imaginative, cinephile alternatives for experimental reasoning.

While there do exist several inspiring examples of visualizing data relating to classic films in media art, very few artists seemed to seek out archival film material to appropriate them artistically with algorithmic means.

Having since had the time to see Jan Bot develop I share a couple of observations on two aspects in which I think Jan Bot achieves a kind of deformative criticism particularly well, while creating a new experimental reason. First, I discuss in the following sections how Jan Bot’s artistic strategies challenge notions of film as evidence in contemporary metadata creation in moving image archives that rely on automated content analysis. Subsequently, I argue that the resulting videos may be considered as more than primarily artistic productions and may also be seen as highly topical for contemporary research on film distribution and reception.

The evidentiary visual regime of automated content analysis in audiovisual archives

Jan Bot’s work is particularly interesting in how it challenges the notions of evidence at work in automatic tools for metadata creation in moving image archives. In order to understand why, it is helpful to first consider a few core aims of film cataloguing and current developments in automatic indexing. Written catalogue descriptions contained in archival film’s metadata remain at the core of film heritage institutions’ catalogues and offer a basis for scholarly research and reuse of footage in new productions. They are made, in most cases, by archivists following rigorous guidelines in order to achieve the best possible accessibility and retrievability of moving images and related materials.

Since film heritage institutions began to systematically build collections and develop catalogues in the 1930s, they have traditionally catered to two types of film historiographies: a history of film as an art form, and of film as source material for social and cultural history. Initially, archiving initiatives emerged primarily from cinephile film clubs and societies but have, in more recent decades, become increasingly professionalized and scientifically codified. Especially since the 1970s, metadata creation has increasingly followed well-defined taxonomies to produce accurate descriptions of the content, physical characteristics and life of archival objects to secure their retrievability. Typically, such taxonomies adhere either to international standards defined within networks of film heritage institutions — in particular those of the International Federation of Film Archives — or specific institutional guidelines.

While metadata are mostly created by humans, they are in recent years increasingly generated with various software for automatic feature extraction and, subsequently, metadata creation. For instance, by using machine learning to automatically detect objects, locations and concepts in digitized film material. An important reason for taking such an approach is to make the workload lighter for archivists as metadata creation is extremely labour-intensive. Furthermore, it makes it possible to analyze historical patterns in archival material as an evidentiary basis for researching events, individuals and social movements.

The development of such tools has a decades-long history in broadcast archives, that have been experimenting with artificial intelligence for metadata creation much longer than film heritage institutions.¹⁰ One explanation as to why broadcast archives have a longer history in this regard is that in addition to wanting to lighten the task of metadata creation, such institutions in many cases cater directly to television production or, in some cases, need to generate profits from footage sales as a substantial part of their business model. For this reason, they need as much metadata as possible on their archival material’s content to optimize access and sales.

Having lagged behind these developments, film heritage institutions are slowly catching up and developing similar methods for film collections. On a European level, the current project I-Media-Cities sees a coordinated effort among nine film heritage institutions to develop software for recognizing objects, places, buildings and persons in order to make archival film accessible for socio-economic historical research. Likewise, the Danish company Vintage Cloud is currently developing film scanners that can produce such metadata in real time, presented by the company as Smart Indexing.

While the algorithms of such efforts are still not very robust and applied primarily on an experimental basis, they hold great potential for film heritage institutions and, when they work well, their affordances in terms of improving access are obvious. Yet, beyond practical considerations of lightening the tasks of metadata creation and improving access to film archives for historians, one may also question their limitations.

In particular, such methods impose a specific regime of vision that favours clear indexicality in the quest to recognize objects, places and people. While this may help semantic content retrieval and produce a great variety of useful entry points, it is less productive in drawing attention to image details or gestures which in unexpected or accidental ways may appear beautiful or intriguing. In other words, this regime of vision can be said to neglect an idiosyncratic form of appreciation that highlight surprising details and moments, something which a more classic cinephile contemplation of films has traditionally valued and would arguably be better in discerning.¹¹

Jan Bot’s Surrationalist 8 o’clock news: the Bits & Pieces as absurd ‘fait divers’

Jan Bot’s approach to feature extraction and metadata creation as a basis for classifying and appropriating videos operates according to a logic that challenges the applications I have discussed above and makes an interesting intervention in this regard. This approach strikes me as a form of deformative criticism that harkens back to classic avant-garde filmmaking and, in doing so, opens an avenue for a cinephile, idiosyncratic mode of appreciation.

Instead of adhering to scientifically codified archival standards and taxonomies and pursuing the development of robust algorithms for feature extraction, Jan Bot taps into the shared consciousness of social media and online news consumption to create metadata as a starting point for playing with the evidentiary status of archival film, using the Bits & Pieces material. Making use of Google Trends, Jan Bot extracts words from current news items, produces tags and associates words with the contents of the Bits & Pieces. Each source is indicated in the data associated with each video. Subsequently, this data forms a basis for automatically generating video appropriation works consisting of video material and text snippets from news items. Finally, the videos and data are gathered in the JAN BOT_ CATA.LOG.

Instead of adhering to scientifically codified archival standards and taxonomies and pursuing the development of robust algorithms for feature extraction, Jan Bot taps into the shared consciousness of social media and online news consumption to create metadata as a starting point for playing with the evidentiary status of archival film.

The tags associated with the video material can be meaningful in rather literal ways, and in some cases suggest strong indexical relations between images and text. For instance, news about the British Royal family are often associated with clips of high society, like in the video called “2018–11–14.005-queen_elizabeth.mp4”.

Among the more striking matches that, to a great extent, appear accurate in a way that traditional feature extraction strives to achieve, one may consider December 23’s video “2018–12–23.002-tsunami.mp4” that links snippets of news items about the Indonesian tsunami to stormy sea images.

For the most part, however, the semantic word-image relations of these matches and the indexical relations they suggest are in a traditional sense broken if not nonsensical. Take for instance the video below about the micro-blogging platform tumblr and its decision to ban adult content:

Broken news

Yet, at its most nonsensical, Jan Bot’s flickering and flashing intertitles still succeed in feeling like a compelling, imperative call to watch and to try to make meaning of the film material. This is achieved by giving cues about recent news events that may resonate in our short-term memory and is arguably also a result of the videos’ insisting aesthetic devices. For instance, the intertitles’ consistent use of all caps — often considered the internet’s equivalent to shouting — may convey the feeling of a newspaper boy shouting out the latest news sensations, of online breaking news banners, or of the sometimes absurdly cryptic clickbait headlines of the tabloid press, designed to create curiosity or astonishment. Thus, the videos’ intertitles attract viewers by offering details and teasers about events that they may recognize, while never offering explanations or entirely accurate illustrations. In other words: Jan Bot’s news are not breaking, they are broken.

I believe said features of Jan Bot’s videos can be traced back to classic avant-garde filmmaking’s surrealist and dadaist plays with meanings of words and objects and that doing so may illustrate how they ultimately achieve to reinstate a cinephile, avant-garde attitude in automated content analysis. In particular, watching Jan Bot’s associations between film material and tags, bears an uncanny resemblance to the avant-garde classic Ballet Mécanique (France, 1924), created by Fernand Léger assisted by Dudley Murphy. Centered around the enigmatic news item “Pearl necklace worth 5 million stolen” presented in different variations, the film offers a frenetically paced and radically repetitive visual exploration of shots of industry, objects, working people, Chaplin and Kiki de Montparnasse’s grimaces, ultimately turning the news item’s hint of a narrative frame into an absurd faits divers.¹²

In several aspects, Jan Bot’s videos recall Ballet’s repetitive montage and elliptical evocation of a news item and drama that is never resolved. In a way, the videos feel as if Leger had created silent film newsreels with algorithmic means. For an illustrative example of this resemblance, consider for instance the clip below from Ballet (from approximately 00:09:15 to 00:12:00):

As in Ballet, the intertitles of Jan Bot’s videos announce factual events, but rather than offering viewers enough details to make sense of them, they take them as a departure point for mystifying current news items ad absurdum while inviting viewers to contemplate the images and fill in the gaps. In this respect, Jan Bot’s dissemination strategy of its own works is particularly eloquent in underlining this strategy: every evening one of its videos is published in a synchronous Twitter, Facebook and Instagram post at 8pm (CET) and thus offers an alternative to the local 8 o’clock news. In this way, the videos point back to the users that create and influence news agendas through the trending topics, using the Bits & Pieces material as a prism for defamiliarizing the newsfeed’s content and current approaches to feature extraction. This invites users to critically reflect on the logics and desires of their news consumption while questioning what evidentiary role archival footage may play in relation to current events.

To conclude, one may say that considered in isolation, Jan Bot’s word-image juxtapositions at first glance appear as strictly nonsensical, stochastic dada poetics that are in themselves highly enjoyable for their unpredictable juxtapositions. Yet, regardless of whether the material is illustrative of the events the algorithms associate them with, the videos also invite critical reflection on automated content analysis and contemporary news production and consumption.¹³

By the same token, the videos produce a surrationalist, deformative alternative to current feature extraction and video content analysis in archives and digital film historical research, by playfully challenging their scientific emphasis on indexical accuracy through generative, poetic strategies. Thus, Jan Bot’s reflexive, experimental reason points us to the impossibility of exhausting archival films semantically and neatly fitting them into contemporary news narratives. Instead, it highlights the underlying contingencies of archival film’s evidentiary status and the distance in time between the material’s past expressions and present interpretations of it created with software.

Documenting Film Heritage’s Social Media Dissemination in the JAN BOT_ CATA.LOG

In addition to offering alternative entry points to the Bits & Pieces material and producing a critical perspective on metadata creation with machine learning, Jan Bot’s productions also carve out a space for reflection on online dissemination of archival films. Through defamiliarization, it elucidates how the viewing contexts of social media constitute a changing web of semantic relations, while producing a significant trace of these contexts. In doing so, Jan Bot has imagined an interesting way of documenting the dissemination of digitized film heritage online and leaving traces of its programming context that may offer interesting perspectives for scholars researching film distribution and reception on social media.

For film scholars, understanding how social media environments attribute meaning to the films that circulate in them is important in order to understand the transitional nature and changing specificities of archival film and its reception today. In recent years, film scholars have increasingly studied films’ past and present circulations across physical and virtual sites, to yield better understandings of how films acquire meaning through intertextual or intermedial relations to other films or media outlets, especially in the scholarly HoMER network. This research strand’s focus has emerged and become gradually stronger since the mid-1970s and is prominent especially in the fields of early cinema studies, new cinema history and media archaeology.

By studying the exhibition contexts of films and attending to how relations to other media are established and negotiated, such research develops insights into film’s configurations and specificities as a medium in phases of technological transition. While film and media scholars are beginning to develop extensive statistical research projects on recent film production and circulation — see for instance the impressive research in Australian media scholar Deb Verhoeven’s Kinomatics projects — there have been few coordinated efforts for understanding the intermedial relations between archival film and new media outlets that develop as a consequence of film’s circulation on social media.

Meanwhile, film heritage institutions increasingly strengthen their social media presence as a way to nurture and improve the circulation of their digitized collections and engage with broader user groups. Archival films now circulate in Facebook and Twitter newsfeeds where they are related to current events and news items through curated posts as part of social media strategies. Typically, film museums post digitized archival clips online as a way to offer historical perspectives on current news, engage with communities, or simply to show a beautiful new digitisation. For instance, the picture below shows an example of a travelogue from Sumatra, posted by Eye Filmmuseum on its Facebook page in November 2018 for its beautiful imagery of bridges and rivers — currently counting 729 views.

Such forms of access are increasingly embraced by film heritage institutions that consider and cite view and share numbers as metrics that reflect the success of their digitization and online dissemination projects. It is great for access purposes that archival films now circulate more widely and can be seen in situations that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. Yet, beyond giving an indication of the popularity levels of archival films online, likes and shares say little about the kind of viewing contexts and receptions that social media offers for watching films.

Jan Bot’s videos offer an interesting meta-perspective on this development. By working with trending topics and the Bits & Pieces as source material, it creates — as discussed in the previous section — videos that conflate archival films and the newsfeed into one singular expression. In doing so, it gives an impression of the news items the footage may have been associated with on a given day.

Moreover, the same footage appears in multiple videos, and is assigned different meanings in each. In this regard it is again relevant to consider Jan Bot’s own social media strategy. The video posted every day at 8pm (CET) is accompanied by the following standard message — beginning with the computer programming crash course idiom ”Hello world” — in which the subject changes from day to day (in this case the video from November 14, 2018 concerning former US Deputy National Security Advisor Mira Ricardel):

🤖 Hello world. Today I generated this video about Mira Ricardel. I hope you like it! Read more about me and my algorithms on jan.bot/20181114.

Through this generative approach, Jan Bot makes changing relations between films and news outlets explicit through continuous re-appropriation while leaving a trace of the news stories they may have been experienced in relation to in its database. When following the updates closely one begins to discern how the same footage is related to widely diverging news items and becomes aware of their shifting meanings. Among numerous examples, take for instance the videos “2018–11–14.007-fallout_76_review.mp4” and “2018–11–14.008-when_is_black_friday_2018.mp4” that in large part rely on the same footage of an aircraft to illustrate news about, respectively, the computer game Fallout 76 and Black Friday.

Becoming aware of such connections between videos, one realizes how Jan Bot makes visible changing patterns and desires of news consumption and information streams and the circulation and changing meanings of archival film material in relation to them. In this respect, Jan Bot has — through its experimental reason — found a way of elucidating and inscribing ephemeral moments of contemporary dissemination and viewing of archival films online which, I believe, scholars would not have imagined.

Because the videos excel in making these relations visible, they may be thought of as traces that scholars can study to nurture novel insights into the dynamics of contemporary film heritage dissemination. Thus, the JAN BOT_ CATA.LOG can simultaneously be considered an interesting collection of avant-gardistic appropriation works while it may also be approached as a highly valuable resource of inscriptions of algorithmic film programming on social media.

Conclusion

Jan Bot’s videos are great fun to watch on their own, and they also offer a welcome — critical — counterpoint to current software-driven knowledge production in film archives. This approach may be qualified as surrationalist insofar as Jan Bot makes an interesting double movement by simultaneously engaging in surrealist play with the scientist ambitions of machine learning and traditional evidentiary notions of film as historical source material, while producing new types of historical traces with a different evidentiary function. Stripping archival footage of meanings that have hitherto been assigned to them with automatic feature extraction, foregrounds the footage’s potential and contingent meanings and creates a repository of works which may be considered as inscriptions of contemporary film viewing on social media.

Ultimately, by achieving this, Jan Bot ties in with scholarly calls for a reflexive, deformative criticism and its ambition to interrogate and question the socio-technical foundations of digital film-historical research through poetic gestures. Far from the usual fare of current feature extraction and film data visualization, it makes things strange and in doing so — to recap Habib’s words — “enrich[es] our experience of film history and, in a more general way, our apprehension of what is in the film archives”.

In this sense, I feel Jan Bot’s experimental reason has truly managed to open new artistic avenues for exploring film archives in a way which speaks very directly to contemporary concerns of film scholars and digital film historiography — probably much more directly than Jan Bot is (and will ever become) aware.

Footnotes

(1) For an interview with Bits & Pieces current curators on the initiative’s history and selection criteria see Christian Olesen, “Found Footage Photogénie: An Interview with Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi and Mark-Paul Meyer”, NECSUS — European Journal of Media Studies, 4 (Autumn 2013)

(2) For a discussion of Jan Bot’s algorithms see Pablo Núñez Palma’s Medium post November 28, 2018, ”Jan Bot’s step by step. The filmmaking algorithm explained”.

(3) Most emblematic in this regard is film historian Yuri Tsivian’s pioneering database and stylometric research project Cinemetrics, see: cinemetrics.lv.

(4) Gaston Bachelard, L’engagement rationaliste (Paris: Les Presses universitaires de France, 1972[1936]) 12.

(5) Gaston Bachelard, op.cit., 12. Original quote: ”C’est de reprendre ces formes, tout de même bien épurées et économiquement agencées par les logiciens, et de les remplir psychologiquement, de les remettre en mouvement et en vie”.

(6) Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener, “Down with Cinephilia? Long Live Cinephilia? And Other Videosyncratic Pleasures” in Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener (eds.), Cinephilia. Movies, Love and Memory (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005) 11–24.

(7) Catherine Grant, ”How Long Is a Piece of String? On the Practice, Scope and Value of Videographic Film Studies”, (Paper presented at the Audiovisual Essay Conference, Frankfurt Filmmuseum/Goethe University, November 23–24, 2013)

(8) André Habib, ”Le cinéma de réemploi considéré comme une ‘archive’. L’exemple de A Trip Down Market Street (1906) et Eureka(1974)”, in André Habib and Michel Marie eds., L’avenir de la mémoire. Patrimoine, restauration, réemploi cinématographiques. (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2013) 151 (emphasis in original). Original quote: ”mouvement d’aller-retour entre l’intelligence historienne du passé et sa réactivation dans les oeuvres artistiques, est essentiel pour éclairer notre connaissance et enrichir notre expérience de l’histoire du cinéma et, de façon plus générale, notre appréhension de ce qui se trouve dans les archives du cinéma…”.

(9) See for instance film scholar Kevin L. Ferguson’s very exciting work on film data visualization inspired by contemporary media art practices: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/11/1/000276/000276.html

(10) For a succinct historical overview of this history, see Brecht Declerq’s Medium post November 28, 2018, ”Jan Bot or a new step in the demystifaction of feature extraction technology”.

(11) For a discussion of historical and contemporary cinephile viewing habits see in particular Christian Keathley’s excellent book Cinephilia and History, or the Wind in the Trees (Indiana University Press, 2005).

(12) François Albera, L’Avant-garde au cinéma (Paris: Armand Colin, 2005) 78.

(13) In this respect, as both Brecht Declerq and Elif -Rongen Kaynakçi point out, Jan Bot may actually be considered a rather logical extension of the Bits & Pieces initiative’s underlying assumption in that it does not seek to identify the fragments.

Jan Bot: a Surrationalist Historiographer was originally published in Jan Bot on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Andreas Treske
edited by Pablo Núñez Palma

NODE01

girl,
boy,
face.

on prepareMovie¹
setStatus (

Before the movie plays the first frame, invisible forces have already been set to motion.
These forces are operative commands, scripts, messages, codes, objects positioned along frames on a linear timeline, preloaded with the display code of the movie object.

- we never think about a movie as complex software.

As an extension of the finger, the play button.
This is the igniter that sets the frame into motion,
it turns on the screen.

The frame follows another frame and then
another frame that follows another frame.
The setting, a well-defined zone with determined changes of display values or,
in other words,
oscillations of light.

Loading…

Eyes, an extreme close up. One fleeting headline, too short to be read.

People in costumes, a party,
A historical event perhaps?
A man with a mask,
the face of a female puppet laying and glancing.
A story created through juxtapositions, interruptions, repetitions.
A reverie of rhythms rather than a narrative of images.

)
end

NODE02

disguise,
wedding,
affection.

on prepareMovie
setStatus (

I’ve never thought of archives as collections of software and datasets.
I am rather familiar with physical archives: reels of celluloid.

One meter of 35mm film is about 52 frames, or two seconds long.
One hundred meters is about 4 minutes, if shot on 24 frames per second.
Silent films were shot on 18 frames a second.

Young filmmakers may not recall this knowledge,
but it has remained.
It has been transported with the weight of Griffith’s narrative tradition
for more than a hundred years ago.

A shot as a single unit of content.
The close up of a pair of eyes
may only last two or three meters.

A movie viewed
consists of a group of shots assembled (clued) to create a narration,
a description,
a visual statement.

Montage can be associative, rhythmic, symbolic, metaphorical, or simply indexical.
Montage directs the viewers, it conditions their attention.
Hollywood’s style of cinematic storytelling pulls us into a narrative world through
its transparent and fluid editing.
This is the doctrine of ‘decoupage’ or
invisible editing

Decoupage creates continuity between actions. It weaves a story.
Decoupage creates rhythm, it gives form,
it let us look at something from various angles,
it allows shifting place and time,
it creates simultaneity,
it manipulates our emotional responses.

As Andrej Tarkovski wrote in his book “Sculpting in Time”:

Editing a picture correctly means allowing the separate scenes and shot to come together spontaneously, for in a sense they edit themselves; they join up according to their own intrinsic pattern (…) it is not always easy to sense the pattern of relationships, the articulations between shots (…)²

In opposition to Hollywood, Sergei Eisenstein claimed that discontinuity between shots immersed viewers in a dialectical process, forcing them to synthesize images and create new meanings.

Everyone who has had in his hands a piece of film to be edited knows by experience how neutral it remains, even though a part of a planned sequence, until it is joined to another piece, when it suddenly acquires and conveys a sharper and quite different meaning than planned for it at the time of filming.³

)
end

NODE03

baby,
friendship,
lady.

on prepareMovie
setStatus (

What changes if the filmstrips are translated into code?

Blocks of data coupled with metadata,
tags labelling chunks of unidentified images, framed as sets.
Sets of sets defined as sequences,
parts of sets defined by labels
and identifiers,
data as an infinite landscape of possibilities,
a big, big digital chunk
inside a storage disk
on a server,
each referring to each other.

In ‘The Language of New Media’ (2001), Lev Manovich proposed five defining characteristics of digital media: Numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding. Understood very simple, any digital media object can be described mathematically and submitted to the scrutiny of algorithms.
But so far digital media objects are still treated just like their analogue counterpart.
Filmstrips have been turned into graphical timelines,
shots into clips organized in digital reels,
digital bins,
and digital folders.

The basic unit of content remained the frame
and the edited film remained
a sequence of frames linked and locked.
A shot, a sequence of images, was and still is the instruction of reading as playing a specific chunk of data from a disk.

The timeline paradigm is just one from many possible approaches towards the assemblage of chunks of data.
Layering tracks over time transforms a computer from a movie player to a movie-making machine,
that is,

A signification engine bolstered by interactivity that can be mechanically scripted with finite options or driven by the fluid dynamics of video game methodologies.⁴

In 1937 the composer John Cage wrote “The Future of Music”.
He described the cinematic frame as a basic operational unit for measuring time.
This unit could be the rigorous framing of one single element,
or it could be part of a complex multilayered composition.

John Cage’s ideas meet Gilles Deleuze, the philosopher
in his theories about “cinema-thought”.
While continuing to reflect on movie-making in the digital domain,
we are ending up with the dynamics of a system that is left to “be itself”,
creating the possibility of an artificial awareness.

For Deleuze the cinematic frame is an information system. Actors, places, objects in front of the camera, sounds, effects, durations of takes, all together build the cinematic frame and create meaning.

Sequences of frames with rational connections or assemblages of cause and effect
are called by Deleuze “movement-images”.
Sequences of images that do not describe time through motion, and rather present time in the space between two disconnected images,
are called by Deleuze “time-images”.

In Jan Bot, or in any system that is left to “be itself”, the sequences of frames (basically chunks of data) become events authored from a network of instructions.
They are modular scripts driven by
the element of chance
to create images detached from actions,
substantial sequences that
inherit both cinema and an AI approach to
autonomous thought.

In a Deleuzian sense, the system produces an image beyond movement and time,
a neural image,
a rhythmical image.

)
end

NODE04

dinner jacket,
strange.

on prepareMovie
setStatus (

Lev Manovich had referred to Vertov’s “Man with the movie camera” as an example of the indexing character of cinema.

Interactive movie-making software like Florian Thalhofer’s Korsakov applied this indexing character to generate interactive storytelling experiences through image tagging.

But the algorithmic editing capacities of an AI go beyond simple indexing and linking/tagging.
When JanBot searches for trending news and scrolls Eye filmmuseum’s archive,
the two given sets,
one dynamic and one static,
become just one set of data at one specific time.

The resulting experience played back to the human eye is unexpected, surprising, sometimes engaging, somehow strange, someway utterly outlandish.

On first sight, the editing of a movie clip like the one -referenced here- on Michelle Obama, looks like another form of chaos editing, an editing style cropped out of music videos, where time is anytime, and space is any space, with a disruption of continuity and a total support of feeling and atmosphere generating rhythm.

On second sight, a movie like this offers an unexpected juxtaposition of images, a refreshing cinematic moment where the narrative is manifested by a set of algorithms. Retaking Deleuze’s theory of action and time image, this movie offers a third kind of image, one generated inside the human mind: a mental image.

Automation might be seen as a giveaway of the creative process to forms and functions of algorithmic logics in computer systems. With Jan Bot it is not only the giveaway of the creative process to algorithms, but also the giveaway of the archive.

And nonetheless, the non-human element is through the act of the artist linked with the human world. The AI becomes a responding mechanism of human archived truth. The generated videos, inspired by online trending news, paint societal mental images in poetic forms. They demand attention to the machine that generated them, evoking feelings and memories out of this observation.

Here, the third image is a poetic one. Through movement and time, the machine contemplates its inner substance, its “machin-nes” — alive in relation to us.

)
end

Footnotes

(1) The starting command of the now obsolete authoring software Macromedia Director for designing and scripting interactive CD-ROMs with the object-oriented programming language LINGO.

(2) Tarkovsky, Sculpting in time. University of Texas Press. 1989.

(3) Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Dobson. 1963.

(4) Goldberg, David. EnterFrame: Cage, Deleuze and Macromedia Director (multimedia authoring software)(Evaluation). Afterimage. July-August 2002.

Michelle’s Eye’s was originally published in Jan Bot on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.