Industrial Jeopardy

Induction is a genre that finds its form in the *industrial jeopardy* film. The Highway Safety Patrol has done the most to elevate the genre to the standard of an art form; i.e., the capacity to form and be formed through a medium, which is plastic. *Signal 30* is a 1959 trigger film shown widely to high school students into the 1980s, and that takes its name from the Ohio State Highway Patrol for a fatal car accident. Like its California counterpart, *Red Asphalt*, *Signal 30* features graphic footage of mechanized death; of dismemberments; of real blood that will never, unlike film, flow backwards into the reminder to wear a seatbelt.

In a review of *FILM01*, which debuted this May, Madeline Cash compares the direct-from-device microcrowdsourced "extinction epic" to the meta-cinema of Ryan Trecartin, Hito Steyerl and 1999's *Blair Witch Project* before reaching for the David Foster Wallace: "We'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones..."

Dumb like a painter? For Cash, "trying to derive meaning from *Film01* is like "squeezing blood from a stone". (Read: labor from influencers). Scott Litz, also, takes note of "this style, which mostly amounts to noncommittal mythologizing of the author and their acquaintances: self-deprecating indexes of perversions, hookups and nightlife encounters..." Cinema, here, is a plane of consistency upon which art and life mediate social representation, and social relevance: you can check your phone any time you like, but you can never leave.

In lieu of being able to recall a moment in *Film01* that isn't "sacrificed and replaced not with desire but with nothing", Cash opts to run the text messages I receive early on into the event:

> "You will be kept there until you are dead tired, then shown hours of loud imagery and slow, dreamlike sequences. Then, once the hypnosis phase is deep, they will move over to a chapter created by Charlotte Fang..."

The message wasn't, as I'd hoped, the group chat version of smell-o-vision. Unless, as Nick Land writes, “Nothing more is required,” writes Land, “than acquiescence to the (almost) entirely empty proposition: it has begun (and been seen to have begun).” In other words, Film01 is viral, and it’s been validated as viral. Meaning: it doesn't matter if you've seen it if you can pretend to have seen it. Already traumatized? Even better.

"Good or evil," Cash concedes, "Angelicism is influential." A year ago, the moniker Angelicism01 was a online pseudonym amongst online psuedonyms. Today, the "schizo-philosophy Substack writer Angelicism01" emerges and disappears behind a legion of proxies; a fit of publicity that’s spawned an NFT valued at $40M since *Film01*’s release. A profile published in 2022 by Palladium mentions the U.K.-based Substack blogger turned “New Yorks most in-crowd shit-poster”, now auteur, in the ritual of controversy surrounding crypto-CEO Charlotte Fang. A Lower East Side art dealer throws his hands up: "I don't know," Casey ____ sighs, and mutters something about groomery: "The stuff I've heard isn't good."

That was leading up to the screening event in June. Eight weeks later, Eugene Kotlarenko mentions the project in a conversation with Dean Kissick and Aria Dean: "Angelicism? Anyone here seen it?" No one in the room budges, so Kotlyranko closes the deal: "I heard it was pretty good."

Prior to releasing a full length feature film starring everyone whose anyone in the New York City downtown, Angelicism was just another middle-aged blogger with a funny name. But what feels ambitious is to release a direct-from-device film that has more to do with the internet, now, than the nature of the cinematic medium itself, as defined by the point of view of Anthology Film Archives:

> a screening room in New York's Soho, where in the late '60S and early '70S a collection of artists, film/makers, and composers gathered night after night to view the repertory of modernist film put together by Jonas Mekas and projected in an unvarying cycle...

In laying an introduction to the *post-medium condition*, Rosalind Krauss must pass through the Soviet and French avant-garde theater, the silent documentary, early versions of American independent film, Chaplin. She describes the seats of the loft like horse blinders meant to cut off any peripheral vision other than that of the screen itself: "artists such as Richard Serra, Robert Smithson or Carl Andre could be said to be united around their hostility to Clement Greenberg's rigid version of modernism with its doctrine of flatness."

Sometimes called *trigger films*, the genre of social guidance educational film is less about narrative than it is about norm-sending. Intentionally lacking closure, the presentation of trigger films in elementary and middle school classrooms mediate discussions of morality and ethics by inviting the viewers to reach their own conclusions about morality and ethics.

The first clip in *Film01*’s 180m magazine of images is a row of “Rainbow Girls” grinning from what appears to be a locker room. The fidelity is low, and the clips that follow compress and collage multiple generations of iphone into a portrait of the generations to come. "We are so glad you're here," the lineup of girls announces in the establishing apparatus. Apparatus, as opposed to a shot, or: a shot, because it interpellates? This past June at Anthology Film Archive’s Courthouse theatre, it was unclear whether or not Film01 was screening for an audience or for its cast and crew. Yet its initial release sold out to an attendance of 300.

"Any film about extinction as such is bound to create new kinds of hate and vulnerability," read the invitation posted to sub stack earlier this week for the second screening event of *FILM01*. The communique added that the movie had "incited a number of 'beefs' as if by automaton'."

Two hours later, two months later, you're still here: "*Film01* is an ongoing act of serializable internet cinema," a substack post reads, announcing that the next screening "will consist of a prelude-- and main feature." An invitation to *Film01*'s second New York screening event reads like a communique:

A few months ago, Lola Jusidisman, 28, a producer on *Film01* let it slip that what was screened for *Film01*'s debut last June was one of a half-dozen derived from seven-hour “Paradise Cut”. The press kit Jusidisman forwarded the following week reported a turnout of over 300 people to the first screening event, with tickets having sold out by May.

August 9, *Film 01* returns to Anthology Film Archives with a second, 125 min directors cut.

Fang is known for creating a series of projects and digital personas that cater, almost exclusively, to the cartel of 18-34 shitposters, many of whom are far younger than eighteen, who barnacle the internet's last surviving democracy: 4-chan.

intermix of small-format video channels with the latest iPhone portrait resolution, throughout the moving picture, leaves a sentimentality up in the air such that it's unclear who the Rainbow Girls, or the film itself, are speaking to: *Film01*'s audience, or its cast and crew.

For every dozen or so e-girls spliced into the multi-hour internet epic, *Film01*, the audience is no more sadistically exposed to scroll-stopping environmental disaster footage (a mountain of burning tires, an electric fire on a wind farm) than they are to the Holy Grail of e-commerce, the ad.

She reports that the work/life boundaries are less clear than the professional lighting rigs just out of shot.

"Last August," confesses the Sociologist Ashley Mears, "I spent a day filming bangers at Anna Rothfuss's rented condo." Mears, a former fashion model, says the one that performed best online was a cheater drama: "The suspense of waiting for a cuckolded spouse to find out keeps viewers gripped enough to sit through the ad."

When I ask Lola Jusidisman,

In TK TK for the Economist, Mears reports shooting high volume online content in the homes of the two most-viewed Facebook creators in 2021, Lax and Julius Dein, who both started out as magicians. Mears suggests that the work/life boundaries are less clear than the professional lighting rigs just out of shot in mansions owned by former public school teachers turned brand ambassadors; homes meant to "to give videos the authentically amateurish feel that Facebooks algorithms favor."

Magic is slow. The internet is fast: "Magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities and limits of people's perception," wrote one former Google employee on his Medium blog in 2017. What Mears qualifies as "stopping the scroll" so the viewer doesn't reflexively move down to the next post in their feed becomes an aesthetic regime when "the opening has to titillate or intrigue, ideally both, in the first three seconds (I saw one begin with a hotdog

Comprised entirely of found footage, (some of it appropriated), and produced by the cast of downtown New Yorkers from which it was commissioned (some of whom were paid), Angelicism's *Film01* thrusts the surreal drama of social media into focus at the same time as it obscures the repressed violence at the heart of its conjunctures: "Not only are useful things given away and rich foods consumed to excess, but one even destroys for the pleasure of destroying," Marcel Mauss remarked on the ritual destruction of wealth observed in both primitive society and the Leisure Class. Rumors of an active shooter surrounded the *Film01*'s initial screening; to gain entry involved an application questionnaire, a pre-approval process and a lengthly waitlist. With the tact of an especially epic amusement park ride, information on the event is peppered with references to safety and a vague NDA: "There will be no +1s. We ask that you keep location information private for our safety, and that you refrain from sharing any photos or information about the premiere until it has ended.”

Following *Film01*'s summer debut to a packed East Village crowd, a 125-minute version returns to the big screen. (This will have been compressed down from *Film01*'s initial, 180-minute premiere, itself an encapsulation of an alleged eight hour "Paradise Cut") The second release is also invite only; it grasps for a definition of the medium as if by nature a gesture of exclusive discourse:

Is *Film01* a cautionary picture or a devious lick? Watchbait or potlatch?

Is *Film01* a cautionary picture or a devious lick? Watchbait or potlatch? In her coverage of the event, Madeline Cash morbidly points out "the high concentration of artists, It-girls, and cultural contributors presented a prime opportunity to eliminate the entire downtown-NYC microcosm."

Film01 is not a film about the internet, but a realistic representation of a different internet: “They are the object of a perpetual reorganization, in which a new image can arise from any point whatever of the preceding image,” wrote Deleuze on the informatics of cinema, “The organization of space here loses its privileged directions, and first all the privilege of the vertical which the position of the screen still displays, in favour of an omnidirectional space which constantly varies its angles and coordinates, to exchange the vertical and the horizontal.” In Film01, the “omnidirectional space” is the front-facing camera, and the “privilege of the vertical”, its subject. Thus the horizontality of the “swipe” and the column of the social media feed address the producer, the user, the scene – all of whom are seated in the theater for “Angelicism”’s New York City debut.

Any film about extinction as such is bound to create new kinds of hate and vulnerability. These may be analysed as part and parcel, as part of the film, if we have time. Do we have time? Why the bound?

movie about how to think, how to shape, how to recognize the resistances to official culture using major breaks in the continuity of social sense.

were the recall jeopardy in everything that you do.

We would recognize her on any device, but only on the big screen does the teenager’s face occur as Leviathan, sovereign in its indistinguishability from social media herself. The short-form video hosting service TikTok was launched in 2016 as Douyin for the ⅕ of global internet users based in mainland China. By 2019, the platform had attained global status as a cornerstone of influencer marketing. Starbucks? Grimace shake? Boba tea? Hell’s flat expanse empties into cult status. Maybe it’s thirty seconds in, maybe it’s three hours. Each "girl" featured in *Film01*'s 180min "Anthology Cut" cut doesn’t look a day older than her phone. For every one of the dozens of e-girls, Korean idols, A-listers and it-kids incorporated into *Film 01* since the introduction of user-generated content into the idioms of cinema, an overflow of eco-disaster footage selectively exposes the audience to the premonition of extinction. Maybe it's a pile of burning rubber shot on a handheld, maybe a windmill caught on fire; Trump's arraignment just a stones throw from the River bar, a popular NYC haunt.

Maybe she’s human. She has a death rattle. Recording live, probably in front of a thousand viewers, or, alone as if she were before a thousand viewers, the user slurps from a plastic straw at an accelerating rate. The way the substance suckers up the purple tube, into her augmented reality of a mouth, we don’t know, we’ll never know, but it reeks of persistence. Is she cross-eyed or are we? Just as the visible traces of plastic surgery have evolved into a symbol of status thanks to the of mutual alienation of wealth and youth, the lossy quality of the online clips strive to achieve the surface effects of the metaphysical tradition; of the imperceptible appearing within the perceptible: “I have to go talk to my mom,” whines the teen without taking the straw out of her mouth.

> Media. Comes from the Greek character Medea. She was an enchantress. Out to murder and maim her lovers. A terrifying beauty. Hard-boiled. Psychologically hopped-up. Chopped up her brother and boiled his parts in a pot. Melodrama and revenge.