‘The Making of Metahaven’ – Juha van ‘t Zelfde interviews Metahaven

Metahaven (M) We liked the initial title you gave to the Google doc that contains this conversation. It was ‘The Making of Metahaven’. So much of what we do is about that, ‘the making of’. Films have a long incubation period: from the initial idea to the final execution, there is quite an extensive period in which there are only different kinds of plans: texts, scripts, fragments, drawings, mock-up collages. A slow coming together of a non-existent reality into a concrete one passes through various phases. During this process, the original idea transforms in a way that is specific, not just to subject matter but also to its treatment – not necessarily what the film is about, but ‘the way in which it is about it’. In a sense, our work has always focused on this process of acquiring and building texture. The process obtains a specific emotional quality through moving image and telling stories. It is not possible to do what we do now without ‘believing’ in these projects on a very personal level, from the first words and ideas to the outcome.
In this sense, Possessed is the ultimate project because its making has taken a few years, from the initial idea in early 2014 to its shooting during 2016 and 2017. The shoot took seven days in total and took place in Amsterdam and remote locations in Croatia. The film reflects our changing relationship to documentary and fiction and the use of found footage versus self-created imagery and scenery. In some respects, it revisits The Sprawl (Propaganda About Propaganda), but it strikes a different tone and makes a different kind of argument by using fiction to mobilise political content. The film’s subject matter arises out of the film in a manner that is different to a documentary, where the topics are put on the table and then discussed. It began as a film about social media and smartphone addiction as a metaphor for the total capture of capitalism and the need for communism – a communism, however, that is also expressed in and through the same platforms. But, at least from our perspective, this direction started to fade, and it became a film about compassion. Possessed catches some of our ever-changing feelings about this subject and its fiction scenes with actress Olivia Lonsdale reflect the statement that we feel is necessary to make.

Metahaven, Information Skies,
2016, Video Still.

JZ How did the transition from graphic designers to filmmakers happen?

Metahaven (M) We never were typical graphic designers nor are we typical filmmakers. There was never really a decision to become filmmakers; it happened because we wanted to go there, taking much of our background with us.
When someone first asked us ‘how do you feel about becoming filmmakers’ we didn’t think that was what was happening. We simply wanted to work in a medium that would engage us differently on an emotional level, and that would also, in time, redefine the collaborative nature of our work into a structure that made more sense to us.
Our first project, the identity for the Principality of Sealand, a place that is difficult to visit or access, except through the internet, led to a speculative identity of Googled conjecture in a pre-social-media age. But it is now more important for us to plot our ideas using media with a time-based element, to bring conceived images to life using story, voice, and music; and the story can be very abstract. Also, we haven’t made that many films: two videos, two music videos, and two ‘films’, with another two currently in production right now.
The edges of film are fluid. Firstly, in a technical sense – it is now easier to produce and disseminate moving image than it is not to (for example, smartphones can immediately notify of updates to video hosting services) – but also in a conceptual sense. Films exist in many forms across different media. Some films never become a moving image but remain stories, and they will be cinema despite them not being realised as cinema. We admire China Miéville’s writing; it produces cinema without pictures and, in doing so, the condition for cinema. His works and those of, for example, the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky – who wrote Roadside Picnic, which provided the blueprint for Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker – are examples of what the ‘scripting’ of a conceived visual reality can do. In Roadside Picnic, the Strugatskys write that, at first glance, nothing appears to have happened and everything seems OK around the ‘Zone’, one of six alien visitation sites that are central to the story.

Metahaven, Information Skies,
2016, Video Still.

JZ You have worked with some of the best composers of their generation: Kuedo, Holly Herndon, M.E.S.H., and Laurel Halo. How do you choose them, and how do you approach the creative process of working with them?

Metahaven (M) There was some mutual awareness between these cutting-edge electronic music composers and ourselves before we ever worked with them. We found it interesting that musicians understood our work on a much more intuitive level than practitioners from some other disciplines. They ‘felt’ closer to where we were. PAN’s Bill Kouligas apparently once composed a long track called Metahaven. (We’ve never heard it, by the way.) Since Holly Herndon, Kuedo, M.E.S.H. and Laurel Halo are very different individuals and composers, they are all incredibly well informed about things that are going on, at a level where they can work with this and use it in a way that implies a real distance to that very reality. One thing that musicians do is work with reality in a medium that can’t reproduce it. A documentary filmmaker reproduces realities in order to show them to a public. Music transforms reality: it plays with how you recognise it. You communicate feelings in an intangible form, and this leaves considerable space for responses, including physical responses, such as dance. The whole interplay between music and image and text is an immensely rich field, and it is very theatrical. However, our hero, Leo Tolstoy, would not always approve of what can be achieved by putting this theatricality to use.

Metahaven, Information Skies,
2016, Video Still.

JZ You have used the phrase ‘cinema for the interface’, which is beautiful. What do you mean by this, and do you remember when and why you first thought of this?

Metahaven (M) This phrase emerged while we were working on Information Skies, a film we made and released in 2016 and which was initially to be viewed online via a dedicated website. The film was almost entirely shot on an ARRI Alexa camera using ‘day for night’ filters, an old-fashioned technique for creating a twilight atmosphere. The dark footage literally hovered in between screen elements, such as subtitles and ‘interfacial ruins’ (as we called them), like broken interfaces. The day for night footage was difficult to watch on reflective laptop screens unless in relative darkness. It made us feel that you can’t just say that you watch films online. When taken as the greatest common denominator, online film simply reproduces what is considered watchable under generic viewing conditions on small screens. Platforms such as Netflix produce an interface for cinema, but what we are interested in is cinema for the interface: a cinema that takes into account the texture of some of our most profound online viewing experiences. It’s a weird idea that cinema with a capital C should not be affected by the interface but simply maintain its central dogmas; those of a visual world that was inherited and propelled – shaped – by the conditions of experiencing narrative in a movie theatre, in near-complete darkness, on a giant screen. VR – not something we are deeply interested in technically, but much more so conceptually – is now bringing scope-shaped screening to users by literally placing the screen in front of their eyes so that all other reality is excluded unless reproduced as AR. We’re not interested in walking around wearing such devices, but we are interested in the solidarity of those who have done so and shared the same feeling, each in their own ultimate isolation bubble, and will make a collective truth claim out of it: ‘this happened to all of us, so who are you to tell me it didn’t?’ – which, by the way, was the subject matter of Information Skies.

Metahaven, Information Skies,
2016, Video Still.

JZ On Tumblr, you wrote:

The idea of an independent cyberspace that exists off-limits to state power is deeply rooted in the idealism of the early internet. It’s like the sea once was: an unregulated and fluid space, that today is overlaid with restrictions, surveillance, infrastructures. It feels less and less like a network, and more like a series of closed platforms, each of which contains a fully consistent reality.

How does this influence how you release, screen, and distribute your work?

Metahaven (M) The internet has become a set of closed platforms, each with a slightly different ethos. The high-minded distributed and decentralised network of networks represents a particular technical stage of the internet’s development, and now you can say that meaning and experience, once free-running, free-ranging, are both expanded and colonised by the platform. We are not so interested in lamenting this context, primarily because art is a way of deciding on the encounter. Online can’t be presupposed as the default space for the encounter, and it’s not as if a concealed Vimeo ‘art world’ is going to fundamentally change the isolation in which its viewers look at screens: mostly on their own. The demand that all films and all art should be online is ridiculous because the artist should retain the right to withdraw their work and, more importantly, because the logic of omni-availability has already reproduced nothing else but the existing power graph – in essence, the world of the meme, from Rick Astley to Boromir. Artists should be able to decide and contribute more on how their work is shared online, instead of being constantly pressurised to share for free or, more precisely, to share against unstated conditions of mass-scale exploitation.

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THE MAKING OF METAHAVEN

THE NOISE OF BEING