1834 - La Mémoire de Masse unfolds during the second canuts revolts in Lyon in 1834. These riots now known as the ‘bloody week’ came as a reaction to the automation of work in the silk industry by the jacquard loom and its implementation of the punched card – first historical ‘mass storage’ system allowing the inscription and replication of complex weaving patterns. This inaugurating event in the history of workers emancipation movements of the 19th century is actually the first revolt against modern computation.

Two machines—a loom and the digital apparatus the film relies on—are symbiotically linked through the conjunctive tissue of an animal body, the contracting veins on its dark, distended abdomen. As this body-as-copula births another, forms of reproduction entwine and the space between old and new machines is flooded with images that appear like a vertical fall through cracks in time, as much as like a scene of lateral vertigo, a disorientation on a horizontal plane of data.

The fifth episode in Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni’s The Unmanned, a history of computation in eight parts introduced in the previous instalment of Vdrome, 1834 – La Mémoire de Masse (2015), samples the protocols of capture and the mechanical and cinematographic technologies of storage in the formation of a modern collective consciousness. The film enmeshes these notions in a cyborg-like entity that is part flesh, part machine, and part anthropomorphic surge of pixels, and whose anatomical apertures and punch card perforations are interfaces between singular images and their replication. Rhythmical exchanges of visual and amniotic substances in this composite metabolism correspond to a historical progression where photosensitive selves are reeled into narratives of emancipation and reconciliation and where crowds are moved and movied, captured in a loop of fabrication and enjoyment around the devices that fashion, visually and materially, their collective biography.

             The introduction of the Jacquard loom in Lyon textile manufactures in the early 19^th century is the film’s narrative and technical trigger, forestalling both the denouement and the means of its telling. The punch card that automated the loom is the first instance of a mass storage device, recording and reproducing complex weaving patterns. From the three major uprisings of the Lyonnais silk workers, known collectively as the Canut Revolts, the film focuses on the Bloody Week of 1834, when state repression pacified the city at immense human costs. This inaugural event in the history of workers’ movements is also the first revolt against modern computation. The Jacquard punch card is a precursor to current computation, a connection that the contemporaries of the invention were well aware of: in her 1843 Notes on the Babbage Analytical Engine, Ada Lovelace writes that the machine “weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves”, quantifying complexity not through labour time but in numerical structures and operational segments.

The computer-generated riot sequence splits the film in two and revises history by “transforming a revolt against the algorithm into an algorithm of revolt”, as the artists note. The site of the massacre is engulfed by a swarm of digital bodies competing for space and consuming their artificial momentum, haemorrhaging possibilities of collision with one another and their environment. A composite image of boundlessness and confinement, this is a mêlée of figures and of regimes of representation, as the protestors against the proto-computer are figured using one of the latest forms in the chain of abstractions set into historical motion by the punch card: they are engendered by the very apparatus they were fighting. Their aimless insurrection becomes an instance of retrofuturism, an undead mass circulating the space between its two automated demises, as opposed to catastrophic landscapes of contamination. The visual effects programme used for the sequence (as well as the film World War Z [2013], which probably features more zombies than the entire history of the genre) was designed to visualize multiplicity, by giving a few instructions to AI agents—a grain of animation as a core set of attributes, vectors, speeds and variance—and drawing on vast databases of motion capture performances to extract a full repertory of torsions and interactions for bodies always on the offensive.

The vortex of interspersed trajectories and demented dynamism drawn in this space without bearings by the zombie protesters articulates the swirls of each individual figure between the edges of its own apparition and decomposition, their frantic incursions into an empty world and their erasures to make way for another arrival. They compose an ecstatic display of excessive numbers and speeds, dashing into existence only to be cancelled out, summoned out of nothingness and ingested by the uninflected space they were made to animate. In the artists’ bi-directional anthropology of our becoming-artefact, the zombie protesters are both predecessors and descendants of the worker who works on his or her capacity to buy the car he or she is in process of always building, and akin to the Lumière workers—six decades later, also in Lyon—exiting the factory at an artificially accelerated pace, to keep up with the turning of the gears in the camera, and huddling together to fit its frame, the first spectators of their own fragmented, reassembled and repossessed movement. 

Three analogies unfold within and beyond the terrain mapped by Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni. Like the attendant of the Jacquard loom, the CGI programmer no longer works on a single spectral entity, but in a ‘labour relation’ reconfigured in whirls of data, as a digital crowd control that extends the arithmetic of efficient work flows and the algebra of patterning into the anxious allegories of a world without us. This world is roamed by zombie-protesters, programmed with an impoverished stock of gestures and agencies. Like the mysterious epidemics that spread in apocalyptic scenarios, the virus of protest has thus far resisted technocratic eradication, but palliatives exist, one of which is to lure those infected into increasingly intricate halls of mirrors and project their dispossession for their own cathartic decompression. Finally, the analogy—rather than moral counter-balance of a naturality that redresses the exchanges of machinic secretions and violence elsewhere in the film—between the operation of loom and the scene of the foaling. The birth of the young horse, propping itself up on quivering legs and ready to flee the abstract predators that might be lurking outside the frame, reproduces those other mechanical pressures and electrical impulses, the drift of the other bodies in the film, at a different speed, within a different system of frames, rotations and syncopations, monitoring and optimization. Shot in a thoroughbred farm, its two parts zoom in on the event of a contact that separates, of a coming together as a cut or evacuation, and do not dwell on the tools and procedures that manage the purity and docility of the specimen, that work as chemical and technological substitutes for insemination and weanling. An everted equivalence, perhaps, between a scene whose conditions have not yet been revealed and one that overflows with conditioning, a ground camouflaged behind the figures it brought into flickering existence.

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