ICI Presentation, Berlin, 17.11.2017 by Pablo Gonçalo, University of Brasília, UnB. 1. A problem: I will talk about writing. Not writing itself in a traditional meaning, but writing as a technological process, which changes constantly and might be influenced by new standards of tools for expression. Since typewriters and old editing practices have lost their central role, writing has been undergoing fundamental transformations. Less mimetic than before, writing has been interacting with alpha-numeric codes and has also dealt more directly with potential, errant, open futures than representations of past facts. My presentation will not highlight these central and essential historical processes that, since the inception of computer games and the Internet, we have been witnessing over the last decades. I will, however, propose a different and conceptual perspective, by which contemporary writing might reveal other aspects. By proposing the concept of speculative writing, which is still in progress, I am dealing directly with a new kind of dramaturgy. A writing gesture that looks at artificial intelligence, chaos, new relations between subjects and objects as other ways of creating events and potential infinities in a new and not so clear aesthetic context. I will get to this concept only briefly and by the end of my presentation. But I can summarize my problem with some questions: how is writing altered when it deals with ontologically-oriented objects? What kind of discontinuity has digital writing been creating? What are its aesthetic singularities? Alan Turing and the archive. Firstly, let's keep with these two topics – they might show us an interesting path. Turing's ideal machine has not only altered our relation with writing but ithas also inaugurated another historical period. For Turing, a computer can mimic anything that humans have already created, experienced and even conceived. Therefore, it is more that an imitation machine, or an imitation game. Turing's machine claims that mimesis representations may have lost its anthropocentric key role. After his machine, some objects may be able to imitate everything – and even something more – that a human has programmed it to imitate. If this claim is correct, it leads us to another issue. Can objects write? That's a weird and difficult question. Actually, an alphanumerical representation does duplicates any mimesis: humans have become spectators of some mimetic representations that have been done or even written by computers, software and some hardware realities. So, what would be the difference between human automatic writing and machine automatic writing? In tandem with this question, we may add another: how does the Turing Machine deal with archives? For computer and programming writing practices, an archival is not the result of a representation process. On the contrary, it is its starting point. It is through a given archival, within its bits of information and potential infinity re-combinations, that alphanumeric writing really begins. Let's remember, for example, Jacques Derrida’s archival's fever conception that emphasizes the arché as a place and an institution that conceives truth, authority and classical metaphysics processes for the receiving subject. If you look carefully upon the ontology of alphanumeric writing, this archive problem doesn't match it or fit so precisely. Digital archives are more like a metaphor for empty and virtual places, for imaginary architectures, than physical spaces. Wolfgang Ernst, for example, claims that the Internet is a collection without an archive for central dominance and organization. Other media theorists, such as Ziegfried Zielinski, suggest more of an anarcho-archival conception than a classical archive perspective. It is through these distinctions pertaining to archives that we may come closer to a speculative writing historical period. Consider, for example, the concept of Arche Fossil, proposed by French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux, which indicates “the existence of an ancestral reality or event; one that is prior to terrestrial life”. For Meillassoux, the Arche Fossil perspective may reveal some event archives (or archived events) that happen before (and also beyond) the human and the subject. They do conceive of a metaphysical event, but it is a wired one, because it reveals a metaphysics without subject. It is a kind of a speculative and material realism that is of interest to my problem and to my question in a particular way. A speculative method, by which co-relationism is not a key aspect and might even gradually disappear. 2. Unfilmed scripts I will talk about writing, but also about reading. In addition, I will touch on speculative writing as well as on speculative reader, plus speculative gamer and even an aesthetic speculative methodology that might influence our relation between archivals, media, artificial intelligence and historical narratives. Taking into consideration that this kind of writing changes, my presentation will highlight two aspects that make up a different approach to film theory, film history and what has been called media archaeology. The first one is about unfilmed scripts while the last empirical part of this talk will be about the American filmmaker Ken Jacobs and what I call a perverted archival image. In the course of my doctoral research, I came across several unfilmed scripts, which led me to some of those more theoretical reflections I have just presented. The framework of my research was the more direct collaboration between screenwriter Peter Handke and filmmaker Wim Wenders, and, while scrambling through the original texts yielded by that partnership among German archives, I came across the scripts for Slow Homecoming, by Wenders, and for Kali, by Peter Handke. Both scripts remain unpublished and unfilmed. The contact with those unfilmed scripts aroused my curiosity, and I became more aware and started to collect each and every datum and index of writers with scripts that were not funded and did not become movies. My genealogical bias, then, focused on highlighting writers transitioning from literary writing into a properly imagistic writing. Would there be a negative history of film, which did happen yet failed to get fully realized? Wouldn't those incomplete strokes by writers-screenwriters from the 20th Century be an invitation to conceive of an imaginary history of film that never actually reached the screens? What kind of archivals are unfilmed scripts? Publications compiling unfilmed scripts with the purpose of suggesting a history of film yet to be be realized on screen are very rare. During my research, the most interesting and wide-ranging case of that kind of bias was the French publication Anthology of invisible cinema: 100 scripts for 100 years of cinema. Released in 1995, in the context of the 100th anniversary of cinema, the book is the product of an almost archaeological research conducted by Christian Janicot and edited by Jean-Michel Place. They really introduce a hundred projects, ideas and scripts by famous authors, intellectuals and artists such as Georges Bataille, Italo Calvino, William Burroughs, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Viktor Shklovsky, Blaise Cendrars, Paul Claudel, Salvador Dali, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Robert Desnos, Max Frisch, Federico García Lorca, André Gide, Allen Ginsberg, Graham Greene, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Antonin Artaud, Georges Pérec, Stefan Zweig, Magritte, Saint-Exupéry, Mayakovsky, e.e. cummings, among dozens of other key figures of the 20th Century. It is obvious that there is, in that anthology, a very diverse plethora of film projects, of scripts and visual or cinematographic dramaturgies. It is difficult, in that pluralist perspective, to trace the lines of a parallel cinematic-dramaturgical history that is potent but has yet to happen. Standing as possible movies, more than hidden archivals, those scripts show us how writers and artists that marked the 20th Century imagined and flirted with film, driven by a creative impulse that brought them closer to their art and their original craft. They found on film a shelter for the reinvention of their aesthetic gestures upon direct interaction with the cinematographic language. They are writers who write texts that will no longer be restricted to books or the stage. They are writings for a forthcoming screen. Pier Paolo Pasolini used to define scripts as texts that don't want to remain as texts. We would like to add that scripts might be paper archives that would like, some day, to be transformed in audiovisual archivals. They are situated on a boundary. Unfilmed scripts, however, are very special cases, because they ask for time before script metamorphoses. Unfilmed scripts are archivals that present an incomplete and open ontology. They are potential films and they point out to imaginative events that one may not apprehend, but only speculate about. More than claiming for a waiting period, unfilmed scripts really befit an undefined and pendulum-like oscillation between potentialities and virtualities. Would the drafted films be, if taken as a whole, possible, virtual and speculative narratives that failed to transform into the most applicable form of archival in the history of cinema? Would those unfilmed films and those screen-less scripts be an invitation for imaginations of imagined stories? Multiple stories, which deny the totality of predetermined possibles. In any case, the intervals insufflated by unfilmed scripts are long breathers that invite us into a generic and spectral flirtation, a speculative viewpoint under which the very act of de-archiving and narrating an unfilmed script also constitutes a new layer, a new modulation, a writing gesture on a palimpsest of parallel narratives in and for film. With the Speculative turn, we navigate through a becoming that transcends nothing. 3. Ken Jacobs and the perverted archival image Since its very beginning, Ken Jacobs’ experimental film work has intended to awake real aberrations within archival images. This intention, however, is increased and has been achieving new levels since the beginning of The Nervous System films, which flirt directly with experimental 3D films. In Ontic Antics, this phenomenon may be noticed as we see two duplicated and divided images, one on each side of the screen, triggering a fusion and getting mixed with the images at the center, yielding a third view. Shattered, broken, the image there lies not just in the archival image nor is it restricted to the right or left eye, as it cannot even establish unity. The image is taking off entirely. It happens in the body, within the brain; it happens, fast and volatile, within the same temporal lapse that gets archived within the body of the spectator, where it dissolves as a result of its pace and confusion. The image’s archiving time happens in the body upon the direct contact of the filmic materiality with the spectator’s corporeality. It is a moment that yields more doubts than certainties. Would it not be a sort of perversion? Like a hacker immersed in analog media, Jacobs disrespects the archons of audiovisual archival films. Archons are understood, according, once more, to Derrida, as the power of constriction that makes archivals possible – the preconceived, patriarchal, and authoritarian ideas that engender secondary, derived, and preformatted concepts and perceptions. To Jacobs, this power is above all optical: technological standards that invent (and restrict) the technical possibilities found in the act of perception and observation. Therefore, Ken Jacobs perverts the optic archons and their data – the perception molds – along with the technical-sensorial configurations that make the audiovisual gaze possible as well as historically or technologically restricted. Yet, what does it means to say that Jacobs perverts archivals? On one hand, Jacobs calls out the spectators to see, in the act of re-watching an archival film, an inapprehensible past in relation to the past itself that the archival film attempted to record. On the other hand, the archival image itself is viewed directly in its materiality. There is no more past, or an act of temporal differentiation from a present gaze that updates the archival, but an ebullience of the crystals of the past that generate images of an offbeat future. Such is the essence of the perversion of the archival. Through its perversion, the archival itself bifurcates and operates mediations of perspective between distinct natures of the image, between the gaze of the observer and the singular feeling by the observer of also being gazed upon. 4. To sum up: what might a speculative writing be? Although unfilmed scripts and perverted archival images are distant events, they do point to some aspects and a sort of metaphor that is a feature of speculative writing. Focusing on a sort of open and incomplete archive, unfilmed scripts reveal an archival that oscillates between a reader and a film audience, the latter of which being, of course, absent. In some perspective, unfilmed scripts are archivals that approach what Graham Harman calls as an ontologically-oriented object, which is something between a real and a sensory object. For Graham, they “are autonomous forces in the world, existing even if all observers sleep or die”, while sensory objects “exist only insofar as some perceiver is occupied with them. These perceivers need not be human”. Unfilmed or speculative scripts might, one day, be perceived by cameras, screens or even readers and spectators. As they are incomplete and multi-natural, unfilmed scripts are part image and sensory objects and part potential real objects, so they remain almost fugitive events. Just by aesthetic speculation, they truly become a possible and upcoming event. Consequently, unfilmed scripts reveal some aspects of a writing that is not more mimetic, that flirts with media technologies and new events through further archives. Its incompleteness translates as an open archive that may be the basis of an interaction between human perceivers and machines that could, under some circumstances, write. On the other hand, the perverted archival image presents some interesting aspects of film editing that are not based in human durations, but iterations and post-human time events that are inherent to film archivals and might affect directly our perspective and optic archival habitus. It is a sort of potential infinity of images that appears between our eyes and the screen, but it points out to a kind of event that happens before, during and even after they are subjected to a perceiver. Ken Jacobs shows that we are not at the looping and electronic age anymore, when editing would create new images, program and even design new aspects by means of the information contained. Ken Jacobs’ editing gesture is closer to the aberrations that are created at the middleground between human writing and archival writing. It opens up a new relationship between chance, duration, potentiality and virtualities, illuminating both new archive and media writing forms with a genuinely speculative method. In the wake of Meillassoux's reflections, it is worth recovering and developing his distinction between the potentialities, the virtualities and the actualizations, which identifies the core issue with speculation as resting upon the provisional aspect of scientific laws and philosophy's need to tackle probabilistic aberrations. Through each of those biases – of chance, of potentialities and of virtualities – there is a notable preoccupation with restoring a very specific metaphysics that must refute any totalising, fixed aspect that is blind to inevitable transformation and mutation processes. “Potentialities are the non-actualized cases of an indexed set of possibilities under the condition of a given law (whether random or not). Chance is every actualization of a potentiality for which there is no univocal instance of determination on the basis of the initial given conditions. (...). and virtuality the property of every set of cases of emerging within a becoming that is not dominated by any pre-constituted totality of possibles”. (Meillassoux: Potentiality and Virtuality). So, to sum up, one might claim that Speculative (and aesthetic) writing are events that appear to happen again, although they have never actually happened. By means of archivals, they point to the return of something that is potential but has never been experienced or even conceived. It is a sort of probabilistic aberration by which human beings remain as fragile spectators of creatures that emerged beyond their dreams, imagination and nightmares. So far, speculative writing points to writing and reading practices that are far removed from a mimetic tradition as well as all the anti-mimetic aesthetic experimentations that we had seen over the last century. It is a turning point and we mustn't be afraid to face it.