And Your Bird Can Sing: Computational Theatre & the After-Image of Social Media

Saturday morning was the start of our "Twitter Cinema" symposium, And Your Bird Can Sing: Computational Theatre & the After-Image of Social Media", hosted by the New Centre for Practice (NCP) and featuring the first of our six presenters, Julieta Aranda, who appeared almost anti-gravitational before a screen grab from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Julieta said from the outset that she is not on, nor ever took to, Twitter, though she does participate in other social media platforms. Like most of us gathered (on Zoom), she has an uneasy relationship with the digital computational algorithmic world of the Internet and its bachelors.

What Julieta presented was an autoethnographic account of her life as it began at the adult age of eighteen (1993), when she went to school to fulfill her childhood dream of becoming a filmmaker. Godard was immediately mentioned (his "on-set mechanics") and I appreciated this because at our end we chose Omar Blondin Diop's seminar scene in Godard's La Chinoise (1967) as our backdrop.

Julieta went on to say that the appearance of the internet in the 1990s disrupted her dream: "What I wanted to do with film is not possible." Somewhat later, in response to the progressive modern question of one medium supplanting another, Julieta stated that all media can co-exist, that supplantation is a "Silicon Valley idea." I waited for someone to mention how old technologies return to us as art, but our audience, it seemed to me, was more Frankfurt School than McLuhan.

For those interested, here is Diop as he appeared in La Chinoise as carried in the trailer to Just a Movement (2021).