I love when I have a clod of a problem in my mind and the soil of it is loosened by something unexpected; the jerky screech of a subway, or a film, which is much more rare, because I’m not a film person. I was seated at the new Camille Henrot film, In the Veins, up at the New Museum’s New Humans exhibit, watching two black beetles copulate with a blue-and-red light shining on their bodies that suggested that there was a third, technological observer present—a camera, maybe, or the lights of a tank—when I thought to myself that this was one of the best films I’d seen in a very long time, that it had attempted a way forward for a major question of our time: what it means to be online; what it means to be offline; what is lost or gained between the two.
It was so affecting that I returned to the New Museum a few times to watch it again. This was during the weeks of the Knicks frenzy. I am an emotional, illogical, deeply prideful New Yorker, which is why, as the game played across every surface in the city—bars, projectors, behind someone’s large head on the bus—I found it hard to ignore, even though I am a reluctant and often inattentive sports fan. And I have had plenty of friends and family who’ve paid (too much) to go see it in MSG, multiple thousands for a view from the nosebleed seats.
When I heard the ticket price for the latter, I thought of N. Katherine Hayles, whose book How We Became Posthuman has frequented my nightstand for weeks now. She traces the information era, an accumulation of voices and divergent views who suggested that information was an entity independent of its material; a substrate that maintained its sanctity across mediums. This thesis, which has seen many opposing and compatible views, has come to dominate much of our own time.
Was there a real, tellable difference between the $3,000 Knicks game and the one showing on the projector? Or, is there a difference between a print book and an ebook? Between an mp3 and playing music off YouTube? Take this ideology to its end conclusion: consciousness is a side phenomenon; the body is just a prosthetic device; intelligence, sufficiently trained, can be implanted in any workable body and carry the same power as it does in a human.
I don’t believe, anymore, that going offline will reveal to us some prelapsarian Eden. I have tried to go phone-less and have failed, finding myself fumbling for my ghost appendage. I have come to accept that my attachment to it is part of what Hayles defines as the posthuman ideology that I have implicitly bought into: it’s like becoming accustomed to reaching for a cane after some years of bad walking.
But neither do I believe in disposing entirely of the difficult-to-articulate belief that too much time online is not good for you, and that there is something not working when we tie ourselves entirely to the information-driven online simulation.
Henrot’s film is about this instinct. If it is about anything. Short clips are overlaid with the voice of a child reading aloud from a text that quotes, among other things, Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ manifesto. We are at the precipice of a climate crisis, not fueled by a climate event, but by humans.
The clips involve infants, human and non-human, domestic rituals, an alligator closing its eyes in satisfaction as it’s stroked; a baby monkey cringing from the pain of a cotton swab applied to its wound; a bathtub of dirty water swirling as it’s drained; a hand touching a turtle shell very gently, as if pressing too hard will hurt it. Henrot’s films do not follow a plot but they have patterns. Spot them one after another, and the film starts to reveal itself: Isn’t that circling laundry machine quite like the small head of this child, covered in thin hair? Like much of Henrot’s work, it involves ASMR. All over the clips are bits of the digital doodles that have appeared in other works, as well as children’s stickers.
It is about, if it is about anything, the two sides of the blade: to care for something small and tender that needs you, as well as the guilt that comes with this responsibility. There are clips of burning cities, of waters coming up so high people have to climb on top of cars. It is about climate change, and the worry that the caretaker is leaving the world in a damaged state. It is about disappearing biodiversity, of never-to-be-seen-again surprising and strange pink beetles and glass-patterned birds and red fish with tails like wide paintbrushes; the disappearance of animals that the children in these clips are learning about, animals that they may never live to meet.
It is a highly personal film, told entirely from Henrot’s point-of-view. It is not a documentary trying to make a point about climate. It is told through the point-of-view of a new mother, one might conclude, who is expressing the guilt and worry that come up for her as she has a child today.
What I find brilliant about the film is how it manages the information era. It doesn’t reject the idea of a substrate, something that can move from paper to screen to walls where it is projected onto. Henrot gives us another view of it: what if care were a substrate?
Care can exist on an iPad in the visage of a motherly queen or it can be present in the test tube of clear liquid being pipetted into the grizzly, round-eyed baby monkey’s mouth. A mother can care for a child; so too can its pet, so too can its surrounding environment of clapping, cheering revelers at Times Square. The substrate metaphor is also there in the visuals; frame after frame, my eyes followed similar shapes until they formed a story.
Every time I’ve seen the film, I’ve become suddenly aware of my body. There is a frame where a small child is submerged in a bathtub of suds that reminded me of being a kid, and one in which the same child is shaking his damp hair across his face. Two webbed, sharp-taloned bird feet plant onto the camera, and I remembered a pair of blue-and-white parakeets I was tasked with taking care of as a child, birds who would scrape at my arm whenever I tried to feed them until I gave up (and then, yes, they died. I live with regret to this day).
I’ve always ended the film at a sharp fork. Henrot gives care the same substrate treatment that information gets. But it is harder to see the ghosts that appear when information is separated from its medium. With care, it is obvious. Caring is unique and brief, it is governed by time, and it will never return again, not to the caretaker nor to the receiver; like our world and our time on this planet, it is fast-receding.
The film loosened the grip that the information era had on me. It reminded me of the many fleeting and individual moments that can never go into the training data. If it is true that AI will infinitely improve towards some impossible horizon, teach and scale itself, become embodied and create a data-mirror of our world; if it is true that AI is a pure extension of the information era, the belief that information, and therefore intelligence, can be separated from its medium; then it is also true that there are many things that will never make it into its training data because information doesn’t really know how to account for individual moments that are meant to disappear.
Stills are all from Camille Henrot’s In the Veins.