Afterimages of Progress: On Diego Marcon’s film Monelle

di Nora N. Khan

Nora N. Khan reads Diego Marcon’s film Monelle (2017) in light of the opaque enmeshment between “rationalist-turned-fascist” aesthetics and the afterimages elicited by such violent politics.

Diego Marcon, Monelle, 2017. Film frame. 35mm film, CGI animation, color, sound, loop of 13’53’’. Courtesy of the artist, and Ermes Ermes, Rome/Vienna. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection

A sickening switch turns on, a flash of hot light floods a space. An image burns the retina for what must be a single second. In the darkness, following quickly, a breath of time later, we are left with a ghost—an afterimage—of a sleeping girl, her face turned away from us, her body propped up against cream, rosy, brown marble. We see the flash, sometimes, in a reflection down a hall, or reflected against an opaque tile. We return to darkness for one minute, then another. Again. Each flash, I am left with a feeling of deep unease: I am sure that I have seen another figure in the darkness. I cannot tell if I am seeing an afterimage that my mind is creating—an uncanny double, a poor and inaccurate replica of the girl we have just seen. Footsteps. The next flash, a bit impatient, I freeze the film, zoom in, then zoom in again. With a simultaneous feeling of pleasure and fear, horror and titillation, I find constructed, human-size bodies, kneeling before the girls, lurching in the darkness behind them, sitting on a ledge above a long set of stairs, leaning purposefully forward into frame, as if it looks at us. I linger on the second and scan them closely. They seem paralyzed, frozen, until they are not; about seven and a half minutes in, an old man in a blue coat, bending, turns his head on a pivot, as if activated by our passing.

We let the film start again, and it fills with artificial bodies—people—being dragged across the floor. In the darkness, too, which I am caught in most of the time, I hear nauseating sounds: of course, I imagine these bodies all being dragged by anonymous hands, or forces, or hooks pulling them off-stage. We cannot see them but must imagine they are there, being dragged at angles away from each other in an elaborate choreography, no one body touching another or crossing paths once, across the floor and out of sight. We might even, nervously, try to take in some of the impressive space, a hall of authority, where the future of the state or its finances are decided. There is a preponderance of glass, seemingly floor to ceiling, giving the illusion of access, transparency, of nothing hidden.

The hall fills with ghosts, and an acute sense of all the catastrophic violence that we cannot see but know is unfolding out there in the darkness, under cover of night, in spaces designed to conceal even as they reveal. I know this violence intimately, along with its long haunting, its afterimages, and its aftereffects: what we might call its wake. I follow this ship, and I swim in its wake; we all, at times, swim in its wake, even if we do not speak of it. We sublimate, we try to forget what we swim behind, ignore the afterimages we take on as cloaks and wrap ourselves in.

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IN MONELLE (2017), BY DIEGO MARCON, WE ARE GIVEN THE DELICIOUS OPPORTUNITY TO MEDITATE ON OUR OWN INTIMATE RELATIONSHIPS TO SIMULATION AND POWER, VIRTUALITY AND VIOLENCE, ALL THE SACRIFICES MADE IN THE NAME OF PROGRESS, AND ALL THE AVATARS AND REPRESENTATIONS THAT WE STEP IN AND OUT OF DAILY.

In Monelle (2017), by Diego Marcon, we are given the delicious opportunity to meditate on our own intimate relationships to simulation and power, virtuality and violence, all the sacrifices made in the name of progress, and all the avatars and representations that we step in and out of daily. In fact, the experience of being largely in darkness only to have brief real, then virtual (and disembodied, but arguably no less real than real) moments of confrontation with situations in which we cannot discern between artifice and the real, is a powerful extended metaphor for our current moment.

Diego Marcon, Monelle, 2017. Film frame. 35mm film, CGI animation, color, sound, loop of 13’53’’. Courtesy of the artist and Ermes Ermes, Rome/Vienna. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection

The ghastly life-sized, humanlike dolls, the figures of artifice, the specters, the avatars on the cusp of being activated, turn us toward a long history of the pursuit of technological progress at all costs. We are invited to walk through the afterimages of this pervasive and grounding fantasy, the ever-seductive ideology of the Great Future that repeats and replicates itself each era, with marked aggression. We might reflect here on age-old desires—from Leonardo da Vinci’s automata to our contemporary AI voice assistants—for humanoid-like beings we construct to mirror, support, and aid humanity toward and in a grand technological, utopian future. In a number of vital science fictions that shaped the very direction of technological design and computation, the aim seemed to always be the creation of a perfect replica of human intelligence that could be programmed to be devoid of trauma and historical bias, and rid of “unnecessary” sentiments and impulses. What is unnecessary depends on the time, the culture: perhaps it is Indigenous knowledges that do not work well under extractive capitalism, that refuse it; perhaps it is intergenerational social structures that pass embodied knowledge down through example and story; perhaps these are more incomputable impulses, like compassion, care, sacrifice, or a love of strangers, or a sense that one’s well-being is indelibly tied to that of others—that techno-capitalism finds irreducible and anathema.

“We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched with a new form of beauty, the beauty of speed,” Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism (1909) began, opening an era of remarkable, chilling paeans to violence, industry, and domination through bombardment. Today’s scions of rationalism, science, and computation speak in similar terms. They often reveal themselves to be some of the most socially conservative thinkers to grace a twenty-first-century public stage. More important than their words are their designs; the deep learning-driven world of planetary computation embodies these visions of ruthless progress at all costs, with little to no regard for local context or historical precedent. Core to that pure technological progress, in which all social issues have a technical solution, is total control: through mass surveillance, predictive policing, and machine learning–driven analysis of a decade plus of data.

Diego Marcon, Monelle, 2017. CGI development; Casa del Fascio (interior detail); 3D model from photogrammetry; screengrab. Courtesy of the artist

That is to say the past, as William Faulkner wrote, is “not even past”—and perhaps was not even understood fully to begin with. We take up Marinetti’s futurism and the legacy of rationalism in our current moment. While the discussions and theories as to the links between Futurism and contemporary techno-positivist design ideologies is well-trodden territory, there is less focus on the wake of such totalizing fantasies of the future, the afterimage of such ecstatic technological dreaming.¹ What comes after the champions of combative, brash, industrial domination of the world leave, fly to Mars, are found guilty of fraud, or ousted? How do we persist in the wake of their dreams of power?

We remember how the dominant technological paradigm of our time has had direct ties to government programs and research on cybernetics, which fed into the data and intelligence accrual of Web 2.0 and the global spread of technocracy.² The roots of this computational “control society” are in the Macy Conferences that looked to assess and map how the human mind worked. The attendees, from Norbert Wiener to Gregory Bateson to John von Neumann to Claude Shannon to Margaret Mead, are well-documented. Psychologists, statisticians, computer engineers, and mathematicians all gathered to hone cybernetics as a system of communication control in machines—and animals. What is less discussed is how many of the attendees would go on to hone militaristic strategies of psychological control, in projects funded by the military and the CIA aimed at manipulation, interrogation, and emotional persuasion. Today, the seeming transparency of technological management (or innovation)—with all company white papers and filings made public, and many major mistakes made on an international stage—obscure the fact of black-box algorithms and gnostic protection of proprietary knowledge, based in deep learning.

We remember how the glass box hides, even as it reveals.

Diego Marcon, Monelle, 2017. CGI development; the dragged woman; 3D model with render preview and animation controls (rig); screengrab. Courtesy of the artist

I am watching the film at different times: early in the morning, late at night, always in a dark room. The light switch, each time, resonates deep in my body. A new friend tells me about her experience watching it in Rome’s Cinema dei Piccoli. She stresses how the sound created a full-body horror effect, a sensation of pure terror concentrated and distilled down into a fully psychosomatic experience in the darkness of the theater. I imagine the theater also filling with outlines, afterimages, the critical remove of the screen and the fiction becoming blurred and less certain.

The silence is not silence, either; we hear what sounds like room tone, also called the sound of silence. Listening closely, of course, room tone is not silence, but an amalgam of very muted, low-volume sounds. We suspect there is life going on outside the building, perhaps airplanes going by or maybe the sound of traffic. In the room tone we hear scratches, and then, intentional body-drags, and then, small liquid noises, a sort of wet, drippy rivulet in the air, seconds before the old man will turn his head. The atmosphere thickens, precipitates one sinister event after another. These almost imperceptible punctuations of liquid and dragging create a rift in the fabric of what should be calm, seamless room tone. In isolation, as Lawrence Abu Hamdan investigates in his work on prisons, inmates train their ears on footfall, counting the seconds between steps and the time it takes to approach, to predict the next approach. To prepare.

Diego Marcon, Monelle, 2017. Shooting development; Casa del Fascio; ground floor; map of the frames, with the positions of the camera in the space. Courtesy of the artist

We are slid on a track, as on an abandoned “amusement” ride gone awry; the sets have the aesthetic and feel of a future natural history museum of twentieth- and twenty-first-century power relations that has itself been abandoned. The guide is, in this future, an automated eye, a camera on a dolly, itself on a track. We get the sense that the camera is timed to pause before a new, preserved subject of the state and its assigned, eerie, unhuman caretaker, companion, watcher. The effect of the movement through the hall, on a loop, is of continual capture, a capture that is impossible for the figures to evade, as they seem unable to respond or are caught off guard by the flashbulbs, eyes lifted open in shock or curiosity, or maybe recognition.

At certain points we realize that we cannot figure out whether the sleeping girls are necessarily real either, save through freeze-frames or a search of stills from the film. I am certain they are real, only because I feel unreasonably confident that I can discern real flesh and blood from synthetic. In this case, being able to distinguish feels existentially critical, an evolutionary need. As an acolyte and critic of gaming-driven visual culture in which the hyperreal’s edge is continually tested, I must be able to distinguish between what is real from artificial, even as I understand our culture and customs and language as artifice, too.

Diego Marcon, Monelle, 2017. Film frame. 35mm film, CGI animation, color, sound, loop of 13’53’’. Courtesy of the artist, and Ermes Ermes, Rome/Vienna. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection

I am turned from the less compelling question of whether a body is real or not to the gestures that make us believe in a body’s temporary reality, its humanness or humanlike qualities, for long enough to engage with it. And the ability to master these gestures, through editing, through software, is an uncanny source of power today. We are asked to pay attention here: the girls are positioned vulnerably throughout. Their necks and napes are bare, visible to us. We are in the position of a person stalking behind, about to surprise them. We do not see their faces, and are refused that final connection. More importantly, they are not protected here, and the composition of their bodies automatically elicits a whole cascade of affect: worry, fear, care, an instinctive protectiveness, perhaps some longing to be innocent again, perhaps some identification.

This is a precise performance of a state of vulnerability. The codes and gestures that communicate vulnerability to our lizard brain can be encoded and learned by the state, whether political or technological. Today, we see how these mimed gestures and actions continue through a different generation of perverse choreography. Advertisements on social media draw on known data of the emotional impact of timed gestures, precise facial expressions, inheritances of the earliest visions of cybernetics, to link the gestures and neuronal pulses of human and animal with machine in perfect synchronicity. Leaders and ministers of information mimic and depict possible future scenes of harm, desolation, anarchy, or futures of mental imprisonment to one ideology over another. On stage, they gesture at devastation; they induce their rapt audience to imagine a future of national pride, progress, wealth, and peace all restored. They, at times, paint an image of the audience being as vulnerable as these sleeping girls.

Diego Marcon, Monelle, 2017. CGI development; the boy; 3D model with wireframe and animation controls (rig); screengrab. Courtesy of the artist

And here, on the other side of vulnerability, we might think of the power of this space. We begin to take in the staircase and the gradients of cream and tan marble, the gray-painted heaters, the pillars, the flashing light casting everything in a sickly pallor. In “Terragni in Vanishing Point,” Luis Fernández-Galiano walks through the diverse ways that Giuseppe Terragni’s building, considered the height of Razionalismo, has had this history since cropped out, left aside, gently rubbed away from the archive.³ We have all seen the images of rallies, themselves an afterimage of the space outside and around the Casa del Fascio. As artists and thinkers and theorists reckon globally across art, design, and literature with the subtle, hard-to-discern, but nonetheless present ties between rationalism and gospels of progress, modernism, and fascism, I find myself taking more care to consider what is not seen but rather implied.

Clean lines and order: an intolerance for mess, for anything unresolved and baroque, for alternative geometries, for fractal patterns, in form and in thinking; all must complete and compute, and all that does not is not rational. Rigorous symmetry: an aversion to the wavy and unevenly weighted, the irregular (and the naming of things as irregular or not on balance, is part of the work of rationalism—creating a default understanding in language). Glass, for transparency: the atrium, the floor-to-ceiling windows (all made of clearest glass), create a sense of access, direct contact with power. All is out in the open, meaning the second and tertiary meanings, and the hidden, and a sure sensation of dread that only builds.

Diego Marcon, Monelle, 2017. Backstage; setup; Casa del Fascio frontal view; photo: Marco Cappelletti with DSLstudio. Courtesy of the artist

As we glide through the Casa del Fascio, we are better equipped to understand the aesthetic act of fascism, a word now used with breathtaking frequency (and sometimes flippancy) online in violent debates and in endless permutations. It is most tellingly used as shorthand, as a marker of brutality, technocracy, bureaucratic violence, and authoritarianism in all its forms. And perhaps the use of the word is sourced in the lack of alternative words for the precise methods, tactics, and strategies with which power distributes itself today. How to describe the rationalism-turned-fascism of computational models that enact their ideology through virtual space, or through rough statistical models that construct reality, or through the coliseum ground of public debate? Monelle allows us to get to the heart of the word, its rhetorical flair, the style that seduced, the chrome call of technological progress embedded in the manifesto of Futurism.

HOW TO DESCRIBE THE RATIONALISM-TURNED-FASCISM OF COMPUTATIONAL MODELS THAT ENACT THEIR IDEOLOGY THROUGH VIRTUAL SPACE, OR THROUGH ROUGH STATISTICAL MODELS THAT CONSTRUCT REALITY, OR THROUGH THE COLISEUM GROUND OF PUBLIC DEBATE? MONELLE ALLOWS US TO GET TO THE HEART OF THE WORD, ITS RHETORICAL FLAIR, THE STYLE THAT SEDUCED, THE CHROME CALL OF TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS EMBEDDED IN THE MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM.

We look at the figures in this play of simulation, within ongoing plans for the building to be restored, to become a museum that investigates these critical ties between architecture and a past that is difficult to reckon with. Of course, there could and will be deeply researched, sensitive, well-framed discussions of the era and the building’s role. But Marcon’s piece asks one, from any political or cultural background, to consider the ways in which the places we come from have failed to recognize the ideology sitting in our own shores, if only in a different form. The Casa del Fascio becomes a set-piece and a metaphorical space, a figuration of the literal glass house of modernism and the echoes of “openness and transparency” ringing through technological discourse today. Transparency is still taken to mean clarity, a direct connection and feeling of inclusion in a hierarchy of power, from the state to the people, or from the king to the people, or from the lauded pioneer-business magnate to the people. We are asked to consider: What is hidden in transparency? How are transparency and openness simulated today? How do we look beyond what is presented to what sits just beyond, its silhouette visible before the light goes out? How are we trained into gestures and performances of rightness, goodness, progress, self-control?

Today, politics unfold before us in real time through orchestrated action, in continual coverage. Power unfolds as much rhetorically as visually; the television set, the blogger, the video editing room sets the stage. Transparency is surely simulated, as is neutrality. Museums and universities, software companies and technology’s greatest acolytes all argue that they are building “neutral spaces,” which their critics vociferously point out are anything but. To claim to be a neutral space is to completely ignore the ways politics are carried and replicated in memory, are in the presets and defaults of an architectural space: the building holds its politics in its lines and symmetries.

In considering the contours of the Casa del Fascio in this devastating film, and the emotional lives of the real and animated bodies that are dragged, pulled, dropped, and marionetted throughout, we are led to consider the afterimages of progress and control that we live with. Cultural afterimages of past fever dreams of power remain imprinted. They shape thinking that is on the rise, that flares up and threatens to reduce us to simulated beings, animated only to channel ideologies of progress and authority, order and a perfect system, as good and just.