Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni, The Everted Capital (Katabasis), video still from The Unmanned, season 2, epilogue, 2022. Infinite HD video loop, generated in real-time by an artificial intelligence. © Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni.

Recently, I listened to a BBC broadcast about galaxies in which one of the panelists said something to the effect of: We know the least about our own galaxy, for the very reason that it is difficult to perceive something from inside of it. Much like in romance, our condition as “subjects” in a capital system is a totalizing fiction that creates and contains our perception of everything else. Capitalism holds its audience captive in fictive convictions of freedom, which are nonetheless limited by the bondage of our mortal selves, these dreadful bodies and their slow march to an inevitable end. Death then necessitates value, as it forces a question of what our time is worth. Time becomes a material constraint that we measure, invariably, in science and progress but also, on a more human scale, in the contributions we make, what we create—like children or art or spaceships—which (to indulge in the easy POV of rationalism) enters straight back into the aforementioned economic trap.

This trap, one could say, organizes Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni’s exhibition at Casino Luxembourg, The Everted Capital (Katabasis), the final installment of the artists’ nearly decade-long episodic film cycle in three seasons, known, as a whole, as The Unmanned (2014–22). Installed across the museum’s two-story space, the exhibition comprises films, objects, and performances from season two, The Everted Capital (2018–22), and season three, The Form of Not (2018–ongoing), as well as an epilogue to the series, filmed in situ during the exhibition’s run. A programmed camera traverses the two floors through a hole in the center of the installation. This camera, the indifferent eye of an artificial intelligence, takes on the tricky task of looking at a system of production, of meaning, from the inside, in a speculative effort to see through these material fictions.

Cosmic timing, really, to have caught that BBC radio show, as it provides some perspective on the stuck situation Giraud and Siboni are interested in: not exactly exiting, though much is made of the concept of an “outside” to capital, but rather articulating the closed circuit of representation and value, as per peering into the penumbra of our night sky and wondering where the hell we are, and not knowing, angst-laden, that the experience is not designed to be palliative. It seems important to note that Giraud and Siboni are, within their Unmanned, helming a vessel completely indifferent to its general audience, us simpleton mortals so hellbent on abstract fantasies and drifts. This intentionally complicates entry into their deeply immersive world-building, as seriously negated in their imperatives for the work are all things “subjective,” so, in essence, all things that could relate—from Hollywood blockbusters to Star Trek, 2001: A Space Odyssey’s Star Child to Walt Disney, 3D animation, and cartoon elasticity. Not that the exhibition is without its own systems of mediation: the catalog comprises some four hundred pages of referential reading, interviews, essays, and the films’ scripts. Primary, here, is the insistence of the artists’ continuation of the project of intellectual cinema as a predominantly philosophical concern leading to this exhibition as the final “form,” a “material fiction” that marks the open end of The Unmanned as a film series as it progressively slips into the “real” of the exhibition venue, in which scenography is revised as sculpture and an actress and her newborn are live performers.

The Everted Capital (Katabasis), installation view, Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain, Luxembourg City, April 2–September 4, 2022. Photo: Thomas Lannes.

But there’s an attendant problem in Giraud and Siboni’s enterprising in real space, namely, in the overdetermination of their own intent—par for the course, per a film cycle set up to “see” its own system of representation, and then see itself seeing itself, and thus see itself creating itself. In The Everted Capital (Katabasis), viewers are sent into the expanses of the artists’ precision-crafted protocols and conlangs, as these appear within episodic narratives that are themselves set inside a filmic superstructure, i.e., the extended Unmanned. Each respective film (which the artists refer to as episodes) weaves overlapping instances in the history of computation and capital through distinct cinematic techniques and special effects, recalling sci-fi classics and blockbusters, as much as structural films culled from the French canon. There is, make no mistake, one operation at hand, here, which is the speculative and theoretically open-ended claim to this exhibition as, ultimately, “unmanned.” The idea is to void and vacate the space of mediation between the artists and their artwork through the dictum of a protocol that allows for the latter to exist independently of their future intervention. Films and performers spit out their own progeny—as concrete fiction. A camera catches it all, and films its own epilogue. Like so, The Everted Capital (Katabasis) focuses, in a sense, on the problem of perspective and gaze through the device of the inward-glancing camera as “eye.” In expanding their cinematic universe into three-dimensional space, that is, by inverting the camera’s direction to capture the sculptures and the performers on display, Giraud and Siboni aim to cede authorship. The question is, to what end? To see in their own work what they cannot see from inside its production? Or to escape in theory, that is, through theory, to a command zone offset from the playing field the rest of us are stuck in? Their ideas—on the implications of capturing the concrete fictions of capital under the aegis of the “unmanned” vessel—are expounded in the accompanying exhibition catalogue. This move gives way to critical interpretations somewhat outside of the artists’ own philosophical goals for the work.

Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni, The Everted Capital (585 BCE–2022), video still from The Unmanned, season 2, episode 3, 2022. HD video and live camera, 70 min. © Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni.

Having recently read Bernard Welt’s 1996 essay on Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, something else emerges for me from their camera reversion: the significance of the space occupied. Star Trek, Welt writes, touches on what cannot be portrayed not because it is unportrayable but because “the Enterprise is human enterprise, surrounded on all sides by a cold, vast emptiness that is not impressed. . . . [T]he world of television occupies the space between the inside of an individual and the outside of the social world.”¹ Beyond that, television (and film) cannot reach, because it cannot exit its own condition as part of a system of mediation. Taking Welt’s analysis to be true, Star Trek’s problem is then remarkably similar to Giraud and Siboni’s problem, which in its own course is culled from Sergei Eisenstein’s Grundproblem (more on this anon): the representation of capital as reconciled with representation’s intimate boundedness with death. Welt goes on to reflect on another planet’s possible version of Star Trek, in which “someone picks up a copy of Pascal’s Pensées and reads, ‘The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.’”² Death and representation share a boundary in this eternal silence, or stillness, as two aspects of the same fiction. As mere earthbound mortals, we are, of course, stuck in the psychoanalytic lensing of self as constituted through and within continuous “alien encounters” with ourselves—like doubles, mirrors, and doppelgängers, or, more to the point, technological apparatuses, such as cameras and AI—that profoundly fuck with and manufacture our sense of reality. Still, such self-alienation remains in the realm of psy-fi, that is, within the limitations of representational frameworks created by our tiny human minds—so vested in acquisition, preservation, and subjective legacies. So much is unambiguous in Giraud and Siboni’s extended oeuvre. Besides the fact that there’s great value in stargazing from the penumbra of your own galaxy into the brightness of another—to make sense of what cannot be experienced in situ—the feat of framing space from two sides of a single system also implies the impossible transmission of an alien encounter with our own slippery selves.

Rather than reflecting on this logic of abandonment and its potential for abstract meaning, Giraud and Siboni are interested in the fact of reification (not critique): protocols, scripts, sediments, materials, remainders. The films on view portray the scant thing of subjectivity sinking into distant memory. The Everted Capital’s filmed sequences follow the process and aftermath of the dismantling of an earth that humans are leaving behind. The fixed points of capital that conditioned the self cease to be, and with them go all known modes of being. In the two presented seasons, The Everted Capital and The Form of Not, we gradually witness, through a series of performative experiments filmed as twenty-four-hour looped sequences, the rise and fall of a species of immortal communists who’ve defaulted to a rote, mechanical life aboard a Dyson sphere. Given the absence of death in this infinite condition, value is no longer necessary. These beings, humans without a sense of humanity, or reason to be, form new habits of congregation as a social mass to structure and suture time. However, as death returns to them “as an atavism,”³ in the first episode of The Everted Capital (1894–7231) (2018), so follows the reinstitution of value as if from the prelogical core of their being—first as a game of exchange and then as necessity, as the corpses begin to accumulate and decay aboard their closed system.

The Everted Capital (Katabasis), installation view, Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain, Luxembourg City, April 2–September 4, 2022. Photo: Thomas Lannes.

Time, in these films, stretches and snaps. Tales are told in the same paratactic pace that moves fairy tales along. Actions are repeated until exhausted. In episode one, a person dies each hour of twenty-four, until only a newborn, stuck in its own endlessness, is left. In episode two, The Everted Capital (1971–4936) (2019), we follow the last living mortal as she’s bound to restaging, over and again, a hostage situation from the advent of earth’s dismantling. Causal logic is abandoned, as what moves these narratives along is not rationalism, per the philosophical tenor, but what is left in its undoing—in the cuts and holes created in each respective film, as one after the other strings together events in the conjunctive. This is not exactly the absence of causal logic, but rather, as Tzvetan Todorov reminds us about forms of the fantastic, “the intervention of an isolated causality which is not directly linked to other causal series controlling our life.”⁴ Our system of logic unravels, intently, as if underground with Lewis Carroll’s Alice in her mathematical flip.⁵ Spaces and objects are transformed under the command of a shapeless intellect and reassembled into the life-like. The unsteadied and inverted animism of an artificial intelligence ultimately brings into being a child who is neither mortal nor immortal but, per Giraud, “more than life . . . something that emerges from the living without being reduced to it.”⁶ Though it is tempting to invoke Star Child David Bowman from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the baby of episode one feels less like the transcendent end of the totality of one’s experiences than an attempt to imagine the apparition of a “life” without value. Stuck somewhere outside of time, outside of growth and value, outside of experience, that is, stuck in a single moment, in a representation, the baby’s condition is an atopic, placeless bliss, in constant revision of its singular, bound “life.” Its blankness horrifies, like the indifferent vastness of space.

Katabasis, the titular subplot to Giraud and Siboni’s exhibition, is a device used in mythic literature to describe narrative descents into often hellish places where values are toppled in the contortions of time and space. The katabatic cruises from concentric hells and mathematical undergrounds to the infinite elasticity of pictorial space as experienced in animated film. Its inversions are, in equal parts, concerned with the aesthetic and the eschatological. Katabatic movement ferries speculation of what exists beyond our mortal selves and our slippery self-definition, as the conditions imposed on the subject are made to shift, in this case, in the roving camera’s cinematic psy-fi. The katabatic drives vision, perspective, and belief into the ground. Voyaging to hell allows us to see what holds up, what lasts, especially in regard to the existential categories with stakes in representation: love, pleasure, grief, death—all things that construct and complicate life under capitalism. Anna Longo, in the exhibition’s catalog, asks: “How can we evoke the limits of a process that only sets limits on itself in order to better overcome them? How can we show the finitude of a rule capable of engendering an infinite series of rules? How can we emancipate ourselves from a narrative that engenders every emancipatory narrative and that legitimates itself through the freedom given to each of us to pursue our desires?”⁷ Considering ourselves as lost in infinite, empty space—space that’s emblematic of death, and not in the abstract—the core question is how do we get out of that narrative, our heads, the existential structure that contains and contorts us? Questions amass, like, how do we access an outside to that which “permits no outside,” the outside to the closed space of our subjecthood, so as to see what’s left of love, language, and the grand narrative promise of liberty?

Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni, The Everted Capital (585 BCE–2022), video stills from The Unmanned, season 2, episode 3, 2022. HD video and live camera, 70 min. © Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni.

Consider the exhibition’s central installation, a milky pool dimly lit with colorshifting lights programmed to change on a gradient from white to fuchsia in narrative tack with season two’s final film, The Everted Capital (585BCE–2022) (2022). This spillage from screen to space, aside from being reminiscent of certain Disneyesque dark ride strategies, lays bare the fallibility of the mechanisms that have driven the subjects of their films. These mechanisms of narrative cinema and its direction, i.e., subjective framing devices not necessarily not on loan from more standard blockbusters, suggest, in extension, that neither cinema nor philosophy is capable of articulating answers to questions demanded of the uninhabited, or the unmanned. Somehow, in the end, we always wind up captive to someone’s psyche. The Everted Capital (585BCE–2022) relies on visual effects and dramatic staging to convey this emotional tenor—a cinematic affectation amplified by the film’s conlang voice-over. The two protagonists bathe in the spiritual milk of an artificial intelligence whose orders (desires?) have condemned them to remain confined together in a capsule, simulating love and all its excess hurts, like compressing a lifetime of relational experience into the hour-long film’s four seasons: pleasure, love, grief, and childhood. Their symbiotic alienation teases questions about the transmission and actualization of emotional realities. These are initially lost into the convolution of their experience but later recuperated in the symbolic transfer of effects and props, as well as performers and their offspring, into the physical space of the exhibition. (A child born to the couple at the end of The Everted Capital (585BCE–2022) is the real baby of the actress, and this actress and her baby are both found in the installation, performing their own beings.) What is scripted is muddled into real emotion. Experience—the encounter with a sculpture as an idea, or the life of something—prevails in the same instance of its failure. If nothing else, we can see ourselves seeing ourselves, as presumably the installation’s embedded camera captures and sees all, with all the indifference of Pascal’s cosmos.

Returning to the core question of representation, it is noteworthy that Giraud and Siboni have earlier professed that the originary spark that set The Unmanned in motion was a note inscribed into the journals of Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. In 1927, Eisenstein had somewhat amusingly decided to make “a film of Das Kapital, based on the original script by Karl Marx.”⁸ Though the film was never made, Eisenstein ultimately launched into a series of aesthetic reflections that are relevant to the means through which Giraud and Siboni would later approach the prompt. Fourteen years after having declared his desire to silver-screen Das Kapital, Eisenstein found himself having spent over a decade trying to solve and getting suspended in what he considered the Grundproblem of the theory and practice of art: the swindling ravine between the rational and the sensuous in its various structures and perceptions. In 1935, he took a stab at an answer to a captive audience at the Creative Conference of Soviet Film Workers, noting that the dialectic of works of art is built upon a most curious dual unit: “an impetuous progressive rise along the lines of the highest conceptual steps of consciousness and a simultaneous penetration by means of the structure of the form into the layers of profoundest sensuous thinking.”⁹

These lines of aspiration—Eisenstein’s speculative solution to expounding the remarkable tension of true artworks—would become the core of what he’d hoped would be his major work, which was ultimately unfinished: a book referred to as Method. In the manuscript, the filmmaker situated his theory of art’s irresistible tension (a term that became, in his later writings, analogous to representations of anticipation, distension, suspense, and uncertainty) in the paradox of art’s progressive rise to high concept and simultaneous penetration into the depths of the profound—to be read in the French: profond, for bottom. These topographical directives should not be missed as Eisenstein moves to redefine true cinema—through scattered references from primitive plastics to Orthodox iconography, from Kabuki to Rainer Maria Rilke—as a vehicle for the spatialization of meaning. He appeared to be moving toward an idea of cinema’s potential to tap into the mechanisms of thought via some kind of prelogical momentum: a world going outside of itself. Tormented by this “dramatic ‘passage through purgatory’ of the director-theoretician,” i.e. by the plights of those authoring “intellectual cinema,”¹⁰ and ever-vexed by visual art’s persistent infantilisms, Eisenstein takes to Vladimir Lenin’s grand theories of the unity of opposites in order to overcome a “tragic, inner rending of his soul.” In 1941, fourteen years after pitching Das Kapital: The Movie to himself, he began chalking out his path to this profound place in the penumbra of Leninist dialectics, step by step, into the ne plus ultra of true modern cinema by beginning notes for an essay on one of the great masters of cinema, who produced “the greatest contribution of the American people to art: Walt Disney.”¹¹

Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni, The Everted Capital (585 BCE–2022), video stills from The Unmanned, season 2, episode 3, 2022. HD video and live camera, 70 min. © Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni.

In a brief lucid moment, before the Disney studio became the very apotheosis of capital enterprise and the All-American Walt allegedly teamed up with the CIA to capture commies, Disney had found in the animated line an anarchic potential to escape all categories and all conventions by an adherence to the “strictest plastic and temporal calculation.”¹² Made real in these rolls of film was not only life blown into, say, skeletons playing the xylophones of their own bones, instrumentalizing being as a pure instance of function—and fun—but also what Eisenstein further read as the surprising coordination of a collective of forms inextricable from their conditions of production: the harmony of technique. This echoes, notably, Walter Benjamin’s reading of Mickey Mouse via Charles Fourier: “The revolution as an innervation of the technical organs of the collective. . . the blasting open of the teleology of nature.”¹³ Found in the looping perpetual present of the animated short was a rosy soap-bubble paradise, a shiny and placeless cartoon atopia, wherein unfettered form could touch on the unclassifiable core of experience—proposing, in the “complete return to a complete freedom,” a better Socialist future, “unreachable on earth.”¹⁴ Disney’s animated line, at least for a brief instance in Eisenstein’s mind, indicted the capital world in its recourse to a psy-fi real that released the viewer from the hell of social burdens into something in tune with nature, precisely by way of its detonation. As Esther Leslie further reminds us, this “nature” is “understood without preconception and without convention, such that nature becomes freedom rather than necessity. Nature becomes non-nature, anti-nature, something in movement. The category of nature implodes.”¹⁵

Eisenstein would have, naturally, also seen the totality of our subjectivity as structured by capitalism’s inexorable advances, and so tried to find, in the fiction of the animated “I,” an archaic, plasmatic return to a self always fine in the next frame—outside of time in its endless transformation. This was an eternity spotted in the literal line, caught stretching and shaping, as if by evolutionary force, toward a cellular infinite. Like Disney, then, Giraud and Siboni’s proposed vitalism provides a drop of comfort not because it distracts but because it stages, in its endlessly mutable forms and elastic internal logic, an escape from the metaphysical immobility that governs the once-and-forever-given self. In the structure of the fantastic, in the alogical and sensuous core of self, is a speculative liberation from the chains and fetters that contain and condition us as subjects. Displaced identifications, substitutions, and surrogates for a self unstuck—doubles, mirrors, and lost selves, seen at the bottom of experience—are all figures partaking in a device dating back to the fables of Ovid, or Lafontaine, where new worlds were inverted in the space of political allegory. This torsion is capable of dislocating systems of representation by drawing, sometimes literally, an idea outside of itself.

Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni, The Everted Capital (Katabasis), video still from The Unmanned, season 2, epilogue, 2022. Infinite HD video loop, generated in real-time by an artificial intelligence. © Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni.

Like so, Giraud and Siboni’s exhibition is centered around this morphing, silent set, steadily forming and reforming around its own internal logic and shifting materialities. This can be seen in the steady drip of water from the second-floor stage set to the lower floor’s subsidiary installation; the slow crystallization of salt and sedimentations of dried clay on the objects suspended in the mix; and the museum lights, programmed to shift in alignment with the films. Irreducible as it may seem from the larger context of The Unmanned, that is, to viewers well-versed in their series, The Everted Capital (Katabasis) asks to be considered for what it is: a satellite, somewhere in space, transmitting on its own. It’s an episodic fable seen staging its own slow collapse, a speculative fiction told backwards—or inwards. It begins at the open end of the artists’ narrative, inside their fiction, in the slow show of a cinematic space as one that has intentionally been left unattended. We are tasked with ambling around questions of what can be recuperated or sussed out in the absence of an outcome, with no sense of an end. Giraud mentions, in an interview conducted for the catalog, negating “the search for fixed provenance.”¹⁶ He, too, was searching for ways to make films in the blind spot of the self—void of subject. But the comment is also helpful in navigating the exhibition’s core construct, namely, that the viewer, as such, will be lost if searching for a single “subject” in the work. Posed at a distance from the aesthetics of reception that govern most experiences of gallery-going, the viewer must instead consider an outside to art, i.e., an outside to the systems of representation that “fix” meaning in our subjective response to concepts conditioned by what we already know.

Sabrina Tarasoff is a Finnish writer based in Paris.