Dear VFX Worker

Politicians like nothing better than to do much about nothing. Thus, forceful opinions from Tory and Labour seem to intersect as indecipherable inflections of a consensual agreement. These two flailing political monarchs slip around on melting ice while grappling clumsily for some secure footing, agreeing on nothing, except an allegiance to the malleable platform they both share. There is only one respite in this feeble display. Periodically, they will imperceptibly move from a fray to a pirouette, slip into each other’s arms and call on the immaterial angels of Tech city and Soho to save them from their purgatorial crisis. The culture industry, or ‘creative industry’ as we’re now obliged to refer to it, is pure light in dark times for the mean men of the ledger sheet; the specular that sings us out of the cold.

Thinkers such as Theodor Adorno once discussed the way soothsayers of capital captured beautiful moments and things. He understood what happened when a vision became another thing sold; how form and prose became the tools to invent wants and distractions. Cultural markets operate not only as fields of consumption but also help us believe that what we see all around us is all that there is and all that we are capable of. Whilst Adorno took aim at the reproduced and rebooted cultural commodities of the post-war western world in the fields of film, text, stage, opera and animation, he could not have envisaged a form that would straddle all such interdisciplinary boundaries: Computer Generated Imagery (CGI). That is, the algorithmic form that germinates in, around and between the moving frames and interactions of the screen. It is the game, movie, and the new imagery of post-fordism. For this reason, we must reconfigure the pirouettes of the political class and claim the production of CGI as a commons. The field of Visual Effects (VFX) is one such important sub-terrain.

It is in the darkened theatres of the spectacle that the dreamy immaterial worlds of the hyperreal image help us forget about our degenerating material reality, whilst concealing the labour power consumed in their production. The VFX film Avatar is a fitting example of this paradoxical compact. A film that presents an anti-capitalist struggle, whilst simultaneously participating in capitalist accumulation. As a spectator, immersed in the highs and lows of this second order reality, it is impossible to comprehend the work of the computer animators, technical directors, riggers, compositors et al. who spend months irrigating the feudal acres of the virtual simulacrum for the barons of Hollywood.

Yet, in the bright green squares of social media platforms we are witnessing the first signs of global VFX solidarity. The green screen is the blank canvas of the VFX spectacle and has now come to represent the Facebook and Twitter profile pictures of all those artisans of CGI who are ready to show a collective face. This metaphor of the unrendered image has developed into a poetic resistance to the exploitation that exists behind the thin veil of the hyperreal, invoked by the protestations of the workers who brought Life of Pi from the green screen to the Oscars only to be unceremoniously expunged from their positions, without pay, after two of the largest production houses in the world went bankrupt. Now, without question, it has been made abundantly clear that the immaterial worlds of Avatar, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and WALL-E do come from somewhere very real indeed. As a result, the artisans of this latest promontory of the culture industry have acknowledged the need to collectively organise and fight for better conditions.

This is, we all hope, a paradigmatic shift for a young artistic form so cruelly delivered out of the military-entertainment complex of capitalist production. But in order for this to be realised, we must consider it the beginning of a movement for all those who play in the sandbox of the virtual simulacrum.

It is the excluded for whom the mystique of the creative industry hangs like an ephemeral perfume. Great throngs of graduates hang on their reels in the hope that they will render out their dreams as unpaid interns, years before they have a chance to join those who now protest at the degenerative conditions of employment. If this is the neoliberal trajectory of global labour then what is left for the collective artisanship of VFX; the heaving edifice of the culture industry that forever mediates our dreams? The VFX proprietors reach out for tax deductions from the sympathetic hand of the slippery politician while simultaneously outsourcing work to the developing capitalist economies of India and China. Are we now witnessing the flagship Soho and New York production houses becoming little more than the reception areas for the sweatshop labour of VFX workers in the global south?

If we intend to extract great rhythms of change from this moment, then we must also consider the future of VFX as an aesthetic and practical concern. If for instance, we consider that all those who practice also have access to a network of production points, then must we continue playing musical chairs to the symphony of the proprietor? Moreover, what might we create with this unbounding form, if we were released from the market compulsions of the culture industry?

Perhaps, it is at this paradigmatic juncture that critical questioning of VFX as a form will be able to mutate out of material concerns. For instance, do we, as VFX practitioners, consider ourselves artists with the attendant responsibilities to a society that the task implies? And if so, does forever pumping hyperreal consumables through the immaterial pipelines of the VFX industry tell us anything we didn’t already know? Goya documented the disasters of war; Brecht brought us the epic theatre of the everyday; and Heartfield showed us the elite dipping their hands in our pockets. Yet the poetry of the VFX artist is cajoled into the cyclical reproduction of wants and dreams.

If the trajectory of global capital demands that we labour in an anxious state of temporality then we should be developing new constellations of practice together. Why are we still working within an industry based on the distribution model of the last generation when we all have the capacity to publish our work globally and instantaneously without the need for the command and control structures of capitalist cultural distribution? Have we not already witnessed the success of decentralised crowd funded projects and the capabilities of entire studios condensed into a single computer?

We know the potential for new content and insights when projects are free from market constraints. We already excel at collaborative work and operate as a single organism for the production of shared visions. The current exploitation relies upon that very conceit. Just imagine what we’d be capable of if we decided to dictate the terms of our own creativity.

By Alex Charnley & Jack Dean | @alex_charnley @Jack__Dean

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