A junkyard gym in a Kyiv forest, and two artificial intelligences trying to seduce us: audio-visual food for the soul

Our occasional still-space within the maelstrom of your image-lives… some films and animations to balance you out (or even bliss you out).

Above is Kachalka - an extraordinary 2019 documentary about a weightlifting park in a forest of Kyiv, whose maker recaptures scrap metal and mechanisms from the Soviet era, and turns them into a forest of self-realisation, for women and men. As Aeon Video quotes the Irish filmmaker:

Kachalka was made in Kyiv a couple of summers ago, in a moment in time that seems a far cry away from the tragedy currently taking place. Although this film shows a very different reality to what we are currently seeing in Kyiv and around the rest of Ukraine, I hope this short film helps to shine a light on the Ukrainian spirit and what makes it truly unique. The intention behind this film was to capture the incredible sense of community and ingenuity that exists at the heart of this Kyiv gym, and I think this is something that speaks to the stories we are hearing from Ukraine in this present time.

‘Kachalka’ derives from the Ukrainian for ‘to pump’ and, as this one’s built from scrap metal, it would be easy to think of it as a Muscle Beach Venice, way east of Los Angeles – a place for hardbodies only. But, in fact, the semi-legendary open-air gym is for everyone, whether they want to get as buff as a World’s Strongest Man competitor, land a few blows at a punch-bag built from car tyres, or simply pose awhile on the machines.

O’Rourke’s short documentary, made in 2019, frames Kachalka with a light touch and a droll eye: there’s an inherent humour to the proceedings, as everything from massive, brawny hands to high heels meet the metal of the squeaky, makeshift machines.

What’s striking is just how serious and how elderly many of these gym users are. But beneath their earnest self-absorption, the film captures the communal nature, deep resourcefulness and creative spirit inherent in the space. After all, this distinctive gym wasn’t built for novelty, but out of necessity.

The film’s narrator – an unnamed regular – explains how Kachalka was born during Soviet times, when factory workers collected scrap metal and brought tools from work to build the fitness space. That gym regular says he wants to keep ‘the Mecca of Kyiv sport’ alive as part of a team who help design and weld new machines to keep visitors coming. ‘I have completely actualised myself here,’ he explains.

AI’s intermingling with human creativity continues - see this collaboration between DJ Max Cooper and Xander Steenbrugge, titled Exotic Contents. From Creative Review:

For the best part of the last decade, London-based producer and DJ Max Cooper has been merging music, science and visual art in his highly collaborative practice. The rate and volume of his output in that time has exceeded many of his contemporaries – and his description of his forthcoming sixth studio album, Unspoken Words, goes some way in explaining why.

“I’ve always struggled with words. Trying to communicate anything meaningful about my internal state, in any way which seems to do it justice, has always been beyond me. But music bypasses language. It is my means of expression, which is why I make a lot of it – I’m compelled to create,” he said.

The album takes “exploring the difficulties of communicating with words” as its point of departure, a theme that’s central to the unusual video accompanying his new track, Exotic Contents.

The music video was created in collaboration with Xander Steenbrugge, a digital artist who specialises in machine learning, and draws on the writings of 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, “who tackled this question of the difficulties of using words to explain ourselves and our place in the world,” Cooper says. These were then fed to an AI, which churned out visuals based on the writings.

“It’s interesting for me to see the incomprehensible philosophical language interpreted visually like this, full of symbolism and the boundaries between language, our selves, and the world, broken down into flowing abstraction. I haven’t really taken it all in yet, I feel like there’s more to discover in it than I can appreciate.”

Speaking of his involvement, Steenbrugge said: “The video was not ‘designed’ by me in the same way that traditional visual artists would design a music video. I wrote all the code that runs the AI pipeline, and I did a huge amount of exploration as to which settings and sentences (most of which are from Wittgenstein’s seminal Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) work best, but the final rendered frames come out of the machine.

“So in essence, what you see probably has many different interpretations depending on who’s watching. I really love how the AI model creates very abstract visual scenery which looks familiar, but is also completely impossible at the same time.”

The visuals rendered by the AI are constantly shapeshifting, gliding from smeared dreamscapes and disfigured faces into environments evocative of Cubism, their cadence matching the track’s beat.

Continuing our AI theme, the above is a 3-part playlist from contemporary artist Dominique Savitri Bonarjee, titled Three Seductions of Consciousness. Below is some context from the first meditation:

Automation is progressively taking over many of the tasks and jobs humans don't want to do. Some AI scientists ('Life 3.0', M. Tegmark) claim that machine intelligence can create a world of luxury and comfort, where we get what we want. But what do we want?

Yuval Harari ends his popular book Sapiens by suggesting: "The only thing we can try to do is to influence the direction scientists are taking. But since we might soon be able to engineer our desires too, the real question facing is is not 'What do we want to become?', but 'What do we want to want?' Those who are not spooked by this question probably haven't given it enough thought."

'What do you want?' is part of the triptych Three Seductions of Consciousness. It is a meditation guided by a cyborg, trying to understand human desire in order to fulfill it.