New Year, new you? Maybe. You can change the way you live and what you want to do. You can change your looks, your attitude, your friends, your hair. But there are some things you can’t change and the state knows that.

When Robert De Niro was de-aged for Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman he might have looked years younger but his bodily movements identified him as old. The idea that our body movements can identify our age, sex, and to an extent exactly who we are has led governments (like China) to use body motion technologies to keep tabs on its population.

Filmmaker John Butler has just released a short animation highlighting this new form of state surveillance. Called Gaitkeeper, a nice little play on words, Butler’s latest film aims to expose how governments are using body motion technology to control their citizens. I caught up with Butler this morning and asked about Gaitkeeper.

What inspired your new animation?

John Butler: Lots of artists have been doing things on facial recognition, and how to thwart/evade it, and it’s a well worn theme. My aim is to look at the new science of ‘gait recognition’, which is being tested as part of China’s social credit system. I’m sure you know about that, it’s the techtalitarian system of assigning each citizen a score for good behaviour, which relies heavily on digital surveillance tools such as facial recognition.

In a ‘solid state’, purchasing nappies is good, and buying alcohol is bad. A cashless system makes every transaction visible, so nosey journalists can often find themselves unable to book flights or even access the web.

Gait Recognition works on the assumption that your walk is as individual as your face or fingerprint, and I would agree. It allows identification from a distance and in cases where the face is obscured.

And you’ve used motion capture for this film?

JB Since motion capture is central to my art, I thought it was an obvious thing to do, especially since getting my own smartsuit. It is also a blatant attempt to be first in the field!

I was interested in the spat between Scorsese and Marvel, which you’ll know all about. In particular, he has used all of Marvel’s pioneering ageing/de-ageing tech to make The Irishman. One review praised how well it was done, but mentions the fact that De Niro “walks like a 70 year old…”

I think this backs up the theory that we are not images, but a compendium of behaviors. In the first Ant Man, they de-aged Michael Douglas, but he still has his older voice.

Another example is from Final Fantasy in 2000. This was the first attempt at a mocap film, and was a box office bomb. What surprised me was how James Woods, one of the most distinctive actors around, sounded like anyone else, when put into a synthetic character. I conclude that James Woods cannot be split into components. You need the hyper kinetic body language, the shifty look, the narrow face etc….

Our movement, motion, is as distinctive as our faces, and this will soon be captured and interned. Gaitkeeper is a biometric control suite designed to counter the challenge of “Locomotive Camouflage.”

Is that how you think we can counter governments using motion capture against us?

JB: Yes, with Gaitkeeper I’m imagining a time when performance artists and dance specialists will be in demand to train civic insurgents in the art of Locomotive Camouflage. It’s also “The Ministry of Silly Walks,” for the age of surveillance.

Gaitkeeper depicts a training and deployment phase, and a carivalesque riot inspired by the umbrellas of Hong Kong.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
John Butler: Changing the world one animation at a time
A song of praise to the future: John Butler’s new speculative animation ‘Acrohym’
‘The Ethical Governor’ and the Genius of John Butler

 
Award-winning speculative fiction animator John Butler, one half of the Butler Brothers, will be making a rare appearance at the Exchange Rates Expo in Brooklyn, New York from October 23rd to 26th. John will be exhibiting alongside artist and filmmaker Patrick Jameson and artist Ellis Luxemburg, as part of the Glasgow’s Queen’s Park Railway Club at the Fuchs Projects, 56 Bogart Street.

Exchange Rates is an international expo of art and art galleries in around the Bushwick area of Brooklyn presenting work by exchange artists from around the world:

Conceived and produced by arts organizations helmed by artists and curators in Bushwick, Brooklyn and London, England, Exchange Rates—known also in this inaugural iteration as The Bushwick Expo—is an international exposition of artworks and curatorial programs in which host spaces in one art community open their doors and share their walls with kindred spaces on visit from elsewhere.

Some exhibits will be integrated, some collaborative yet autonomous, some even spontaneous or virtual.

The rates of exchange, as such, will fluctuate, while the currencies of exchange—ideas and culture—remain fixed.

 

 
As regular readers to Dangerous MInds know, I am a big fan of John Butler’s work and have been banging the drum for his speculative animations for some considerable time. For those who don’t know his work, Butler, to give a snapshot, is a hybrid of J. G. Ballard, John Carpenter via Stanley Kubrick—an imaginative and intelligent dystopian, who has an exacting and precise style to his animated films.

Today, Butler will be premiering his recently completed speculative science fiction animation, the so-called Amazon cycle of four films (a reference to working practices of the company rather than the South American river) contained in Descention along with The Terminal Node. Butler’s recent work examines the processes by which capitalism uses technology to dehumanize a workforce.
 

 
As Butler explained via email:

Descention draws a straight line from military robotics to retail cybernetics, from DARPA to Amazon.

Refusnik, G.O.L.E.M., M.O.N.A.D. and Mutator are all episodes in an adaptive odyssey that evaluates human utility in the age of artificial indifference.

Through a series of mutations, the human candidate is gradually purged of all non-essential attributes in an attempt to meet the imperatives of growth.

This process of adaptive degradation eventually leads to the distillation of human demand into an intelligent algorithm, fully able to realise it’s own destiny.

It is similar to The Incredible Shrinking Man except that his mutation is driven by the market rather than radiation.

 

 
Below the Butler Brothers Descention which will be screened at Exchange Rates. More information here.
 

 
The Butler Brothers continue with their very particular, dystopian vision of the world with their new animation Refusnik. Like J. G. Ballard before them, the Butler Bros. (aka John Butler) create speculative fictions out of present reality, and both share the author’s antipathy towards technology.

Technology is not our friend, their work says, it is created by corporations to imprison and enslave. This theme is touched upon in Refusnik, where drone technology is fused together with warehouse slavery to create a highly probable and deeply disturbing future.
 

 
For twenty-years, artist John Butler has been the driving talent behind an incredible array of short animated films and science-fiction series. As one half of the Butler Brothers, John has produced, written and animated original, speculative fictions that examine the nature of our relationship with Government, Military and Corporations through technology.

Animations such as Eden, The Ethical Governor, T.R.I.A.G.E. and Unmanned have reinforced John’s dystopian view of the world, where technology is primarily developed as a means of control, war and exploitation.

The future being shaped by computer technology tends more towards a world of anonymous depots, owned by companies like Amazon, where whey-faced workers trudge endless miles through giant product mazes, being told what to do and how long they have to do it by their own personal navigational computer—rather than the much vaunted promise of personal liberation.

‘I don’t think we’re doomed,’ says Butler, ‘But we are stuck with it. I think the self checkouts in supermarkets indicate where we are going, towards a cybernetic transaction space. They should give us a discount since we’re doing all the work now.’

Butler’s latest animation Acrohym is a satirical ‘song of praise’ to DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency):

...the most exciting arts commissioning agency in the world today.

Acrohym stands for ‘Advanced, Central, Research, Organization, High-Yield, Markets.’ The kind of buzz words promoted by PR reps and technocrats, who are currently destroying language and democracy.

Butler is fascinated by this and the way in which organizations like DARPA, have become like art/science patrons developing new technologies for the military, while at the same time creating their own language.

‘I liked the idea that DARPA seemed to think of cool acronyms first and work backwards from that. Things like the FANG (Fast, Adaptble, Next-Generation Ground vehicle) challenge, the Triple Target Terminator (T3) and the Magneto Hydrodynamic Explosive Munition ( MAHEM). They ruthlessly torture language to create a new form of technocratic poetry.

‘I think weapons design attracts the brightest minds and can draw on limitless funding, so it’s no wonder they make such fascinating stuff. It is an art form of sorts, increasingly so, as the systems become more baroque and dysfunctional, like architectural follies.

‘Form Follows Funding is the first Law of Procurement.

‘I think Defense is the seedbed of all research, but it eventually trickles down to the civil sphere. If private enterprise had created the internet, it would be a lot of bike couriers with USB sticks. Only a military project could have had such a long range investment strategy.’

John is working on his next project, but I wanted to know when he would be makinga full length feature film?

‘As soon as I’ve secured Ministry of Defense funding.’

More of Butler Brothers’ work here
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

John Butler: ‘T.R.I.A.G.E.’

John Butler: ‘The Ethical Governor’

 
John Butler of The Butler Brothers will be presenting Artificial Indifference: A Seminar on the Ethics and Economics of Drone Warfare, at the University of Glasgow, today, Friday October 19th, at 15:30 in the East Quadrangle Lecture Theater.

John will be speaking alongside Dr. Ian Shaw and Keith Hammond, and the seminar ties in with a one-day exhibition of Butler Brothers’ work also being held at the University.

This is highly recommended for any fans of Butler’s brilliant work, and for his critical analysis of drone warfare.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

The Ethical Governor

 
More from John Butler: this his current work-in-progress, Freedom Device, a look at the “Free World” of “Value Added Transactions” - a companion piece to his excellent Ethical Governor.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

John Butler’s brilliant animation ‘T.R.I.A.G.E.’

 
John Butler’s superb latest animation T.R.I.A.G.E. is a speculative tale showing how:

A sick and failing area is swiftly restored to sound financial health

T.R.A.G.E. is an acronym for

Target
Respond
Identify
Administer
Globalize
Exit

Sound familiar?

Of course, triage is “the process of determining the priority of patients’ treatments based on the severity of their condition.” With this in mind, any similarities between actual events is purely intentional.
 

 
Bonus animations by John Butler ‘Unmanned’ and ‘Sub Optimal’ after the jump…
 

 
Each year animator John Butler produces his own distinct Christmas image to send to friends. Rather than the traditional jolly Santa or nativity scene, John creates “a sinister festive image,” inspired by a work of classic science-fiction. This year’s image was inspired by John Carpenter’s The Thing and John has sent it to Dangerous Minds for all of us to share. Nice.
 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

 
According to the dictionary, the definition of the word genius includes:

n., pl., -ius·es.

Extraordinary intellectual and creative power.

That’s good enough for me, for by this definition, digital animator John Butler is a genius.

If you don’t know John’s work, then here’s a good place to start - an article Richard Metzger wrote up for Dangerous Minds, taken from an interview carried out with Butler earlier this year.

John is that rare and distinct thing, a creative talent with a unique and powerful vision - one that informs his analysis of current events into original speculative fictions. Underpinning this, John uses the terms and language of the military and financial sector, subverting them to reveal their true meaning.

All of which can be seen in his latest presentation The Ethical Governor, described as:

This presentation demonstrates a prototype of the Ethical Governor, a key component in the ethical projection of unmanned autonomous force.

In an exclusive interview with Dangerous Minds John Butler talks about the ideas behind The Ethical Governor and how they reflect today’s political, corporate and military world.

“I’ve been very interested in all aspects of what is now branded as the Long War, which I see as a war between Finance and Humans, rather than East versus West, Capitalism versus Islam, or whatever. 

A military invasion to secure resources and a financial austerity package to placate bondholders are all part of a unified process. It’s just that force is applied in a somewhat cruder manner in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Africa.

What I’ve done is transposed the action to the Homeland, where it will eventually arrive anyway. The Drones are Chamber of Commerce assets, part of the elite Milton Friedman Unit.”

What is the inspiration for the presentation?

“The piece is based on actual systems being developed in universities right now in anticipation of fully autonomous war fighting. What I’ve done is resynthesised an academic presentation to reveal it’s true intent.

The language comes from the Military Educational Complex, but has been rewritten by the Butler Brothers to fictionalize it, and therefore make it more effective.

Concepts like the “Ethical Adaptor” actually exist. I liked that aspect most of all, the calibration of guilt, and the option to override the Ethical Governor when convenient.

I think that says it all about battlefield ethics. I like the idea of robots being “in Harm’s Way”, one of my favourite phrases.

How does this relate to what’s happening just now in the world?

“The anti IMF riots in Greece and the protests in Ireland and here are attempts by Humans to react to the Process.

Young people in Britain have no access to home ownership now, which is a detail that might have been overlooked, so they seem to have less to lose that Thatcher’s generation.

What are you working on next?

“Thinking up a companion piece just now, provisionally called Triage. It would be great to project this somewhere soon, as part of a Forum for the Future.”

Update

John Butler has forwarded Dangerous Minds an article on War Machines: Recruiting Robots for Combat from the New York Times, which confirms much of The Ethical Governor‘s theory, including:

“A lot of people fear artificial intelligence,” said John Arquilla, executive director of the Information Operations Center at the Naval Postgraduate School. “I will stand my artificial intelligence against your human any day of the week and tell you that my A.I. will pay more attention to the rules of engagement and create fewer ethical lapses than a human force.”

Dr. Arquilla argues that weapons systems controlled by software will not act out of anger and malice and, in certain cases, can already make better decisions on the battlefield than humans.

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

 
Mesh was a digital animation scheme that brought together a diverse range of talented, young animators, who created twenty-seven award-winning works between 2000-07. Produced by Nicola Black, in conjunction with Channel 4 and Nesta, Mesh was a neat idea, one that is typical of Black’s imaginative and uniquely original approach to program-making. 

It was also the kind of series that benefited TV, as it allowed anyone to submit an idea, script and storyboard for consideration, out of this a short list was drawn-up, from which 4 animators were chosen to develop and make their films. The scheme also involved seminars and courses, where the animators worked with established film-makers and script-writers to develop their projects.

Amongst the animators were Grant Orchard, whose Welcome to Glaringly was voiced by Little Britain’s Matt Lucas; James Merry who went onto work on Monkey Dust; Darren Price, who animated the true story of a bear who loved vodka; Yasmeen Ismail who made a simple animation about size and shape before going on to form Sweetworld and Rhumbaba: John Butler who created his clever, idiosyncratic consumerist fable; Stephen Cavalier who crafted a homage to 1950s sci-fi; and Neil Coslett, whose Killing Time at Home was used by Placebo as a back projection on their recent tour. All of have gone on to bigger and better things, but Mesh was where it all started. Here is a small selection of some of these animations.
 

 
Five bonus ‘Mesh’ animations after the jump…
 

 
Dangerous Minds pal Paul Gallagher posted a fascinating interview with animator John Butler at his wonderful Planet Paul blog where he writes about cultural obscurities and and things that interest him:

In 2001, Channel 4 television, in the UK, broadcast a 20-part sci-fi short animation series called Workgroup Alpha.  It starred Ed Bishop and dealt with a team of inter-dimensional consultants, lost on an intergalactic space mission. Bishop, with his association as Commander Straker from Gerry Anderson’s cult TV hit UFO, was ideally cast as Aquarius, the Enterprise Class Visionary, who with his fellow travellers explored “a whole new dimension in universal solutions.”

Though there is the passing hint of Frederick Pohl’s satirical sci-fi classic The Space Merchants, which imagined a world run by ad agencies, Workgroup Alpha offered an intelligent and witty critique of the growing cultural obsession with corporate speak, focus groups, PR consultants, and all those other anemic constructs that have depersonalized our world.

The end credit to the series was attributed to the Butler Brothers, the name by which John and Paul Butler operate.  Paul is the co-producer, writer and conceptual consultant.  John is writer, designer, animator, composer, co-producer, and director.

I first heard about the Butler Brothers through friends, though it was always John Butler who attracted the most attention.  His name was mentioned with that hushed reverential tone and nodding head of respect that said we had touched on some sacred matter.  It made Butler seem almost mythical – a great creative artist who lived somewhere (no one seemed quite sure where, or if they did, didn’t say), a garret most likely, where he created, with help from his brother, these incredible digital animations, of such intelligence and imagination.

I sent Paul a quick note last week that I had enjoyed his interview and he replied:

“Butler’s latest animation, Children of the Null, was inspired by Dennis Wheatley and to an extent, more Stephen King. When I asked him about it, he said the Children of the Null was about the occult practice of finance.

“I tend to think of Finance as an occult concern, hence the masks of the Transactors. The fact that during the collapse, derivatives were described as being too complex to understand confirms this suspicion.”

Though John is an atheist - he sees capitalism as an evil.

I think he just might have something there.”
 

 
Do androids dream of eclectic sheep? – an interview with John Butler (Planet Paul)

The Butler Brothers YouTube Channel