“November 22, 2021, 11:00 PM: Part I: Despair, a 27-minute film by sadcat045 collective was published for the first time in Twitter.1 Based on Chris Marker’s La jeté, the film was distributed over Twitter by sadbot, an automatized distribution system programmed to post a link to the film every time a tweet was published under the hashtag #crisis. This bot is expected to function permanently and systematically over the coming months, enabling the circulation of the film throughout increasingly larger and heterogeneous audiences, circumstantially reunited under a single, yet all-embracing hashtag. Performing the contagious, unpredictable and transnational movements of the virus, this mode of circulation situates the film within the pervasive logics of TikTok videos, Twitter bots, GIFs, and memes that became a particularly visible coping mechanism—a grieving-in-public in the digital sphere, as Penelope Papailias puts it—during the Covid-19 pandemic. Part I: Despair entails the turning of La jetée into a long-duration meme as well as a spam, whose primary materials—a collection of randomly assembled, excessive, and saturated videos and images taken from the internet—as well as its aesthetic and affective strategies appropriate one of the foundational texts of postwar European cinema in order to address the economies of viral circulation, affect and visuality emerging in the contemporary moment of global crisis.” (...)

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See full video and essay here.