we have a free screening of “young ali: those were the days” at Colombia College Chicago on April 29th, 6:30-9:30pm - click here to register
young ali: those were the days
I haven’t written an essay in a long time, so let’s not call this that. “Software will eat the world”—the famous line from the perennial tech shiller VC Marc Andreessen, one of the key architects of our most recent, suddenly defunct and utterly chaotic “vibe shift,” but an even more essential architect of a profound and lasting macro vibe shift: the digital cognitive abundance era.
Software ate, and ate well, as we shift from ape-eat-ape survival to a kind of post-scarcity culture where abundance is just assumed, baked into every phone. You want something from the matrix? Just ask. Just type. Just click. It’ll appear, as an amalgamation, from a simulacrum. Yet it passes the smell test for millions and appears as real as necessary, partly because our lives are now locked into a rolling feed. We have been trained on good enough.
With this ease, we’re promised the entering of a golden age of creativity. No more gatekeepers, no more struggling with the nuisance of craft. Just infinite music, essays, art, stories, code—all from your fingertips, or your voice, and soon, just passing thought. It's everything you ever dreamed of, vibed into existence. Every cycle oscillating faster as the machine feeds into itself as output, churning mid-level human endeavor 100x’d.
And like everything else online, this rather radical and sudden shift has calcified into two sides of the terminally online megaphone class. A PvP between the accelerationists and the Doomer archetype—one championing the augmented existence and the other, championing the human with its internal limitations—each writing take after take, while the rest of the world, the NPCs (people that actually touch grass), go about their days knowing something is different, but not able to point a finger at this difference just yet.
However, this is not why I’m writing this. Cat’s out of the bag, it’s not going back in. And for me, a couple things have happened of late that caused me to think through this thing and wrestle insight from emotion. First, the Ghibli AI takeover of the web—a grand theft out in the open—is where it hurt. Seeing forty years of painstaking craft taken so for granted, with so much cynicism and entitlement surrounding it, was where I witnessed firsthand the erosion of the social trust layer between art, artist, and the audience. Turning what we deemed sacred into slop—that thing that AI does so well. The soulless output that looks good at first glance but fades into nothingness as quickly as it’s churned out, simply as a matter of its abundance and its uncanny valley-ness—a nothingness behind the eyes, a facsimile of feeling.
The other moment for me has been more gradual—witnessing artist friends create slop to speed up workflows but confide in a feeling of hopelessness. Receiving wordy slop letters from family. Seeing friends use perfect English slop for captions when they still harbor a heavy accent in the physical world. But it’s clear: except for my artist friends, who can’t quite articulate it but feel a sense of loss, most don’t mind. In fact, most prefer this convenience for any tradeoff yet unseen.
But let’s forget the larger debate for a second. Let’s focus instead on a subgenre of this culture war—the way people talk about AI image generation, and with that, the ungrounded or sloppy arguments used to justify its legitimacy as art. I’ve seen three main ones, and I think each of them misses the mark in a big way.
First is the digital photography analogy—the idea that AI image generation is no different than going from film to digital, or from brushes to Photoshop. But this analogy doesn’t track. Digital photography is still photography. While film became file, the medium stayed intact—point and shoot, light, lens, subject. AI image generation doesn’t evolve a medium; it detaches from it entirely. It’s language into a rendition of a photo, a digital simulacrum dithered into existence. You’re not making an image; you’re prompting one into existence. It’s not painting, drawing, or photography—it’s medium-agnostic, trans-media.
Second is the idea that AI art is “something else”—a new category. Adjacent. Not in competition. While this is true in a micro sense (self-labeled AI artists exist and so does a history of programmed art), it’s not in a broader one. This is why every AI tech CEO pitches it as a better, faster, cheaper way of doing the old thing. While the old thing could be a spreadsheet, the statement is a blanket. AI is not marketed as a parallel tool but one that’s a direct replacement. Pretending otherwise is either naïve or dishonest.
Third is the democratization claim—that this technology makes art accessible to the masses for the first time. But art has always been accessible. The tools are everywhere—cameras, tablets, music software, free drawing apps. If you have something to say, you could say it. The reality of this statement isn’t access for the first time—it’s results. Output without input. The dream isn’t to make art—it’s to skip the part where you have to become someone capable of making it.
So this is the shift—and the break. Art, in either an academic lens or a layman’s sense, is a proposition, a form of communication that centers around—and has enhanced—human culture. Clicking a button and getting a Ghibli-style rendering of your dog may be fun, but it’s as distant from art as a 1099 form. As is the anime cat girl or the millionth cornball dystopian futurescape ripped straight from Blade Runner and Akira. It is, as predicted by philosopher Charles Baudrillard some forty years ago, a Xerox of a Xerox, repeated ad infinitum.
But barring some real culture shifts—maybe the forming of a post-luddite culture, where the youth treat these new tools as antithetical to human life, or rebel as an anti-boomer (not age, worldview) agenda takes over, like a new punk movement or the hippie, antiwar movements of the 20th century. In any case, these will be short-lived in the grander cycles as this technology dominates every inch of human life.
Two things stick out to me at this seismic moment. One is that we have not had time to mourn this feeling of loss of human craft. Our pursuits, our vision, our dedication and detail—those are losing essence day by day. Not everyone feels this yet, but my feeling is they will shortly. This transition, the sense that we are speedrunning the end of culture—a heaviness not fully realized. So let’s mourn. Give humanity this space. We will all need it.
The other thing that magnifies the first is our sense of entitlement to subvert our very own culture. Let’s ease this—for all our sakes. Let’s not pretend that we are artists for prompting a soulless image, or that we are sudden developers because we can craft a website or simple game in mere seconds, when we can’t read a simple Python script.
We are staring out over the cliff, nearing the end of culture, where everything is a perpetual remix of something that was a remix of an amalgamation, iterated out of our own human creativity. Let’s pause to mourn. And after we have given respect, let’s create again, with a newfound respect—from the cave to the now.
Let not the computer take our purpose, for if it does, we are dead.
mr bojanges of three worlds had two main design…pre-morph and post-morph, but the in-betweens had this entity going through a mid-morph.
its been several years, but it, through an other worldly communication protocol is now demanding a physical mid-morph edition to claim post-ethereal.
we did the original animation the ol’ fashion way, as i’ve always had a deep fond spot for 2D rotoscoping and cel animation is one of our great 20th century achievements.
seen below are some of the iterating on young ali: those were the days title designs. both the english and farsi versions where done first by hand by artist martin nilchian.
he went back to his graf roots to blend between our aesthetic & story considerations. you can see some designs really signal an authentic early 90’s socal graffiti style. in the end, we chose a design that had just enough flavor of that style, without it dominating, and showing transformation of time in the details.
the persian version had additional challenges that had us consulting some experts in the language to seek a proper translation.
hi, its a good day to pick up our 2018 HD-Remaster of the 2010 film WHALE now on Apple TV.
some words about the picture below:
"WHALE is beautiful in ways I never expected. Lyrical and delightfully lo-fi" -Lucas Mcnelly -Filmmaker (Blanc de Blanc)
"A debut well worth catching.... the film, especially in its quieter moments, has a dream-like quality that rewards the viewer with its insight into just trying to be able to juggle life's hardship with an innate desire to just enjoy life" -Sam Ippolto Pittsurgh Examiner
"An exquisitely handmade exploration of holding onto one's spirit in this world....sublime imagery finds transcendence in the ordinary...WHALE manages to feel timeless, yet particularly relevant for this moment in history- a crystallization of the widespread longing for something beyond what modern society has to offer us all" -- Steve Bagatourian Writer IFC's American Gun
"WHALE is what Truffaut called the cinema of the future.... It has talent and ambition to spare; Motlagh knows exactly what he wants and he knows how to get it. He's not afraid to be personal, to be slightly obscure and elliptical, to use the freedom that independence gives him. whale is definitely worth seeing and considering for filmgoers and filmmakers alike." -Tom Russell- Turtleneck Films
"Pulsing with a restlessness of purpose and Vision" - Alejandro Adams -- Braintrustdv
"The acting/non-acting is so flawless Whale appears to be a blend between documentary footage and a foreign/art house project....I can very comfortably say that Whale is one of the most exciting & well made indie films I've seen in a while...creating an interesting/reflective image of ethnic & economic diversity in America." -Sujewa Ekanayake -- DIY Filmmaker Blog
"Writer/Director Amir is a fresh cinematic voice from the west coast. Distinctly schooled in technique yet has a unique approach to aesthetic over narrative. The film was more of a poem then a traditional story and I love that!" -Ryan Balas- One Way Community
"First, let me start off by saying that Whale, written and directed by Amir Motlagh, is a visual masterpiece. It is shot and edited in my favorite style of dynamic camerawork done with an amazing flare for composition and coverage, and immediately draws you in.......Yes, I love Whale. I love it because the characters and dialogue are more natural than 99% of Hollywood movies made. I love it because the scene between Cameron and his ex is one of the best and most realistic scenes I've seen in a long time." - Reid Gershbein -- Royal Baronial Theatre (#2wkfilm)
"An unassuming, soulful debut feature..."I was quite taken by Whale...Motlagh's eye for composition (I knew I was in good hands from the film's very first shot) and ability to flirt with indie film clichés without becoming entrapped by them mark him as a director to watch.." - Andy Horbal
just a little before covid hit, i had an idea that i presented to my father. my baba jaan, an incredibly talented man, who is, above all, a phenomenal cook. his cooking is a bridge for me—a connection to a culture i’ve always felt in between, that of my birth country and my origin country.
this was my value add: to document the incredibly vast, sophisticated, and ultimately delicious cuisine of iran for the world. and here, we had the perfect vehicle—a man who has spent countless hours perfecting a traditional craft, in the time between working to provide and being an extremely caring and wonderful husband and father.
i asked if he wanted to showcase his talents to the world and help people like me learn the art of iranian (persian) cuisine.
in my mind, the audience wasn’t those already familiar with the food, but people like me—those who have always felt caught between two cultures—and, of course, anyone who simply wanted to learn how to cook what, to western eyes, might seem like an exotic cuisine.
so, “cooking with yousef” was born. now, we have thousands of viewers from all over the world, and it keeps growing.
this was just an impulse, but it had agency. and so, it grows…
thank you to everyone who watches, who sends beautifully kind messages to my father, and who shares the videos so that more people can discover the beauty of iranian cuisine.
this is our bridge, and we welcome you to cross it.
you can subscribe to his channel on youtube here, you can follow him on tiktok here, or instagram here. and if you want to support above and beyond, you can pick up some fantastic “cooking with yousef” baba merch.
Young Ali: those were the days is an offical selection of Bridge Video
Limited engagement starts in December.
(for more info, click on link above or image below)
Bridge Video 2024
Tickets now available for “Young Ali: those were the days” screening at Film Noir Cinema in Greenpoint, Brookyln on Wed Oct 9th, 7pm.
young ali: those were the days
what’s the ol’ sayin, “all good things come to an end”
looks about right…
though i’m stoked to be on the jury for the final year of 24FPS International Short Film Festivals. this is one of the first fests to showcase my work and one of the finest short film festivals in the world.
24fps final year Jury
canadian author & photographer shawna lemay muses about “young ali” over at Transactions with Beauty
“Is the film trying to describe this singular time to others who had been lost in the fog or to those who were not lost in the fog? Both, I think. And isn’t that a feat? Young Ali is poetic and real, the eponymous character living and trembling as we all did, under that same old, silly old storybook moon. ”
this work is now fully public without a paywall, originally released on 06/22/20.
*note: headphones advised*
On Wednesday, March 11, 2020, the United States went into shutdown to keep citizens sheltered from the threat of a mysterious global pandemic sweeping the world. In this meditative days-in-the-life-of work, a small family experiences the fog of time from a mandatory stay at home order, as a strange, comforting togetherness forms in a very uncertain time.
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directors statement:
"three eleven" is a meditation. It is a reflection of boredom, of togetherness, of uncertainty, and most of all, stillness. It intends to direct the viewer into the granularity of life in its most basic, mundane practicalities, and thus, direct focus into the beauty of routine, and of the nowness, all while under the umbrella of impending & uncertain chaos, a lingering scent of anxiety as the real outside world experiences shocks unlike any other in modern times.
It is intended as an experience, hypnosis, and a reflection. The stillness is the message. While stripping the “narrative” of the filmic medium into its most minimal building block, the frame clicks out of “narrative” time, and into clock time. It’s a universal acknowledgment of this very “moment in time”, and we intend for this to be a visual/audio documentation at its most basic level while conveying the beauty of togetherness and separation at its most minimal.
This work is indebted to Ozu & Kiarostami, who oddly enough (the latter), and without my prior knowledge shares his birthday with our release date.
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credits: Shot & Directed by Amir Motlagh
Produced by ANIMALS & Charles Borg
Story by Charles Borg & Amir Motlagh
Music by Amir Motlagh (three eleven zazen) - BMI © ANIMALS 2020
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release date: 06/22/20 trt: 33 min original aspect: 1:85:1
hello
items on agenda as follows
new project beings…
young ali distro late summer?
young ali trailer out now (unlisted but exists)
see you around friend
will be back here posting material
protocol > centralized networks
drop an email for quarterly reports :)
