SCRAPER
Scraper (2023) was commissioned by KW Institute for the Poetics of Encryption program, watch the film here.
Scraper is a dank mixed-reality film-biome presented in six parts across 71mins. Each kaleidoscopic chapter is an interface for a folkless lore of Minimally Viable Knowledge: stories of procedural data extraction, and aggregation as a cultural logic. Together they explore a ‘connectionist mentality’; an implicit ideological code or intellectual spirit emerging across our platform feeds. Scraper's acid-pessimism traces a scorched history of excommunication, encryption, and ecstatic extraction; an ‘entropology’ of memetic redundancy, ecstatic resignation, and model collapse.
Web crawlers or scrapers systematically search, index, and aggregate manifold data from across the internet,
creating user-profiles and datasets that contribute to training and implementing machine learning models whose outputs consist of statistical extrapolations that are inherently defined by the terms of this pre-existing indexable training data. These generated artefacts are predefined by what is already searchable or a known category. Scraper explores our own functional and evolutionary internalisation of this process: How much of our gestures, terminologies, concepts, rituals, philosophies, visual and material cultures may be elaborated beyond the capacities of algorithmic recognition? How much of this work is the work of innovative elaboration and how much is the procedure of search and aggregation? Scraper takes a bleak view: the strata of discourse and social
interaction in our dismal swamp of ritualised prediction is dredged and re-dredged for moodboards, thinkpieces
and datasets that prompt further dredging of the same depleted slough. In the fast-paced field of Machine
Learning and its commercial application, some have already warned of this state as “model collapse”. So what of
the cultures and their artfefacts that embody this entropic course? Are all the -cores, promptist screeds, and
aphorisms that desperately attempt to define the contours of our Multi-User Shared Hallucination nothing more
than grist to a degenerative adversarial network?
Full credits:
Scraper chapter 1
Director: Dane Sutherland
Edit, colouring, VFX, NeRF: Dane Sutherland
VFX: axonbody
Words: Dane Sutherland
Music and Sound Design: Miedo Total
‘Chambers’ & ‘Latch’ Blender scenes: Gerard Carson
‘Trappers’ costume and choreography: Nina Davies
Performers: Kaivalya Brewerton, Jose Funnell, Nina Davies
‘Termite Ceremony to Welcome: Jobseeker+’ Performance: Plastique Fantastique
Performers: Vanessa Page, David Burrows, Alex Marzeta, Ana Benlloch, Arianne Churchman, Benedict Drew,
Tom Clark
‘Macchine Inutili’ Customisable 3D model: GVN908
Unreal Engine design and development: David Reason
Initial Unreal Engine designs and prototypes: Dane Sutherland
Camera: Dane Sutherland, Derek Szeto
Voice: Takiyah Kamari
Scraper animated typography: Post Cyberparamo
Virtual Production filmed at Gossamer Fog and Alt_R
With thanks to Aberdeen City Council and staff at Provost Skene House
___________________________________
Scraper chapter 2
Director: Dane Sutherland
Edit, colouring, VFX, NeRF: Dane Sutherland
Words: Missouri Williams
Music and Sound Design: Miedo Total
‘Dredge’ & ‘Relic’ Blender scenes: Gerard Carson
Performers: Willow Swan Killeen, Jenn Leung, Toi Guy
Bonnet & custom headpiece: Dr. Creatur3
Basic costumes: Dane Sutherland with printed typography by Post Cyberparamo
Knitwear Garments: Freyja Newsome / mvudslyde
‘Instrument of EUPHORIA’ sculpture: ecolagbohrsac2021 [created in collaboration with axonbody & Rozalie
Klimesova]
‘Molecular Shiver’ Installation: Diane Edwards
Camera: Dane Sutherland, Derek Szeto
Voice: Lewis Den Hertog
Scraper animated typography: Post Cyberparamo
Virtual Production filmed at Gossamer Fog and Alt_R
Fold installation: Dane Sutherland
With thanks to Karolina Magnusson Murray, Futur.shock and all at Fold; Gerard Carson; Atay Ilgun; Lou Shafer;
Zlata Mechatina; Chris Macinnes; Samuel Capps
____________________________________
Scraper chapter 3
Director: Dane Sutherland
Edit, colouring, VFX, NeRF: Dane Sutherland
VFX: axonbody
Words: Dane Sutherland
Music and Sound Design: Miedo Total
‘Bury Me In Lipkits’ and ‘Eyeshadows & Faceshit’ sculptures: Claire Barrow
‘Trappers’ & ‘Bionic Step’ costume and choreography: Nina Davies
Performers: Kaivalya Brewerton, Jose Funnell, Nina Davies
‘Molecular Shiver’ Installation: Diane Edwards
Unreal Engine design and development: David Reason
Initial Unreal Engine designs and prototypes: Dane Sutherland
Camera: Dane Sutherland, Derek Szeto
Voice: Takiyah Kamari
Scraper animated typography: Post Cyberparamo
Virtual Production filmed at Gossamer Fog and Alt_R
With thanks to Aberdeen City Council and staff at Provost Skene House
__________________________________
Scraper chapter 4
Director: Dane Sutherland
Edit, colouring, VFX, NeRF: Dane Sutherland
Words: Confraternity of Neoflagellants
Music and Sound Design: Miedo Total
‘Privlogea’ & ‘Trench’ & ‘Relic’ Blender scenes: Gerard Carson
Performers: Willow Swan Killeen, Jenn Leung, Toi Guy
Bonnet & custom headpiece: Dr. Creatur3
Basic costumes: Dane Sutherland with printed typography by Post Cyberparamo
Knitwear Garments: Freyja Newsome / mvudslyde
‘Instrument of EUPHORIA’ sculpture by ecolagbohrsac2021 [created in collaboration with axonbody & Rozalie
Klimesova]
ecolagbohrsac2021 live @ the MEMERGENCE OF DOOM FESTIVAL [Crystal Palace Park]
Camera: Dane Sutherland, Derek Szeto
Voice: James Stephen Wright
Scraper animated typography by Post Cyberparamo
Fold installation: Dane Sutherland
With thanks to Karolina Magnusson Murray, Futur.shock and all at Fold; Gerard Carson; Atay Ilgun; Lou Shafer;
Zlata Mechatina; Chris Macinnes; Samuel Capps
__________________________________
Scraper chapter 5
Director: Dane Sutherland
Edit, colouring, VFX, NeRF, photogrammetry, 3D model: Dane Sutherland
Music and Lyrics: Miedo Total
Bonnet & custom headpiece: Dr. Creatur3
Basic costumes: Dane Sutherland with printed typography by Post Cyberparamo
Macchine Inutili Customisable 3D model: GVN908
Unreal Engine design and development: David Reason
Scraper chapter 6
Director: Dane Sutherland
Edit, colouring, VFX, NeRF: Dane Sutherland
VFX: axonbody
Words: Dane Sutherland
Music and Sound Design: Miedo Total
‘Termite Ceremony to Welcome: Jobseeker+’ Performance: Plastique Fantastique
Performers: Vanessa Page, David Burrows, Alex Marzeta, Ana Benlloch, Arianne Churchman, Benedict Drew,
Tom Clark
‘Bury Me In Lipkits’ and ‘Eyeshadows & Faceshit’ sculptures: Claire Barrow
‘Molecular Shiver’ Installation: Diane Edwards
Unreal Engine design and development: David Reason
Initial Unreal Engine designs and prototypes: Dane Sutherland
Camera: Dane Sutherland, Derek Szeto
Voice: Takiyah Kamari
Scraper animated typography by Post Cyberparamo
Virtual Production filmed at Gossamer Fog and Alt_R
With thanks to Aberdeen City Council and staff at Provost Skene House