Bulk Collection, 2022
3hr 07 min

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"The story of our lifetime is how intentionally, by design, a number of institutions, both governmental and corporate, realized it was in their mutual interest to conceal their data collection activities.”
—Edward Snowden, 2020

BULK COLLECTION--a euphemism for mass surveillance--is a film-essay and audio commentary that chronicles the hegemonic condition of algorithmic monoculture. A combination of shot footage and found audio, BULK COLLECTION was filmed on a Iphone 8 over a two year period. It is a diary and time capsule of digital gentrification--a New York City of ubiquitous mega construction sites, constant demolition, and the socio-economic fallout of the COVID regime and limbic capitalism. The construction of the massive new Downtown home of Disney's 650-million dollars headquarters at 4 Hudson Square--which Masha Tupitsyn filmed for over a year--the COVID-19 breakout in spring 2020, and the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, all coalesce into a temporal record of the cultural wreckage of a physical world that was destroyed because no one was paying attention. BULK COLLECTION concludes by receding from the digital City, as Tupitsyn makes a pilgrimage back in time to a literal and metaphorical land's end, Provincetown, Massachusetts, one of America's oldest towns as well Tupitsyn’s childhood haven. Set aside as the nation's second-oldest common land in 1654, the Atlantic Ocean becomes a come-down calendar of cyclical tides and existential grounding. A natural landscape that is vast, stunningly complex, and antidotally slow.

“The use of audio in BULK COLLECTION is something new: by substituting voices of media and the internet for her own voice, Masha Tupitsyn both gets the auteur’s voice out of the way (we are free to listen) and allows one to hear for the first time what internet voices (podcasts, Netflix comedies, and so on) sound like on their own—when we are not looking at a non-cinematic screen. Insofar as the film is also partly about addictogenesis (internet addiction, porn addiction and the ways in which these can override erotogenesis), one is given a film between what plagues one and the thing itself. One is inside, but filming. Does internet cinema exist yet? There are certainly films that do something with the internet frame—Levan Gabriadze’s Unfriended (2014) for example—but are there any films that integrate the Internet as an ongoing lesson in composition and cuts?…Bulk Collection moves in that direction, and so, is almost entirely alone. In an age where sight itself is shut down on sight, when one is not allowed to see, to film, to know, to think, to rethink, to cut, to compose, a ‘collection’ is made. What the internet gives film is a series of new cuts: to spend a day online is to cut between a thousand different aspect ratios, technically and tonally; it is the clash of timelines (vertical vs horizontal scroll), a goodbye to reconciliation…The present is here as pure footage, pure internet film—not just as persona and strategy. It’s what Tupitysn might call the tell or toll of footage. It’s all there. The tolling of these years. The bulk collection.”

-angelicism01.


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