The Second Self

On the tenth anniversary of Chris Marker’s pioneering experiment in machine intelligence

- Paul Chan

After the 1983 release of his nearly uncategorizable film-essay Sans Soleil, the protean artist and filmmaker Chris Marker started developing a computer program called Dialector. He worked on the project for three years before abandoning it. In 2014, two years after Marker’s death, a small band of programmers and writers, as well as curator and artist Agnès de Cayeux, who knew Marker, resurrected Dialector and launched it online. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the work being reborn. Dialector functions like a chatbot: users ‘talk’ to it by typing on a keyboard and the program responds with text, sounds or 8-bit images of cats or owls. It’s tempting to think that the inspiration for Dialector may have come from another project he was working on during the same period: a 13-part television series on the influence of Ancient Greek thought and culture called The Owl’s Legacy (1989). Was Marker trying to reinvent the Platonic dialogue for the 21st century?

The second line of the source code for Dialector reads ‘the second self ’, which serves as the subtitle for the project. The phrase is a noteworthy choice for an artist whose fixation with privacy was arguably as famous as his work. Over the course of his 60-year career, Marker rarely granted interviews and refused to be photographed. In fact, ‘Chris Marker’ is just one of a handful of pseudonyms he went by – none of which can claim to be any more or less real than the name given to him at birth in 1921. This persistent depersonalization and need for anonymity has been interpreted variously as evidence of his media savvy, a habitual form of political protection he picked up during World War II, a personality quirk, and so on. To these theories, I wish to add one more: that he didn’t endorse the sanctity of life as a single self.

What would a poet, or an artist, want out of computation?