Hypermontage

Sergei Eisenstein, the Soviet filmmaker and theorist, the guy who helped develop the whole ‘montage’ thing. The guy who put that crying nurse in Battleship Potemkin and then Francis Bacon created that haunting painting of. Yeah that guy.

Montage as an idea is simple. Put two images next to one another and the audience can’t help but invent a relationship between them. A baby followed by a coffin becomes a tragedy. A bowl of soup followed by a man’s face equals hunger. Meaning isn’t contained within the images themselves. It exists in the collision between them. That’s intertextuality, baby!

But hold on a second, isn’t it weird that collectively, as a species, we now spend most of our lives inside the world’s largest montage experiment, and almost nobody is writing about this?

I find that weird. And so now I am writing about this.

Open TikTok. Or Instagram. Or YouTube Shorts. Or OnlyFans. Or LinkedIn Video.

Guess what? You are immediately presented with a sequence of images and clips which, individually make sense, but sequentially may have absolutely nothing to do with one another.

A drone strike. Someone making focaccia. A dermatologist putting yoghurt onto their armpits. A stand-up comedian. A man explaining that the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire. Three AI generated capybaras floating on inflatable pool loungers. A woman crying because her boyfriend liked another woman’s holiday photos.

These clips were not made to sit together. And yet placed together they become today’s media diet. A sushi train of scenes.

This is interesting, is it not?

So anyway, back to our guy, Sergei Eisenstein, he whoe believed montage was the highest form of authorship. The filmmaker carefully arranged images to produce ideas that no individual image could ever communicate alone. Meaning was engineered by the montage.

Hold on… The modern feed does almost exactly the same thing. Except nobody is directing it, there isn’t an author. A human one at least.

Or perhaps more accurately, everybody is now an author. The people uploading. The people scrolling. The people lingering for an extra half second causing engagement rates to rise and therefore higher distribution of the aforementioned AI pool lounger capybaras. The people commenting “Ha Ha! That looks just like my husband” and the people commenting “This is AI slop bollocks.”

The algorithm understanding that disagreement is still engagement.

Instead of one editor constructing meaning, millions of tiny behavioural signals are continuously negotiating over what the next cut should be.

Isn’t the result a kind of crowd-authored montage? Or perhaps it is machine-authored?

Unlike a film, there is no authorial intent. Or is there?

Did someone at TikTok intend for your Tuesday evening to consist of medieval history, Korean skincare, football tactics, clips from The Sopranos but with the voices made to sound all squeaky like they’ve inhaled helium, municipal politics and a golden retriever that was approved for a mortgage.

Yet there it is. A sequence exists. And because human beings are exquisitely talented pattern-recognition machines, we do what we’ve always done. We assume the sequence means something.

Perhaps that is what algorithms really manufacture? I’m not sure but I can’t help thinking about this.

The feed doesn’t merely decide what you see. It decides what sits next to what. What follows and what interrupts.

Marshall McLuhan argued that media are environments rather than channels. We tend to notice the fish swimming past us rather than the water itself. The feed feels like water.

Eisenstein knew exactly why he’d placed one image after another. The invisible editor in your pocket has absolutely no idea. Or does it? I genuinely do not know.

Is it trying to tell you a story? Or is trying to predict which cut comes next.

Or is the story your brain builds merely a side effect?

Answers on a postcard please.