47. Invocation (w/ E. Elias Merhige and Gavin Gamboa)

E. Elias Merhige is the experimental filmmaker behind Begotten (1989) and its sequels Din of Celestial Birds (2006) and Polia & Blastema: A Cosmic Opera (2022), as well as Shadow of the Vampire and Suspect Zero.

Gavin Gamboa is a composer, pianist, and video artist who wrote the music for Polia & Blastema and works in local-first "digital gardens" and the piano repertoire.

What began as their shared film becomes, here, a way into a single question Elias poses at the top: what is being born through us - and is that thing digesting us on its way out?

From there the conversation moves through desire and digestion as the engine of creation, and what happens when the interval between the wound and the poem collapses to nothing. Merhige treats AI as atavistic rather than alien: a dark mirror, an artificial unconscious, a "necromantic bureaucracy" of dead expressions made responsive, and reads the manuscript and the personal library as older machines through which the dead already speak.

Gamboa holds a more skeptical line, defending manual effort and drawing on Marshall McLuhan's "auto-amputation" and his own experiments training models on his audio. 

The guests & their work

• Gavin Gamboa: composer, pianist, video artist  gavingamboa.net
• E. Elias Merhige: filmmaker; his 1989 debut Begotten anchors the "Begotten trilogy" -  Begotten on Wikipedia
• Polia & Blastema: A Cosmic Opera (2022) — premiere Q&A with all three (Vimeo)

Books & essays cited

• Thomas Moynihan, “The GASTRULATION of GEIST: or, an Extended Meditation upon the World-Historical Connection Between Digestion and Simulation,” Vast Abrupt, 8 February 2018, link.
• Kate Crawford, "Eating the Future: The Metabolic Logic of AI Slop,"  e-flux
• Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality (Bloomsbury, 2018), Bloomsbury