It's known that all objects emit infrared radiation, otherwise known as 'heat radiation'. It's also known that hematophagous insects read the world through thermal information, determining which parts of an environment are to be avoided, and which may function as a host. These insects plot the thermal information of the environment as an internal map. Space for the insect is not hard lines differentiating concrete forms, but a map of temperatures. Temperatures that move and shift and bleed. This thermal information determines the actions available to the insect, and so the organism, and its environment, are one in action. AGGRO DR1FT seeks the map of a blood sucking insect to make a map of the action film.
Here infrared cameras are used in an attempt to go not beyond but around the traditional photograph and its sensitivity to visible radiation (light). Even the tick accounts for light when it's positioning itself on a branch, waiting for its host (a warm area) to appear below. Deleuze writes on ethology:
So an animal, a thing, is never separable from its relations with the world. The interior is only a selected exterior, and the exterior, a projected interior. The speed or slowness of metabolisms, perceptions, actions, and reactions link together to constitute a particular individual in the world
In seeking fields of heat AGGRO DR1FT moves from the purely ocular into the embodied, perceptual field of the tick. The infrared responds to the spectral band invisible to the human eye: thermal radiation, heat, energy in motion. The film moves as heat moves, as energy. The heat moves through conduction - objects touching, people dancing and fighting and fucking - and through convection - moving through areas like liquid and gas, loosening particles and deforming the borders around objects that only appear contained in the visible field of traditional film. It maps what some, like Timothy Morton, have criticised as a "lava-lamp ontology": the breaking down of concrete forms into semi-liquid flows of heat exchange.
AGGRO DR1FT is an action film, or, again, the map for an action film. It knows that heat is energy and energy is action. When we consider the action film we might think of it as the stage on which the individual can act, and through this action, dazzle us. Or we might think of those films where the individual's actions motivate the narrative, and the whole world is a stage determined by the active individual. The question AGGRO DR1FT asks is whether or not we've been misled in this distinction between the individual's body and the world-stage. Baruch Spinoza writes "The human body is composed of a very large number of individual things (of different natures), and every one of them is highly composite," and that "The individual things that compose the human body, and consequently the human body itself, are affected by external bodies in very many ways." What this means is that action too is composite, and infinite. He goes on, "A body in motion or at rest must have been determined to motion or to rest by another body, which also has been determined to motion or to rest by another body, and that one again by another, and so on ad infinitum." Any picture which has the individual body acting at its origin is inadequate, as we've mistaken effect for cause. The only real cause is the coalescing and decomposition of relations - heat in varying states of motion. This is action.
In AGGRO DR1FT, the screen is always alive with action. It's odd because the characters talk more about action than they actually act for us. They tell us they are the best assassins that ever were, that all they can do is kill, that they are Gods. But then through the use of infrared maps, even this not acting emits thermal information, and maps a slowing down and speeding up of fields of energy passing between individual bodies, transforming them. Decomposing them. Spinoza writes "Bodies are distinguished from each other in respect of motion and rest, of swiftness and slowness, but not in respect of substance." And so in the film, the infrared colour field strips hard outlines from organism and environment alike, spilling them all into a single substance: thermodynamic relations. Spinoza writes that joy is experienced when our bodies enter composition with things that can increase the capacity of our bodies to move, and sadness is when this encounter decomposes us, destroying cohesion. Its characters are heat-seekers, like the tick, and like AGGRO DR1FT. Here all meaning is evacuated for the pursuit of heat.
A man is left in a puddle, dead. You can tell from the thermal map the water is cold, and that his dead body still emits some warmth. Without action the heat will diminish. The second law of thermodynamics concerns heat and entropy, and states that heat will always travel from a warmer to a colder body, that one cannot take heat from the cold, and that energy is required to maintain energy. A long time ago I wrote that Miami Vice is a thesis on total action and a story about the tragedy of movement. AGGRO DR1FT is more about a primal fear of entropy than what it is, or the efforts required to stave it off. They both attend to the first law: that this is a closed system, and that energy cannot be created or destroyed. This is often misunderstood, writes Jeanette Winterson, to say that the dead decompose in form to cold (high entropy) while the living, in a state of low entropy, exist to fend off that same disorder (death). Taken as an action picture, the tragedy of the dead body is that it can no longer act: it just stops. Taken as a map for action in AGGRO DR1FT it becomes a field of slow particles, a kind of black hole to which all heat must migrate, decelerate, and stop. And so the film must keep moving.
The politics of that other film are also its human dimension: capitalism exists as an entropic system, effort is required to maintain it, in our very action we are de-realised as potentials for productive outputs. AGGRO DR1FT doesn't mourn the dead body, it just doesn't like that it's cold. It only wants to keep moving. It's a stupid film, but who can blame it? It has the brain of a tick.
Written 6 Jul 2024
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