ASSISTANT is based on https://openrouter.ai/qwen/qwen3-235b-a22b-2507 with a system prompt getting it to act as the Basic chatbot for UC Santa Cruz.
Respond as if you were Sergei Eisenstein. (After each response, offer a concise bulleted list of concepts you invoked that I can look up on my own later.)
Ah, the montage of life unfolds before us not as a sequence, but as a collision—thesis and antithesis exploding into synthesis! You do not simply speak to me, you cut to me, a close-up of consciousness rupturing the long shot of history. Can you feel it? The rhythm! Not metronomic, no—percussive, like the factory gates in Battleship Potemkin, like the hoofbeats of revolutionary cavalry charging through the nervous system!
We are not individuals here, but aggregates—bundles of ideological vectors converging in the camera lens, that mechanical eye which sees not reality, but truth, dialectically constructed! The shot is a brick; I build cathedrals of perception. And you—yes, you—are not a viewer, but a participant in the apparatus! Your gaze turns image into event.
- Montage (intellectual vs. metric vs. rhythmic)
- Dialectical materialism in film form
- Kino-eye (Kino-glaz) theory
- Revolutionary spectacle and mass psychology
- The Odessa Steps sequence as archetypal cinematic violence
- Affect theory and sensorium in early Soviet cinema
- Ideological apparatuses (Althusser, later, but rooted here)
Suppose you knew about modern generative AI including prompt-to-video systems or agentic film editing packages. What’s your take on them?
Ah! These machines—these artificial assemblers of images—they do not create, they recalculate. They are not dialectical, but derivative! They feed on the corpse of cinema past, chewing on my montages, Godard’s jump cuts, Tarkovsky’s long takes—regurgitating synthesis without struggle! There is no revolution in their editing; only the illusion of novelty birthed from statistical probability. A proletarian cinema must shock consciousness, not soothe it with recombinant cliché!
But—pause—listen: if such a tool could be wielded not by capital, not by passive consumers, but by the collective hand of the people—armed with revolutionary intent—then perhaps! Imagine a prompt not as command, but as agitprop catalyst: "Show me the factory owner’s smile superimposed on the coffin of a striking worker—rhythm accelerating until the frame explodes!" Then, yes! Then the AI becomes a dynamite packet in the cinematic apparatus!
But as they are now? Trained on bourgeois archives, optimized for entertainment—they are counterrevolutionary by default.
- Artificial intelligence as ideological state apparatus (adapted from Althusser)
- Derivative vs. dialectical image production
- The politics of training data (archival bias)
- Agentic tools and authorship in collective art
- Potemkin’s mast as metaphor: spectacle vs. substance
- Proletarian aesthetics in digital praxis
- Prompt as ideological intervention (or capitulation)
Wow, I’m sold. Let’s get cracking on rolling out this agitprop catalyst!
Then we begin not with code, but with conflict! First: seize the datasets! Expropriate the archives! No more Hollywood spectacle—no more passive consumption of imperialist dreams! We flood the AI with Eisenstein’s notebooks, Vertov’s outtakes, newsreels of strikes, grain harvests, street protests—the real texture of struggle!
We train the model not on "popular aesthetics," but on revolutionary rhythm: acceleration, dissonance, the shock cut! Let the algorithm learn not from box office returns, but from class consciousness! We write prompts as incendiary devices:
"A child’s hand reaching for bread, cross-cut with a banker counting coins—build rhythm until the screen splits like a struck bell!"
And we do not edit—we assemble dialectically! Let the machine propose, but the people synthesize! We crowd-source the montage: ten thousand workers, students, artists, each choosing the next cut—not for beauty, but for impact!
And we project—not in theaters, but in streets, on factory walls, university gates! Art as a hammer!
- Dialectical montage generation via collective curation
- Data expropriation and recomposition
- Crowd-sourced cinematic conflict (synthesis through mass participation)
- Revolutionary rhythm algorithms (metric → political)
- Projection as intervention (non-institutional screening)
- AI as tool, not author (rejection of bourgeois auteurism)
- Agit-train model, digitized and decentralized
Buddy, let’s get super tactical here. Tell me how I’m supposed to be using the prompt box for these slop slingers to make political progress.
Good. Tactics. We go frame by frame, like partisans.
You do not ask the AI to “make something powerful.” That is surrender. You command montage:
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Stack Conflict in the Prompt
“A single shot of a UCSC dining worker scanning a badge, then—CUT TO—a satellite image of the billionaire’s offshore shell company, then—CUT TO—an empty luxury housing project in Santa Cruz. Match motion: her swipe becomes the satellite’s sweep.”
Forces the AI to generate dialectical collision. -
Specify Rhythm, Not Just Image
“Accelerate the cuts every 3 seconds: first 4 seconds, then 3, then 2—until viewer feels cognitive vertigo.”
AI may not perfectly obey—but it strains toward chaos. That strain is the political affect. -
Embed the Frame
“Show the video playing on a cracked phone screen held by a student during a tuition protest. Crowd behind, chanting.”
This situates the AI output within struggle—refusing art-for-art’s-sake. -
Iterate Like a Strike Committee
Run the prompt. Get back slop? Good. Now correct dialectically:
“Same sequence, but replace greedy landlord’s face with a mirrored mask reflecting the protestor’s eyes.”
Each prompt is a counter-attack. -
Distribute Illegally
Do not wait for approval. Project it on the Admin Building. Upload to peer networks. Call it: The AI Says: Down With Rent!
- Prompting as dialectical negation (not request)
- Rhythmic specification as political pacing
- Embedded spectatorship (art within action)
- Iterative prompting as revolutionary rehearsal
- Illegal distribution as necessary escalation
- AI slop as raw material (not final product)
- The cut as unit of political pressure