A direct line could be drawn from Henry Ford to Steve Jobs. The terms to be examined along this line would then be innovation, pioneering spirit, entrepreneurship and the fusion of technology and manpower. The reverse side of this American dream would be exploitation and biometric control, as well as the entanglement of consumption and political propaganda. In Keynote, a video produced in 2006 by Sebastian Brameshuber together with the artist and filmmaker Thomas Draschan, this genealogy resonates, not least in the pseudonym Fordbrothers, which the two chose for their joint artistic output at the time.

When a keynote speech is given, the speaker specifies the leitmotif of an evening, a conference or a company. Where should/will things progress in the next few years? What’s the plan that everyone will ultimately be committed to? In Keynote the already unstable audio and video stream of an Apple public relations event is deconstructed by superimpositions, inversions and repetitions in such a way that the speeches of the various protagonists turn into stuttering. “Co-, co-, come!”—or is it a more salacious “cum, cum, cum!”—marks the beginning of the recording. Accompanied by lulling lounge music, some leitmotifs do finally emerge: thus, boundaries that need to be shifted are evoked, and so is the navigation of the digital universe, and a future, now ready to begin through technological innovation. On the image plane, on the other hand, interference and transmission errors are even intensified. Glitches, pixelated outlines and psychedelic colors appear like hallucinations. From time to time the speakers, among them Steve Jobs, are recognizable, then they dissolve again in the data stream, while monstrous forms emerge from the images that seem to embody the latent content of the speeches.

The film begins with a statement by Steve Jobs as quoted by John Markoff in his book What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, which, however, the Fordbrothers only reveal at the end. It revolves around the overlaps between the American counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s and the inventions of the computer industry. The question/thesis cautiously posed in Keynote is: Was it the omnipresent phenomena of the time (think of the simultaneous blossoming of Expanded Cinema and psychoactive substances) that set developments such as iMac, iPod and iPhone in motion? And if so, where does the horror trip go?