I found this via BoingBoing and it’s a fascinating short film with obvious resonance (and apologies) to Alan Ginsberg’s Howl. It’s a teaser trailer of sorts for a larger documentary production called Connected: A Declaration Of Interdependence but in and of itself it’s a interesting take on the predicament, fate or plight of humanity in our current technological haze.
Be sure to click and get rid of the annoying ads on the bottom of the screen - there’s text under there.
Now, I’m not one to subscribe to hysterical pseudo-Luddite notions that we are destroying ourselves with every techno-evolutionary leap humanity makes. Of course, we are, but that’s not the technology’s fault - the blame lies squarely in the hands of each and every one of the silly monkeys with car keys that litter this planet - and, yes, that includes you and me. That’s not to say the National Day Of UnPlugging is a bad idea - it’s always good to get some focus on what we’re doing and where we’re going - I just don’t think there’s any need to panic. Do you?
Should we be afraid? Should we shut ourselves down? Should we sit in a corner and take a breather? Have a little time-out so we can collect our thoughts before advancing further?
Hell no.
Full speed ahead. I’m convinced it’s our only hope to fix the messes we’ve already made and ensure we thrive and arrive at a place that has at least some sense of meaning for our existence on Sagan’s beloved pale blue dot.
And if we fuck up - at least we’ll be doing it with really cool toys.
Cheers.
P.S. Since today I seem to be ragging on all the silly monkeys it only seems appropriate to include this little gem of Ernest Cline’s again. Dance, Monkey, Dance!
P. P. S. Oh what the hell - since we seem to be on a monkey jag today I might as well toss in a little Elvis Costello and his wondrously delightful Monkey To Man video. Love those dancers.
John Boswell at Symphony Of Science has released another wonderful music video featuring Carl Sagan and 11 other scientific minds celebrating how science changes our point of view of the world and universe we live in - or, as Richard Dawkins croons: “Science is the poetry of reality.”
The title of this article is as bizarre as the video itself. I found this over on Bruce Sterling’s blog Beyond The Beyond and it is a wondrously brain melting bit of video wizardry that dissects and reassembles the images and sound of the formerly linear presentation of media - much like the Yooouuutube site I blogged about earlier.
That it uses one of my favourites and the best movie musical of all time - “Singin’ In The Rain” - only helps but it also serves to reinforce the ideas behind the technique since it incorporates dance and music. Have a lookey-loo and I’ll rant at ya after you’ve had your head opened up just a little bit.
Now at first blush this might seem like just a weird and trippy gimmick - and it could certainly remain as such. But consider the choices made in the creation of this little gem - it’s not arbitrary work. The repetition of the lyrics, the overlapping layers of the melody, the attendant visuals that are given focus at the requisite moment(s) in time - it’s just fucking brilliant. Check out their otherwork.
And not just as a mashup. The images and sounds drip like rain water upon a pane of glass. This is poetry, folks.
At the risk of hauling out the old adage poetry in motion - it is just that. Regardless of whether the content is repurposed or original, this is a stunning example of where our culture is heading.
I hear you say: “What the fuck are you on about, Robbo?”
Fair enough. Just this:
We are emerging from a culture that has been dominated by visuals - motion visuals. The moving image has become the lingua franca of the past century - it defines us and it defines our world. The power once held by a painted image, a photograph or a sound bite has long ago relinquished its hold upon the minds of our culture - and in its place is the moving image.
Technological and market forces decreed that such images would always come from a combined creative and business elite - a one-way and top-down conversation. The democratization of this technology is allowing the once passive viewer to speak back to those once hierarchal images - to craft a response in a myriad of forms - to redefine our culture by adopting the language of moving pictures and transforming them into poetry. We also get to speak to each other in this way - transforming the culture further by adopting the methods of what was once voices from above to our own voices from within.
Poetry.
Giambattista Vico postulated - back in the early 1700’s - a recurring cycle of three ages of culture: The Poetic, The Mnemotic & The Vulgar. It doesn’t take a great mind to look about and realize what age we are currently wallowing our way through. Vulgar doesn’t even begin to describe it.
But it is a cycle.
The wheel turns - slowly, yes - but it does turn.
And thus we enter an age where the content of our former culture becomes transformed into the poetic. McLuhan oft stated the content of new media was the media of old. This is but one of the reasons why fighting to retain public access to common culture is important. Our voices stem from our ability to speak of what once was by using the voices of that recent time past.
Blah blah blah blah blah blah.
I easily foresee a culture that speaks like the video above. Songs, stories, music, dance, narrative, marketing, instruction - the whole gamut of human communication - parlayed through what now would be perceived as an incoherent too-well-stirred pot of media.
We shall speak in video.
And this speech will not merely be regarded as art or a sub-culture of hipster dialect, Daddio - it will be how we converse.
Just as easily as I type - and you read - these words.
Welcome to the future.
Say what?
Cheers.
P.S. This reminds me of the work of Graham Smith, who I used to hang out with a bit in the early ’80’s when he was at OCA creating his photography based work Skinned and messing around with early experiments in video and cludgey virtual reality simulations. He’s currently deep into the telepresence and immersive video world but still crafting very compelling images.
It was my distinct pleasure to have worked so very briefly with the gentle god of poetry, bpNichol who - when he wasn’t tearing up the soundscape with the Four Horsemen - wrote scripts for the Jim Henson Muppet series Fraggle Rock. That’s where I met bp and discovered his work.
Today I fell down a bit of a nostalgic rabbit hole when I stumbled across a little thing called Virtual ][. It's an emulator for the Mac that allows you to run old Apple II programs. I was immediately flung back to 1982, hiding up in Stephen Finney's set decorating offices on the second floor of VTR Studios, hunched over the awesome machine that was the Apple IIe featured on the show in Doc's workshop. When it wasn't needed on set the computer stayed in Stephen's room. When I wasn't needed on set - and even sometimes when I was - I was upstairs in Stephen's room.
Rediscovering games like Aztec and the wonderfully accessible Applesoft Basic programming language was a real treat for me today and I have already wasted far too much time playing Galaxians too.
But then I remembered bp.
After bp passed away Jerry Juhl, the late head writer for Henson, lent me his copy of a stunning little work that bp had crafted, in Basic, for the Apple II computer back in 1984. It was comprised of visual and verbal puns, animated across the screen to create further layers of meaning and emotional context. Like all of bp's work it was deceptively simple, slyly powerful and utterly charming to behold. I still have my bootlegged copy of that disk but I no longer have a drive from which to read it.
Obsessed, I conducted a search online to see if it could be found anywhere. I love the internet. It's called: bpNichol's First Screening.
Fred and Ginger is my favourite.
bp was always fascinated by language and how it could move people and shift and change meaning and how even when contained upon a page or spoken aloud or captured on a computer disk it always remained as something capable of morphing and transforming itself into delightfully unexpected treasures. From his notes included with the disk:
As ever, new technology opens up new formal problems, and the problems of babel raise themselves all over again in the field of computer languages and operating systems. Thus the fact that this disk is only available in an Applesoft Basic version (the only language I know at the moment) precisely because translation is involved in moving it out further. But that inherent problem doesn’t take away from the fact that computers & computer languages also open up new ways of expressing old contents, of revivifying them. One is in a position to make it new.
Many thanks to Jim Andrews, Geof Huth, Lionel Kearns, Marko Niemi and Dan Waber for their work in keeping this work alive, making it new, so others can continue to discover and enjoy it. Go to their site where you can find out more about the journey First Screening has taken from its inception as a work in Applesoft Basic to its presence on the web today.
And if you don’t know bp’s work please visit his site and immerse yourself in his rich and touching use of language.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to the next level of Aztec.
