Beyond the Frame | Untangling Non-Linearity
A fascinating look at the connections between hypertext and film editing. I’m a sucker for any article that cites both Ted Nelson and Walter Murch.
A fascinating look at the connections between hypertext and film editing. I’m a sucker for any article that cites both Ted Nelson and Walter Murch.
Back in 2017 when I was in New York, I went on a self-guided infrastructure tour: 32 Avenue of the Americas, 60 Hudson Street, and the subject of this article, 33 Thomas Street. One of my pictures is used to illustrate its creepiness, both in real life and as an evil lair in fiction:
A windowless telecommunications hub, 33 Thomas Street in New York City embodies an architecture of surveillance and paranoia. That has made it an ideal set for conspiracy thrillers.
Suppose you had a luxury spacecraft spinning at 1RPM to create 0.5g using centripetal force, as is often depicted in science fiction:
I believe that the perpetually spinning views would be extremely nauseating for most humans, even for short visits. Even worse, I suspect - when it comes to the comfort of the experience - would be the constantly moving light and shadows from the sun.
A short documentary that you can dowload or watch online:
The film explores how image banks including Getty gain control over, and then restrict access to, archive images – even when these images are legally in the public domain. It also forms a small act of resistance against this practice: the film includes six legally licensed clips, and is downloadable as an HD ProRes file. In this way, it aims to liberate these few short clips from corporate control, and make them freely available for viewing and artistic use.
Licensed under aCreative Commons 0: “No rights reserved” license.
- A film acknowledges that some people menstruate
- without any characters being ashamed of it
- or being shamed by someone else (without resolution)
If you were at dConstruct on Friday and you enjoyed the mood music during the breaks, this is what you were listening to.
I can’t wait to see this documentary about Marc and Beyond Tellerrand!
Cardigans are not entirely necessary for a show or a film to fit within the Cardigan sci-fi subgenre (although they certainly help). It’s the lack of polish in the world, it’s the absence of technological fetishism in the science fiction itself. The science or the tools or the spaceships do not sit at the heart of Cardigan sci-fi — it’s all about the people that wear the cardigans instead.
Comparing and contrasting two different takes on long-term thinking in sci-fi: Dune and Foundation.
In a moment of broader cultural gloominess, Dune’s perspective may resonate more with the current movie-going public. Its themes of long-term ecological destruction, terraforming, and the specter of religious extremism seem in many ways ripped out of the headlines, while Asimov’s technocratic belief in scholarly wisdom as a shining light may be less in vogue. Ultimately, though, the core appeal of these works is not in how each matches with the fashion of today, but in how they look forward through thousands of years of human futures, keeping our imagination of long-term thinking alive.
This is so in-depth! Movies and TV shows from within movies and TV shows. All of them are real …I mean, they’re not real, they’re fake—that’s but the point—but they’re all from real movies and TV …ah, never mind.
I need to seek out this documentary, Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of World War II.
It would pair nicely with another film, The Eniac Programmers Project
chef’s kiss!
(you know my opinion of Adam Curtis’s documentaries
)
Coded Bias follows MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini’s startling discovery that many facial recognition technologies fail more often on darker-skinned faces, and delves into an investigation of widespread bias in artificial intelligence.
I watched The Social Dilemma last night and to say it’s uneven would be like saying the Himalayas are a little bumpy.
I’m shocked at how appealing so many people find the idea that social networks are uniquely responsible for all of society’s ills.
This cartoon super villain view of the world strikes me as a kind of mirror image of the right-wing conspiracy theories which hold that a cabal of elites are manipulating every world event in secret. It is more than a little ironic that a film that warns incessantly about platforms using misinformation to stoke fear and outrage seems to exist only to stoke fear and outrage — while promoting a distorted view of how those platforms work along the way.
What a brilliant homage! And what a spot-on pop-cultural reference for The Situation.
2020: an isolation odyssey is a reenactment of the iconic finale of 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968). Restaged in the context of home quarantine, the journey through time adapts to the mundane dramas of self-isolation–poking fun at the navel-gazing saga of life alone and indoors.
This is an epic deep dive into the 1984 sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey.
For all its flaws, I have a soft spot for this film (and book).
A forthcoming documentary about Stewart Brand (with music by Brian Eno).
I’d watch this game show:
Welcome to the first installment of a new series on Typewolf, where I’ll be identifying the fonts used in popular things. The focus here is on anything you might encounter in contemporary visual culture—movie posters, TV shows, book covers, etc.
I enjoyed this documentary on legendary sound designer and editor Walter Murch. Kinda makes me want to rewatch The Conversation and The Godfather.
Here’s a BBC adaption of that J.G. Ballard short story I recorded. It certainly feels like a story for our time.