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Friday, March 24, 2006 |
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Thursday, March 23, 2006 |
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Bloggers Making Movies |
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Snakes on a Plane!
One of the funniest articles I've read in a while chronicles the online cult that was spawned when bloggers discovered one of the stupidest movie titles ever was in production: "Snakes on a Plane."
Jackson publicly endorsed the move. "That's the only reason I took the job: I read the title," Jackson told entertainment site Collider.com. He added, "You either want to see that, or you don't."
New Line execs, concerned that it is too early to discuss the movie, declined comment. But sources now insist the studio never abandoned the "Snakes" title in the first place and that "Pacific Air" was just an internal working title.
In any event, "Snakes"-ophiles already were hard at work. Chris Rohan of Bethesda, Md., created an elaborate, R-rated audio trailer that lovingly mocks the title and movie. "It's a genius title," Rohan said. "It's so stupid it's great. It invites satire, but it's something you just love. It's something I can't explain. You either get it or you don't."
The audio bit uses a Jackson sound-alike shouting, "I want these motherfucking snakes off the motherfucking plane!" Soon, the growing legion of fans added their voices as they demanded that that phrase also appear in the movie.
Apparently, the studio got the hint. When Ellis assembled Jackson and others for the recent shoot, the filmmakers added more gore, more death, more nudity, more snakes and more death scenes. And they shot a scene where Jackson does utter the line that fans have demanded.
Posted by
Eryk @
4:48 PM
(0) comments
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Thursday, March 16, 2006 |
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Notes on "The Gutenberg Galaxy" |
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Been reading Marshall McCluhan's 1962 book, "The Gutenberg Galaxy", and found a few things to be interesting, but here's one.
John Wilson, at the African Research Institute of London University, writes about a film he shot in Africa showing the audience (the tribes people) how to get rid of stagnant water from a village. They shot very simple shots of the actions taken, and showed it to an audience of 30 tribal villagers. The tribes people were asked what they had seen, at the end of the five minute film, and they collectively responded that they had seen a chicken.
The director of the film didn't understand- a chicken wasn't shot for the film. When they looked at the film afterward, they noticed that for about 7 seconds, a chicken had been startled and flew over the right side of the frame. When the researchers asked the villagers later what else they had seen, they remember seeing a man, but they didn't tell him anything about a story or instructions being gleaned from the film. What they had done was look at the frame the way they would glance around the environment. None of them had known where to look, so none of them did what "literate" (conditioned) audiences do, which is stare at the entire screen, instead of treating it as a special kind of environment.
Wilson had to do some research on film, then, in order to shoot films that the villagers could understand. He found out something else interesting: When you show two characters talking, and one leaves, the villagers didn't understand what happened to him. They think he has disappeared, and they get confused and angry, and start yelling at the picture to ask it where he went. So Wilson started showing the paths of people as they left the frame. The only way tribal audiences approved is if they saw the character make a natural exit- going into a doorway, for example, or walking behind some trees. But a panning movement, to show the character walking away, made no sense to them, either- they understood it as the landscape moving, not the camera, because they weren't really even aware of what a camera was.
So what's interesting is, as we learn media "literacy", as McCluhan explains, we start losing our connection to the immersive environment of oral culture- where participation and interplay is mandatory, unless you are talking to yourself. The written word allows for isolation and independence because an idea can be stored for later retrieval. Strictly oral cultures can't do that.
So a hallmark of unmediated culture is exchange and interplay between people. The rest of what we look at as a storage medium- text, film, photographs, recordings- are isolated. But an audience based on interconnection and community, an oral culture, also demands an intrinsically interactive experience in their storage. In other words, these tribe's people might have intuitively understood an open ended video game such as morrowind or final fantasy, because it is interactive and navigable, in a manner that is more natural to them than the passive consumption of film. (McCluhan, for reasons I can't understand, seems to think they would understand television more than film. I don't agree, and actually have no idea why he would make the assumption).
Posted by
Eryk @
5:02 PM
(1) comments
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Friday, March 03, 2006 |
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William S Burroughs and New Media Pessimism |
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Just re-read William S Burroughs 1970 new media manifesto about the tape recorder, language, and the potential for using this new media to interact with the physical world.
A few things: The tape recorder was a handy playback device that could interact with the world around you in an immediate way. As Burroughs points out, if you play a tape of bullets being fired in the right situation, you can cause real bullets to be fired. You can also use the tape recorders to interact in real space, you can play back recordings and spliced audio on the subway.
But I'm having a hard time coming up with any ideas about how we might use the newer, much more broad tech of the internet in as direct a way. Plasma screen mirrors in Palestine and Chicago connected via internet 2? Flash mobs might be the most direct way we impact realspace with the internet.
But I think the internet might be asking us to think harder. We have this limited approach for public net.art, which is the ecstasy with which we realize the internet is a remote control with global reach. It seems like that's the relationship we have with the web, when we use it in real space. We use it to produce signs in cities we've never been to, or to impact the lighting of a gallery in another country. Remote controls, though, are kind of a disappointing use of tech.
Secondly, on the pessimism front, I am kind of struck by the way the web fits into Burroughs' expectations of tech. Word is a virus, he says. And technology is the science of developing better weaponry, or:
There are no games where everybody wins. That's what games are all about, winning and losing ... The Versailles Treaty ... Hitler dances the Occupation Jig ... War criminals hang at Nuremberg ...It is a rule of this game that there can be no final victory since this mean the end of the war game. Yet every player must believe in final victory and strive for it with all his power. Faced by the nightmare of final defeat he has no alternative. So all technologies with escalating efficiency produce more and more total weapons until we have the atom bomb which could end the game by destroying all players. Now mock up a miracle. The so stupid players decide to save the game. They sit down around a big table and draw up a plan for the immediate deactivation and eventual destruction of all atomic weapons. Why stop there? Conventional bombs are unnecessarily destructive if nobody has them hein?
The interesting thing is, the web was born out of the need to defend ourselves from atomic annihilation. So in a sense, it's a weapon more powerful than the nuclear bombs, using the paper beats scissors model. The net survives the atom bomb, so the net is the stronger weapon. Just like having an atom bomb in every home, we all have the web in our hands, and we're capable of using it either way: aggression, or not.
Right now, we're immersed in the transition from one to many media to many to many media. But now, we're still in a one to many medium. It's just that instead of three networks and five newspapers, we're looking at a half billion bloggers broadcasting their one way ideas to echo chambers of agreeing opinions. It's a mandatory stage of the transformation, the point in anarchy where the pent up frustrations of the previous regime gives way to a kind of "freedom sickness" involving violence, theft, rape, and war (freedom with no regard for personal responsibility, which usually rushes in a new regime). The problem is that this regime that has fallen- the gods of old testament media- have molded a generation of users who demand to be gods, who demand the power of the network not to network but to broadcast.
That's the weapon element- the game that Burroughs was talking about, the game where every player believes in final victory and strives for it with all his power. The web is more powerful than the nuclear bomb because it is a weapon that changes consciousness, as Burroughs points out, which "puts the whole war game into question." The problem is, it exists on a simultaneous plane with the war gamers.
What to do, then?
Posted by
Eryk @
8:25 PM
(0) comments
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