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Maybe because the Matrix Reloaded was so [fill in pejorative], you could be forgiven for not picking up the Animatrix tie-in DVD. The first short in the collection, Final Flight of the Osiris, ran briefly in theatres; this Final Fantasy-style synthespian adventure made me want to run screaming for the exits (something about seeing texture-mapped gooseflesh on a human butt projected two stories tall...). The Animatrix includes 8 more films, mostly in the straight anime style and by Japanese directors, which fill in back story and sidebar details to the main movies. Quick report: the next two shorts after Osiris, depicting the Rise of the Machines, the desperate blacking out of the sky by humans, and the conversion of people into batteries, are pompous and ridiculously violent, although there's one sequence of a factory with machines building other machines that's rather, er, riveting.
The two best shorts are "Beyond" and "Matriculated." In the former, set in the weedy back streets of Tokyo in the summer, a young woman searching for her cat discovers a disturbance in the Matrix that neighborhood kids call "the haunted house." In this abandoned building, the laws of space and time break down; the kids amuse themselves by jumping face first from the second floor and entering slow-mo "bullet time" right before they hit the ground--a kind of invisible safety net. The inside of the building, where doors lead into black voids, dogs change colors, and inexplicable rain pours from the ceiling, has the look and mood of "the Zone" from Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker. While the children explore the house, Agents are dispatched in a futuristic exterminator truck to seal off the area and repair the "error" in the Machine's simulated city.
In "Matriculated," by Aeon Flux's visionary director Peter Chung, an outpost of humans captures a robot and forces it to "jack in" with it their little group, coaxing the befuddled Machine into a weird, Aeon-like world of digital hallucinations. By doing this, they hope to create conditions where it will bond with its captors and reprogram itself voluntarily to do their bidding; whether this is for ethical or practical reasons isn't entirely clear. Some amazing tripped-out stuff here, featuring Chung's trademark queasy psycho-sexual imagery. A classic Aeon moment: the robot sticks its head into a sort of bio-mechanoid glory hole and gets trapped; our POV is looking at its back but then the camera swings around to the other side of the hole and shows the creature's head and neck protruding from a Looney Tunes logo inside a miniature movie theatre. The robot's skin peels off, rolls into a ball, and drops into another hole of brushed aluminum resembling a dentist's spittoon. Frantically trying to recover its skin, the scalped robot...anyway, you gotta see it.
Postscript: The Wachowskis owed Chung big time for the scene in The Matrix where spyware is inserted into Neo through his navel. This is a more or less direct cop of Trevor Goodchild's "custodian"--a spindly robot also inserted navelly--in the AF episode "The Purge." The spyware's later removal as a disgusting squidlike glob sucked into a vacuum container is also pure Chung.
Speaking of html (see previous post), Mark taught me a new trick, which is making little pixelist drawings big by assigning them bigger values in html. I know, duh, but I was surprised to discover that the edges of the pixels stay really sharp (provided the pics haven't been saved and/or compressed too many times). Below is a drawing of mine posted a few weeks ago (actual size about 100 x 133), all pumped up on digital steroids at 400 x 450:
There's still some fuzz in there--I'm going to try some more and see if I can make them cleaner.
Unfortunately I missed the opening event at Team Gallery kicking off the Beige/Paper Rad etc "SUMMEr oF HTML" tour, but photos (with funny captions) are here. The lineup included "performances and videos by: Extreme Animalz, Paper Rad, Jamie Arcangel and the Arcangels, Bitch Ass Darius, Taketo Shimada, DJ Jazzy Jess, Beige Records, Dr Doo, Insectiside, plus live HTML!!!!!! and new 'html' work by Mark River." The official tour page is here, and James Wagner has a report with more pictures on his weblog.
When is a graveyard not a graveyard? Answer: when it's a porno set! The title of the above photo, by Laura Carton, is www.ebonyplayas.com--no, I'm not kidding. Other images by her are here, all pretty innocuous and bearing titles of x-rated websites. These are some of the best (wittiest, most patiently executed) examples I've come across of the "erased porn" genre, a kind of deliberate, art world cousin of those altered news photos the papers keep palming off on us. Each originally had, let's just say, a human figure or figures in it, but they've been removed in a photo program so you're left with a kind of empty stage for smutty-minded projection. To do them requires getting inside the image and matching colors and textures and light--basically making a photorealist painting, a skill similar to that of an "inpainter" who restores missing chunks of old masters. By removing all the hot action, the pictures become quirky vernacular photography, as much a catalog of the archetypes and tropes of "place" as Cindy Sherman's were of "feminine roles." The porn charges up the innocent or banal location, and Carton taps the residual energy.
I referred to what she does as a genre; here are a few more examples. The first is proto-porn: Kathy Grove's erasure of Thomas Hart Benton's pin-up nude from his painting Susanna and the Elders, leaving only the old codger staring at her blanket on the grassy riverbank. Istvan Szilasi, a Hungarian artist working in New York, and Arizona artist Jon Haddock (scroll down pictures at left), however, are doing work somewhat similar to Carton's. Szilasi doesn't attempt to hide the fact that he's removing figures, he's almost expressionistically sloppy in his use of Photoshop tools. I find his approach pretty amusing. Judging by the Kent State/Vietnam photos in the Whitney's "BitStreams" show, Haddock attempts to hide the erasure, but poorly--the telltale marks of the rubber stamp or "clone tool" are obvious, and not in a good way. Carton's images aren't infallible (almost nothing in Photoshop is), but they pass the "close enough" test when printed and laminated on Plex. On a content level, Haddock's porn photos are just a record of tacky motel interiors--there's none of the sense you get with Carton's work that porn is a strange mirror for the "normal" side of life: the everyday world of recreation, communications, plumbing, TV repair, dentistry, and, um, cemetery caretaking.
Astroboy I found on the Internet; the rest I did. I like Osamu Tezuka (and this color blue).
Pres. Admits He Lied Us Into War
AP via NYT: President Bush on Wednesday accepted personal responsibility for a controversial portion of last winter's State of the Union address dealing with claims that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear material in Africa. "I take personal responsibility for everything I say, absolutely,'' the president said at a White House news conference. Bush has been seeking to quell a controversy over a controversial claim that has dogged his administration for weeks.So, now he's going to step down, right?
Like the mortuary residents in Philip K. Dick's novel Ubik, some of the posts on this weblog are still ticking away in the comments section, enjoying happy and productive half-lives. The following are recommended threads:
A rousing discussion of Golan Levin's Dialtones (a Telesymphony), a new media work in which audience members' cell phones become musical instruments. After kicking it off with my customary gentle critique, artist/poet/critic/WFMU dj Kenneth Goldsmith and various digital media tree-ers chimed in, and then Levin himself responded. The nitty gritty is gotten down to here.
The discussion of 28 Days Later shifts to the film's stupid "alternate ending" strategy and iffy racial politics.
In the Marsha Cottrell vs Seldon Hunt thread, Digital Media Tree-er Mark posts a nifty chart of DCT coefficients and I try to bluff my way through a discussion of image compression technology.
In the thread on Soviet Synthesizers, Bruce Sterling's 1995 speech about "dead media" is excerpted. That brilliant bit of argument should be required reading in any college-level new media curriculum.