There's plenty of space out in space!

How a robot can appear so cuddly and lovable I'm not entirely sure. Those sad, tear dropped shaped eyes and nimble, toddler-esque movements really tugged at my heart strings. I'd be pretty emo if I was the last active Waste Allocator Load Lifter Earth-Class left on the planet. Even worse, Wall E has feelings ! Having feelings is hard enough as it is in this cold, hard universe.

Wall E learns, through his tasks of sifting through the rubble of humanity, about love and relationships. Most of all he learns that he is lonely.

He is not without a friend, though - Eve (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Examiner). The first scene in which we see human civilization is when Wall E follows her to the Axiom. It is not a very optimistic view of humanity, which is surprising for a Pixar movie. Super obese people float on automated hoverbeds and talk to each other with screens. I have read many reviews of this film that draw parallels between the film's representation of humanity in the future and out current preoccupation with social networking sites like Facebook. The humans in the Axiom are within speaking distance, but still communicate via computers. So many of us are guilty of this even now.

All the humans in the film are pretty useless. The only human on the ship who has any personality, the captain, is still portrayed as a bumbling, unintellegent fool. The robots are the real heros of the film. Wall E is the only who makes other people and other machines start to think differently. He is a visionary, in this sense. While he is a robot, he is presented as superior to the human race. More sentient, more in touch with his emotions, more to offer the world.

Thanks for being so cynical, Disney.

The motif of garbage is obviously a strong one in the film. The landscape is comprised of the leftovers of human life. Even on the Axiom, masses of trash are ejected into outer space. Garbage is synonymous with human life.

This is what the director said about his depiciton of humans in an interview with WorldMag.com ...

"With the human characters I wanted to show that our programming is the routines and habits that distract us to the point that we’re not really making connections to the people next to us. We’re not engaging in relationships, which are the point of living- relationships with God and relationship with other people."

... but the programmed peices of metal are the ones who triumph here. Director Andrew Stanton imparts a cynical view of humanity, but leaves lots of hope for robots. Thereby justifying the very thing he intends to disprove - that robots and machinery will be the downfall of the world. I can appreciate that this film, (not unlike other Pixar films) isn't strictly for kids. It has a complex message that is intended for an intellegent audience.

Voices from Ravensbruck.

Pat Binder's art project is a memorial to those 132,000 women in Ravensbruck, Germany's largest concentration camp. Arranged as if the viewer were opening a door inside the camp to each different category, a select few of the 1200 poems are revealed. Hope, death, everyday life, work, suffering and resistance characterize some of the themes of the poetry. They are positively bone chilling. More so, the talent and beauty emanating from this work is incredibly moving. Pat Binder celebrates the creativity and the limited self expression the women had in the camp, and shows it to the world via this electronic medium. Her use of hypertext doesn't take anything away from the feeling in the poetry.

When I click the "longing" door, a pink rose with thorns and new shoots appears and when I click the new shoots, there is a poem from an unknown French woman. It is the following:

"No doubt you poeticize me from afar,

see me ever in the bloom of spring,

you do not yet know, my dearest, that I now

am greying at the temples"

If I could ever write with such simplicity and beauty I would try to pay homage to this masterful collection of creativity.

On that note, I retract my statement that I don't think the internet is conducive to earth shattering poetry - Pat Binder has single-handedly changed my mind. One doesn't need to read all the poems on this website, or even open all the doors to understand what she is doing - giving these women's voices back to them to provide a chance to leave a legacy, share their spiritual solace, and inspire other women, writers, navigators of the internet. And she does it with considerable success.

By way of conclusion to this post, and this blog, I want to express my humble appreciation of the colossal concept that is narrative in a digital age. I'm a single cell in an entire organism of technology and power, to be sure, but now I'm a little more educated on that organism. I hope my posts have portrayed a glimpse of hope, because I do have hope that journalism and poetry and art can thrive in a world of data. As I gain confidence in my writing and critical abilities, I have increasing faith in that of others, as well. As I have stated before, as long as there is Grimaldi's pizza, there will be Amore. Similarly, as long as there are experiences to be had, there will be art. The medium of the day might by a stone tablet, a quill, a blog, or a hypertext, these matters of media are trivial, and not to be discriminated against. The hater bites the dust. The hater gets left behind, and some people might be alright with that, but not me. I'm up for the wave of technology that the future has in store for us along with all its resources for art, because I love humanity and its creations and I can't wait to get in it.

The inscrutible project of an inscrutible man

According to Greenaway, the "Tulse Luper is a sort of alter ego created many years ago -- Tulse could be said to rhyme with the pulse in your wrist, and Luper is a corruption of the Latin for wolf. So how about "danger lurking at the very door of your life?"

The Tulse Luper Suitcases is a multimedia project by Peter Greenaway, a Welsh film maker, consisting of three films, a 16 episode TV series, 92 DVDs, and web sites, CD ROMS and books. No wonder it took me so long to understand this damn thing.

The project is essentially an autobiography of a Tulse Henry Purcell Luper, a professional writer and project maker / fictional professional prisoner. It is structured around 92 suitcases allegedly belonging to Luper, recovered from his voyages across the world. Luper's life is set against the background of the 20th c. history of uranium. The kooky thing about this is, the multiplicity of narrative possibilities in the Tulse Luper project that constantly play with narration against a background that states “there is no such thing as history, there are only historians” History is only "his story", rather than an all encompassing doctrine that provides an empirical account of what truly went down in the past.

Luper spends his whole life in 16 prisons located all over the world. The website has a map in which one can trace the whereabouts of said prisons. It also has a time line, a manual, stories and characteristics. I am unclear as to the context for these stories (consisting only of titles like "The Fat Boy" and "The Kangaroo Lover"). I think I get the characteristics option, which includes the 92 characteristics of the 92 characters in the story. They are super obscure characteristics, like "climbed Christmas trees" (which conjured an image that totally made me LOL in the library.)

The number 92 is significant because it’s the atomic number of uranium. Each suitcase contains an object to represent the world, which advances or comments upon the story in some way, although in many cases its contents are metaphorical.

The time line goes through an incredibly detailed account of 9 segments of his history, complete with external links to Antwerp Stations official website, Wikipedia, random blogs, and resources that embed the life and times of this Luper character in reality. This is what makes him seem real. He is more than just a character in a film - the point of the project seems to be to make him appear as real as possible.

The ambition of the project over the next three years is to build an extensive online archive of his adventures, the places he goes, the people he meets, his prisons, the stuff he made, the objects that he hides in his mysterious suitcases from 1989 – 1921. This is stated on the site, but I don't know if this is an actual goal of the creator or if its part of the project. I can't imagine Greenaway stating something so obvious and un-mysterious about his personal artistic motives. The reason I feel this way is because I think he actually wants us to believe that Luper is real. I can't see him giving up the facade right on the website. It's Luper's website, not Greenaway's.

I don't think such a venture would be possible without the internet. Providing proof in the form of legitimate websites, scientific data, (the scientific aspect of uranium and the repetition of the number 92), and maps of the world. The internet is really conducive to reducing the great lengths people go to to achieve a sense of reality in what is non existent. Luper might not have flesh and blood, but he exists on the internet and on film insofar as his "life" is embedded in a series of interconnected companies, blogs and people.

When technology actually helps us do creative things ....

I like how this week is titled Dreaming. It seems appropriate for the Angela Joosse's installation art - which has a dream-like, otherworldly quality. This holds true especially in her installation piece in The Leona Drive project, Dear Ruth.

This mixed media installation piece took an amalgamation of personal relics of one woman's life, a resident of 9 Leona Drive for 40 years, and deposited them in all over the kitchen of the house. It was done in a way that I'm assuming Ruth never really decorated her kitchen. Psychedelic colours and glowing lights accompanied excerpts from poems, cookbooks, letters inserted in cupboards and projected into the sink.

I can't believe no one bothered to clean this woman's stuff out of her house after she died. There were so many sentimental remnants. Angela's work paid tribute to Ruth's life where no one else bothered to, and did it in a contemporary, artistic way that admired this mysterious post WW2 life and probably inspired lots of people.

Installation art is super cool. The Leona Drive Project facilitated the work of several artist projects for an exhibition in a 6 vacant homes that were about to be demolished. The installation artists worked to create multi media projects, including the use of audio, architectural installation, projection, photography sculpture and performance. The installations in the project all relate back to the concept of the "good old days" ... where women made tuna noodle casseroles, vacuumed in high heels and crime went unreported. Dear Ruth takes the life of Ruth, a product of the good old days, and turns it into something a little more radical, a little more colourful, and somewhat sinister.

I find it a bit sinister, anyway. But I suppose the point of art, if it is to be called art, or good art, must be a bit hair raising.

In Angela's artist statement on her website, she reveals the thing that horrifies her - the prospect of creative acts and revolutionary ideas being appropriated by those venues that can turn anything (and everything) into marketable products. That seems to be the dominant fear with technology. A fine line exists between technology helping us to be radical and revolutionary, and slipping into a state of technopoly. Either that, or we simply get distracted by Craigslist or something ... either way, its a fine line between help and hinder.

Angela notes that we are drawn to phenomena that are little known, in order to keep our work fresh and our ideas innovative. She expresses anxiety about the paradox of merit in giving a voice to that which is unknown, and at the same time, the disgrace of making this sacred unknown palpable for consumption.

Oh, paradox! We live in such ironic times. Where is the line between paying homage to something and simply messing it up? They say you should only cover graffiti with yours if you know it can be better. Not everyone is going to agree that my tag is better than Pam, Beth or Sherry's tag. And I don't necessarily believe that the sole purpose of art is to please other people. If that were so, there would simply be no challenge or radicalism.

Angela ponders how we can let the phenomena teach us the terms appropriate to its description. I think the difference between paying homage to that which we wish to represent, and simply messing something up is this - we have to let the phenomena speak to us, instead of imposing our preconceived, self serving ideas on it. And there are limits. We have to leave a bit of mystery, I think. The artist can satisfy the desires, but must leave a little bit of mystery for the phenomena, to acknowledge its unfathomable depth.

"The camera can so easily reduce the fullness of living moments to quantifiable fragments" Angela states on her website, testament to the fact that it's the artist job to produce a feeling of the vastness of life in their art when the media doesn't do it automatically. Dear Ruth was a success because we saw Angela's interpretation of Ruth, with continuous glimpses into the vastness of her many relationships. The installation celebrates that there is more to life than we really see.

He wants to put Elton John in a headlock and pour beer on his head.

DJ culture has fallen into a place in my life in the city where I can't seem to escape it. I find that a DJ creates a musical atmosphere unparalleled by any other performance. It provides an element of live music, but at the same time, can be ambient. It is unintrusive, and doesn't require an "audience" to sit down and necessarily watch a "show".

I have no qualms with mashups. Lots of people do, as made evident in RIP: Remix Manifesto Personally, I see no reason why taking ideas from other artists and making it something new is frowned upon. Artists do it all the time. To me, it's creativity, its sharing, its consciousness. One thing is for sure - mashups are permeating our society left right and center. They exist everywhere, not just in DJ music, but in the DIY ethic of punk rock, certainly in the pop music of acclaimed stars like Lady Gaga and Beyonce, rap - which relies heavily on sampling, remixes, parody and SO much more. Other art also exhibits mashups - video art, collage, fashion ... the list is infinite, it seems.

Mashups aren't just a recent phenomenon, although it seems like they are gaining considerable popularity of late. Frank Zappa did it in the 1960's, extracting a guitar solo from a song and inserting it into a different song. He called it "xenochrony". He did this in his album Shiek Yerbouti - which is one of my favourite albums of all time - and it sounds so good because of the crazy layers of sound that he utilized this technique to produce. No one gave him a hard time about plagerizing himself, then. Which is essentially, what he was doing with this technique. Sometimes it is necessary to reuse ideas, recontextualize them, and turn them into something new.

So why do people hate on Greg Gillis?

He as a good grasp of the legal consequences of his work, is no fool when it comes to tissue engineering, and appears to throw a mean par-tay.

As we learn in the documentary, sampling even a single note is grounds for a lawsuit ... and his music is "a lawsuit waiting to happen". The issue here is the stealing of intellectual property. His computer is his instrument, one that lends itself wholly to remediation. He sees the moral struggle with collaging two songs together as something that will be dated very shortly. I totally agree. We will look back in a few years, maybe not even that many, and laugh at those on the "copy-right" (as opposed to the "copy-left") with scorn for being so rigid and dreary. Lots of people already do - Girltalk included.

Copy right = copy LAME.

The clip of the interview with Lars Ulrich and his Napster dealio was the most laughable peice of garbage I have ever seen. I was astonished at how conservative and power hungry he was. If I was in Lars's shoes, I would sit back and be satisfied at the musical legacy I had left on the universe and the expansive fan base and millions of dollars I had. I wouldn't be pissed off because some kid who can't afford to buy my CD somewhere downloaded it because he wanted to get down.

I felt really bad for all those poor souls who were being charged crazy sums for downloading music. (Especially that pastor.) These people are only products of their time, not pirates. It just comes down to: would we rather pay to have music, or have it for free? We seem to have the choice, these days. There are so many artists who promote free consumption of their music. Radiohead's album In Rainbows was a "pay what you can" album. But I suppose a band like Radiohead, who has an established fanbase and generally, millions of dollars, can afford to do this.

Is Girltalk a criminal? Not any more than I am, than everyone in the world who downloads free music is, or anyone who has ever sung "happy birthday". Is Girltalk an artist? I think so. In fact, I think he is more of an artist than a lot of stars who make music today.

I tried to become a shape shifter after viewing this film.

I've often heard Waking Life be referred to as a stoner film.

I've watched this film a handful of times, and I thoroughly disagree. When I think of stoner films, I think of Wayne's World, Half Baked, Cheech and Chong ...

But do any of those so called stoner films have:

- Awesome rotoscope?
- Intellectual banter / meditations of Bazins film theory and the meaning of life? (demonstrating actual logic?)
- Touching depictions of intimacy and relationships?

Kait says: no!

With that being said, I'm not being ironic when I say that this film had an intoxicating effect on me, for lack of a better word. I first saw it when I was 18, and was entranced by the visual effects. Four years later, I can really appreciate this film for what it is - a cornicopia of existential ideas married with vivid, interesting imagery. It is virtually the antithesis of a Hollywood film, in that it requires that the viewer not be a stupid head. It wants us to think! It wants us to be entranced by the warping images! It wants us, above all, to appreciate human existence for what it is - absurd!

Absurd, but with inherent beauty, I reckon. The film shows us that everyday reality is more complex and multilayered than it first appears. It does this with the help of its crazy rotoscope action.

Rotoscope animation uses live action footage which is then converted to digital files and then drawn over using a special software, frame by frame. The products of this type of animation affords a slight deviations from the "true line" differing from frame to frame, which, when animated, cause the animated line to shake unnaturally, or "boil". Avoiding this shake requires great skill in the drawer, though causing the "boil" intentionally (as in Waking Life) is a stylistic technique sometimes used to emphasize surreal qualities. Rotoscoping also allows other special visual effect like glowing. This was used in the first Star Wars films for the effect of the light sabers !

Although I do think A Waking Life would be improved had there been light sabers, it is pretty interesting to note that rotoscoping is a technique that has been around since 1915, and is still gaining in popularity. Walt Disney used it for Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in 1937 and Cinderella in 1950. The effect in each of these wildly different films is obviously quite different as the technique has changed over time.

One of my favourite parts in Waking Life is the one on one interview with a blonde woman who talks about language. She says something like this : "Language was made for our desire to transcend our isolation, and have some sort of connection with one another. It had to be easy when it was simple survival. What is anger or love? When I say love, it comes out of my mouth, hits the other persons ear ... they register what I'm saying and they say they understand, but words are inert, they are symbols, they are dead. So much of our experience is inangible and cannot be expressed as speakable."

This is a concept that I think really relates back to Narrative in a Digital Age. It is pretty clear that language was originally made to overcome our isolation, but as we become more advanced in communication, we are also becoming increasingly isolated as a result of our technologies. Have we come full circle, then? Words are inert, yes, but it seems like the evolution of words has made us become more inert. The venues we now use them in do, at least. As for our experiences of the words, well, I guess those are dwindling too. Love now equals luv, lav, or that lame heart emoticon that I don't know how to conjure and hope I never do.

Language had to be easy when the purpose of it was for basic survival. We don't have to worry about surviving thunder storms or hunting animals anymore, so our language is failing, and it doesn't matter. We don't hunt in packs, move around nomadically together, or even live in big families anymore. Our need to communicate is purely recreational now, it seems. Technology, especially instant messenging technology, has obviously had hugely dertrimental effects on language. Text message vernacular is an entirely different language than the one I used before I had a cell phone.

For the longest time I seemed to make the same typo. Instead of "me" I constantly typed "ne", or something. Thats not it, but I can't remember exactly what it was. I know this isn't it because my typo had a softer sound, it was two vowels put together to make a wishy washy two letter word that was no way indicative of "me" (I would like to think). And I started thinking about it a lot, too. The most personal word, me, had become something else entirely. Something that meant nothing. It wouldn't even register in the other persons mind what I was trying to say, unless they read it in context. But the singular typo, out of context, made no sense. This small word that signified my entire self, meant nothing.

So technology tried to kill me, essentially, and I survived. Barely.

Why this bothered me I have no idea. It must have been a subconscious insecurity about my place in the universe or something trivial like that.

Waking Life wants us to ask ourselves why we privilege reality over dreams. And by what criteria do we distinguish the two? I don't think it's a coincidence that the audacious animation used in this film, a mix of organic, life like imagery and computer generated elements, inevitably presents another tension - one of man and machine. We naturally conclude that man is on the side of reality, yet what we have in this film are technically distorted depictions of people talking about extremely life intensive issues. Philosophy, science, romance, holy moments. It works, though. I feel like I want to reach out and touch these blobby people as I understand their dilemmas and passions. The technology of rotoscope actually makes these people seem more real.

A little about split screens ...

I remember being really impressed with split screens in film for the first time I watched The Rules of Attraction. There's one scene in which James Vanderbeek and Shannyn Sossamon both walk down the halls of their University to see their grades posted somewhere. They meet at their destination and the screen becomes whole. (They proceed to fall in love, naturally. Getting marks back is oviously soOoOoO sexy).

This film uses the technique of split screens in many situations to show these two main characters having many "missed connections" in close quarters, but feeling the same emotions and having very similar experiences though it takes them a while to meet.

Both The Tracey Fragments and The Rules of Attraction represent something of a personal crisis, but the former uses the split screens more to portray the troubled protagonists multiple perspectives of a world in which reality and fantasy are blurred. The multiple fragmented images of the same things recall cubisms fragmentation and epistemological challenges to Western thought. In this sense, the film is pretty radical.

McDonald, the director, was inspired not only by other films that employed this technique throughout history, but also a Beastie Boys video, and Piet Mondrian's grid paintings. This is a quote from the main man himself: “By editing the film in this split screen fractured/Cubist/Pop Art kind of way, we felt that we could capture Tracey’s interior emotional state quite well”

I agree with him. The film is clearly very painterly in its influences - it's a visual jam of chaotic activity. Visually, it really is similar to a cubist painting.

I was aware of shifting my attention all over the screen - particularly when Tracey is dreaming, at the corner store, that she is a celebrity. Screens all over the place were kind of overwhelming. But that was the point, I reckon. It makes for a more active participation, a more selective participation, a more sensory experience.