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.

Things I learned this week: Ellen Page is a golden god, split screens are cool.

“They never should have grounded me – now I have nothing” ... sounds like a quote from an emo teen in a self indulgent drama, but Tracey is anything but self indulgent. While she is "emo", she has copious reasons to be - her brother is missing, her parents are abusive dead beats and she constantly finds herself in situations with threatening / hostile men.

Tracey’s character is easy to feel for. The viewer is shown a fragmented view of her life by split screens, scenes behind bars, and broken imagery. Although I spent most of the film cringing, it was a total pleasure to watch. This film exhibits many postmodern techniques, such as visual fragmentation, non linear plot line and blurring between fantasy and reality. There is also a recurring theme of animals, particularly horses and birds, to denote freedom – the freedom that Tracey wishes she had. She’s oppressed by her problematic relationship with her parents, the kids at school, and the disappearance of her brother, for which she is held responsible.

A quote that stuck in my head when I watched this film is said as Tracey is on the bus in the shower curtain she grabs before she flees from Lance’s bleak apartment. “How do you know what’s real and what’s not when the whole world is inside your head?” The story within a story technique employed in The Tracey Fragments naturally triggers the viewer to question the reliability of the narrator.

As she is on the bus, looking at the camera, telling her story, she tells us that her dad has previously expressed qualms with her exaggerating. He can't tell “whats the truth and whats a lie” when it comes from her mouth. The viewer is shown pieces of her fantasies as well as reality, with little distinction between them. Tracey’s questionable relationship with Billy Zero is an example of such exposure of her imagination. We see them both portrayed all goth glam in the super steamy sex montages of her fantasies, which look like something from a music video. Then a minute later, we see her being kicked out of his car onto the road in a more realistic representation of the dreary world in the film. But the portrayal of reality isn’t exactly true to nature at all times, as fragmentation and obscurity of vision is a regular occurrence.

Tracey’s life has been a perpetual state of crisis, and if I were her I’d live in a dream world, too.

Tracey, as she narrates the story, makes many references to the cycles of nature and life and how creatures of the universe are all connected. Horses watch her and Billy Zero in their fantastical escapades, and she is spliced with a horse as she runs away from her house near the beginning of the film. She tells us of the connection we, mankind, have to these creatures even though we might not know it. She tells us -when horses fall, foam comes out of their mouth. Then they are made into glue and kids glue bits of paper to cards and the children eat the glue and the children become the horse.

In another statement exemplary of the cycles in nature and life, Tracey tells us the country creeps her out – because dead bodies live in graves, swamps, ditches, in the country, creeps her out. A man dumped the body of a girl into a ditch, it melts into slime, then flowers grow and a bee sucks the flower and makes honey. And the family of the girl buys the honey from the store and the family eats the girl.

These cyclical correlations adhere to the postmodern theme of absurdity of life – animals, humans, corpses and insects are all connected because we share this earth and live on it together. We aren’t conscious of this fact all the time, it’s easy to forget it. Yet, the viewer is made aware of this simple, all encompassing truth once again as we are guided by the wisdom of our unconventional protagonist.

Sonny, Tracey's brother, is often portrayed as a dog or seal like figure, on all fours, barking. She even calls him a "bad dog" when he follows her to the forest. Sonny is one of the few characters in the film that seem to bring Tracey pleasure. When he presents her with a necklace for her birthday, she is genuinely touched. Unlike Lance, her sketchy “friend” who gets his ass handed to him by an enormously aggressive man who ends up raping Tracey – or at least such is implied. (But she slashes his throat with a can of beans in a fury of instinctual fervour that inspired my room-mate and I to laugh out loud in feminist triumph.)

Anyway, Lance is a total creep who grabs a crow from outside his window even though Tracey protests. She asserts that crows are like people, and will be tarnished by his human hands – much like herself. Lance grabs the crow, casting a “human’s spell on it”, robbing it from the natural world free of oppressive institutions and messing with it with his greasy, substance riddled hands and killing it.

The end of the film has a surprisingly optimistic ending. Tracey gets off the bus at last and walks through a more or less deserted park, but runs into Billy Zero and his entourage of lowlife homies sipping on 40’s in the middle of the afternoon. She tells herself in her head that no one can stop her, no one can make her stand still, (like the horses and birds we see so frequently in the film). Tracey gives Billy Zero the cold shoulder and walks on as it starts lightly snowing, giving us the impression that she continues walking on in this world that is “as crusty as the flowers on this fucked up shower curtain”.

I think what makes this film a masterpiece is the fact that it takes bold risks that might confuse the (less attentive) viewer. Watching this film as a "class reading", I prepared myself to be more critical, ask more questions of it as I was watching it, than I would have if I were just kicking back watching it with a group of pals. The viewer who is looking for a good kick back film will be disappointed, I think. But I was not. On the contrary, I found this to be one of the best films I have seen in many moons.

This is the cutest caterpillar I could find.

Neil Postmans holistic / hippie analogy: "Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. If you take away the caterpillars from a given habitat, you are not simply left with the same environment minus the caterpillars. You have a totally new environment, with new condition for survival. The same is true if you add caterpillars. This is how the ecology of media works as well. A new technology doesn’t add or subtract something, it changes everything."

(from "Technopoly, The Surrender of Culture to Technology")

Yeah, James !

I can't recall which lecture it was, but once the class got into a huge discussion about the movie Avatar. In retrospect it must have been the lecture on the avante garde, because James Cameron is so astonishingly uncreative.

"The avante garde intends to shock viewers out of thier complacency and wrestle with the conventions of bourgeoise art and mortality"

- Duchamp. The urinal artisan.

The most expensive movie of all time with a budget of $237 million, Avatar has been compared to the epic likes of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. Avatar was said to “employ a new generation of special effects”, and it showed at the box office as it proved to be the highest grossing film of all time in North America. Cameron originally wanted to start filming after his 1997 film Titanic, but he reckoned the worlds state of technology hadn’t caught up to his vision yet.

When the world was ready, Avatar was released for traditional 2D projection, as well as 3D formats such as RealD, Dolby, XpanD, IMAX 3D and even 4D - a marketing term that describes an entertainment presentation system combined with 3D film with physical effects in the theatre that occur in sync with the film – in Korea, the leading multiplex chain CJ-CGV used more than 30 effects during the movie, including moving seats, sprinkling water, lasers, smells of explosives and wind.

Despite the larger than life proportions, negative feedback managed to seep through the praise. Some critics contended the film was “big and dumb”, while others criticised the plot for being trite, such that viewers may as well analyze a beach ball.

One can’t deny Avatar is technologically epic, but the film triggers me to ask the question: is the grandiose sense of entertainment more important to us than intellectual content?

Does narrative die at the hands of these larger than life blue people on the big screen?

I think Avatar is one of the first films that demonstrate the new craze of 3D. The stereoscopic era of motion pictures dates back to the late 1890s, but was relegated to a niche in the industry due to obtrusive mechanics. In 2010, 3D films have reached a point in production which has granted enormous mainstream acclaim. Coinciding with developments in digital media and high definition, 3D may be as significant a technique in film as the introduction of colour.

Is 3D film avante garde? or is it avant garde's anti thesis - fun, visually stimulating, not necessarily thought prokovoking?

I don't have an answer to this yet. But when I do ... I will write James Cameron a letter immediately to propose a collaboration on his next film to take over the art world as we know it. Because if there is anything that was ever avante garde in this universe, we can trust that is was certainly Titanic, in all its loud and romantic glory.

(that was a joke.)

The main indicators of a technopoly - plastic palm trees, bikinis, and turf. Lots of turf.

And DEFINITELY scuba diving chihuahuas.

A technopoly, according to media fiend and cultural critic Neil Postman, is a society that believes that the sole aim of human labor and work is expediency, and that technical calculation beats human opinion any day. The meddling of citizens in a technopoly then, are best guided by "experts" (ie - machines). Basically, in a technopoly we are robbed of all agency and willingly give our souls over to the wretched gluttonous machine.

Postman wasn't down with this - he was a humanist and maintained that new technology could never substitute human values.

He believes that the U.S. is the only country to have actually developed into a technopoly. He believes this because citizens don't see the downside of a society riddled with technology. Instead, they crave more and more ... until information becomes garbage, utterly incapable of answering our questions and ends up obscuring solutions to even our mundane problems. He fears that the next generations of people to come will be used to technology, not use it.

I think this exemplifies the general fear revolving around the Internet and the crazy technologies that stem from it. I fear this, but I will be the first to admit that, sometimes I feel myself loosing footing in the real, (print) world, and slipping down a slope of mechanical accessories. (Telus totally conned into buying a Blackberry last weekend, thereby rendering me a much more frequent user of facebook, text messaging and even blackberry instant messenger. I don't really know how to use this contraption yet but already I feel inescapably connected.) How "attatched" do we have to be to our digital accessories in order to become "technopolized" as a society?

Also, what does this mean for the artist?

Digital art and flash poems don't really speak to me. Judging from what I have seen so far, I find them uninspiring and trite. I can get down with a little musical remix or mash up here and there, of course, (I'm only human, and even worse, a college kid). But when it comes to visual art, I need something in which I can feel the love in. I don't mean necessarily something made by human hands, because media like silkscreen and lithography don't require any human touching, and often that is the point (Warhol's mechanically produce prints emphasized the coldness of commerical duplication and consumerism), but I guess I need resources that are of this world.

...I oil paint, so maybe I'm showing my bias. At any rate, I like what Mark Amerika did with Filmtext, and Grammatron is pretty cool too, but I'm not sure I would classify them as art. Maybe I would feel better about classifying this as art if e-art had a category of its own by which to judge this umbrella genre of creations.

Niel P. reckons the solution to the technopoly is a good old fashioned education in history, and social effects of technology.

Since you asked, My solution to the problem here would involve instilling an appreciation of nature in our children. Yeah yeah yeah, super corny, I know ... but knowledge of our primal roots is humbling beyond any knowledge of history. In a sense, it is history, but history before we made history as humans. Before we built ourselves up a fancy society, the challenges posed by the elements was unparalleled by that of the numerous worries of technology. And when it comes down to it I don't think there will ever be a day when a tsunami or tornado couldn't mess us up like a computer crash. We'd be miserable, but we would survive. Contrary to popular belief, we would survive.

We owe a lot to our natural environment, and when we lose that, it will be all turf and plastic palm trees. Which sounds kind of fun, (but I guess we need trees to breathe and what not). Besides, I couldn't handle a spring break themed life for more than the length of reading week.

I expected to see these guys in Mark Amerika's Filmtext.

"Nothing happens here. Nobody lives here"

The introduction of Filmtext says this itself. And speaks the truth.

When I investogate this piece via Google, I discover that Filmtext is a "hybridized online/offline digital narrative created as a net art site, a museum installation, an mp3 concept album, an artist ebook, and a series of live performances" as proclaimed by the artist himself.

I read this and at once I believe that my digital literacy is failing me! I don't understand this! Mark Amerika is telling me I have 4 personal messages and I can't open them! I hear lazers but I can't see them! A futuristic scroll opens before my eyes and says something incomprehensible !

On the first "level", in the desert, text that appears in the little box when I click one of the white crater things seems to be a series of postmodern rants about the body and art, media terrorists and social hammers, perception and reality.

When I graduate to the next two levels, his prose becomes even more cynical and cryptic. At one point I click something and its this woman's voice leaving a message on an answering machine, telling me about doing laundry and stuff. This keeps playing over and over again and I can't find a stop button of any sort. This is why I'm not entirely sure is there are other levels after this, because this phone message is playing over and over again and I feel increasingly anxious because checking my phone messages always makes me feel anxious like I'm neglecting someone somewhere. I don't know this woman and I don't know what Mark is trying to make me feel!

...Well, Mark Amerika has succeeded in creating a highly baffling digital narrative that makes me feel kind of lonely and kind of stupid because I have no idea whats going on.

Nice fonts, though.

Roland Barthes doesn't want to be a literary square.

I've come to terms with Twelve Blue.

I realize M.J. meant no harm in trying to get the reader a little more involved. He placed on us responsibility that some may have been not be used to - and that's kind of uncomfortable for some. It can hinder people's enjoyment of the poem. But he was only trying to liberate us, reader ! His intentions were good ! And he wanted to get closer to us, as hypertext blurs the line between reader and writer.

Roland Barthes, (an ACS homeboy, and certainly a househould name around here) argued that the ideal text did this - achieved an unclear distinction between the author and the reader. In fact, hypertext contains many aspects of Barthes' ideal text. It links, connects, allows information to be presented in a crazy ordder. It is a "galaxy of signifiers".

Woa. Deep.

He wasn't down with readerly texts, (commonly associated with lame classical texts. I don't think they're lame, but I reckon Barthes did), texts presented in linear ways, traditional texts adhereing to the status quo. He even went as far as to say that they supported the commercial values of the literary establishment.

Well isn't Barthes radical? I want to see him and Walter Ong fight.

On the other hand, a writerly text allows the reader to take control of the text. We construct our own meaning, as each reader is a subjective soul interpreting the text however they want. Twelve Blue is a writerly text, freeing the passive reader from the shackles of his own! small! mind!

Roland Barthes just wants to do what he wants. From this perspective, I can appreciate Twelve Blue and what it is trying to achieve - top knotch readers who can actively get down with text in a subjective, personalized way. Barthes just wanted us to not be literary squares, and instead, be our own literary hero's.

I feel closer to Michael Joyce already ...

That is a fine textile.

At Last: I finally understand the term textile !

From the day I dragged my boyfriend textile shopping in the dead of winter, I developed a true appreciation for textiles. (Shockingly, he didn't really appreciate this.) I also happen to really appreciate text - but I didnt think the two had anything in common. Except maybe "Bless this mess" on decorative kitchen crochets.

Alas, the term textile is a Latin word originating from the word textere, which means "to weave", as in to weave yarn to make cloth, as demonstrated by the lovely lady above. We do the same thing with words, non? weave them together to make sense. Sometimes when we are super advanced and postmodern, we can get inter"text"ual, or meta"text"ual, meaning that a bit of text about another text lies in top of a text. Many fictions incorporate intertextuality to make them more complex and interesting. Like in Shakespear's Hamlet, there is a play within a play. There are a million other examples of intertextuality out there in film and books, and they are on the rise.

George Landow knew what was up with his celebration of hypertextual freedom. He thought hypertext and hypermedia were open and linear, and crusty, ancient old books were closed. He believed that we needed to abandon conceptual systems founded on ideas of center, linearity, and migrate toward multilinearity and networks - essentially, ditch print for digital.

Pretty cutting edge, for a man who specializes in Victorian literature.

Twelve Blue, Michael Joyce.

Perhaps you wonder why I chose this picture for a post about Twelve Blue, the poem by Michael Joyce.
Well, it came up in a Google image search for the poet, and led me to a blog that promised me that this very hot dog would sing Twelve Blue to me while it was in the shower. Not the strangest promise anyone has ever made me, but I was intrigued. It didn't keep its promise, much to my disappointment. Hot Dogs are never to be trusted.

Similarly, I think my high expectations were to blame for my lack of enthusiasm for the hypertext piece.

The name Twelve Blue initially made me think of those math games I used to have to play in elementary school. Twelve blue cats eat twelve blue apples, so how long will it take for train A to pass train B? That kind of thing.

Anyway ... The aspect of Michael Joyce's hypertextual poetry that I found most interesting is his prose. It is really beautiful. His references to women stand out to me, using references to Gaugin and carnies. He uses alot of earthly and classic imagery, things pertaining to nature and the like. His poetry is astonishingly sensual for the medium he uses. To me, this juxtaposition is really ironic (and I reckon also a little distracting). Based on the fact that it is a hypertext poem, I found that I had lower expectations for the quality of his actual writing, and expected to be more astonished by the flashiness of the hypertext. I anticipated more stimulation, more qimmicky things. I assumed the medium would naturally become the message, with its overpowering and voltaic qualities.

On the side of the screen are panels with a bunch of different coloured lines, which arrangement you can change by clicking on - the purpose of this is unclear to me. According to Greg Ulmer, they represent the StorySpace network, and each line is a link to another document. But nothing happens when I click it. I feel like I'm missing something here.

In terms of content, the cumulative effect of the poem is supposed to be that of drowning, Greg tells me. That, and an "awareness that this image of drowning in its totality is the signifier for some unstated, abstract, perhaps inarticulable signification." Gregs explanation is a little vague to me, but from what I can understand, but I feel the finality thing. The last panel of the poem, starting with "everything can be read", has a sort of resolution to it that evokes feelings of the details of humanly life; the whorls of a rose, armpit, the sigh of rain, light through high branches of blue pines, whisper, every man and his mother, every woman and her lover ... culminating to a catharsis. There is nothing more than these details.

All the things I imagine would flash before your eyes during the last moments of drowning.

Hence, I attribute the profundity of this poem to Joyce's writing skills. I would probably be just as in awe if I read this on a peice of paper. If not more. Call me old fashioned, but I have a hard time anticipating seeing poems of Tennyson and Rossetti quality in electronic form. To me, the medium simply doesn't lend itself to the seemingly effortless masterpeices that were scrawled on parchment under a willow tree on a bank somewhere at dawn, in "ye ole' days". That's what I picture when I think of classic poetry.

Futurist sensibility = no sensibility.

The "Futurist sensibility", according to Marinetti, is the modern mind set brought about by our dependence on telephones, trains, cars, tv ... all technology, essentially. All our crazy gadgets have effected our psyche more than we realize, he argues. He dwells on a list of the phenomena caused by our obsessions. They all move us further away from European ideals (the laissez fair lifestyle, 'less is more' attitude, and emphasis on sensuality) and closer to a cold, isolated existence. Here are a few notable items on the list ...

- Acceleration of the pace of life in general. We want things to happen faster than instantaneous, not just online, but everywhere.

- Dread of quiet. I feel this. Silence makes me nervous, perhaps because I am a child of the interwebs. I think this has a lot to do with the first point. Silence is stillness, stillness is slowness.

- Attitude of daily heroism. This one I find sort of halarious. I'm not sure what Marinetti means by this. To be sure, the internet grants us freedom in the possibility to manipulate our identities, greater agency over our life and activities, but he's talking about technology all across the board, including bikes and trains and stuff. He even refers to a telegraph - so I guess this was written before the days of ye ole' interwebs. I can't imagine how sending a telegraph would make you feel like a hero. (I guess theres something to be said for crossing something off a to do list though...and if that makes you feel like a hero, then more power to you).

- Multiplication of human desires. The idea that we can't simply be happy with what we have anymore scares me. I think theres an element of human nature present here in the fact that we are pretty much inherently envious creatures, and when we see Pam Beth and Sherry with sweet highlights, we instantly think of ourselves and how much we deserve that, too. In terms of technology, as more becomes available to us, the more we desire.

- Man multiplied by the machine. AVATARS ATTACK!

- Idea and love of the record. We've always had this, I think. Technology just helps. Bazin said that we are creatures who have a strange preoccupation with preserving things. He called this our mummy complex. Hence, our fascination with film and photography and its unparralled ability to capture a moment in time. We treasure these things, especially after those who they depict are gone.

- Disdain for 'amore'. Certainly, I think romance is being abandoned in this modern age ... its changing, at least. In terms of the internet, sex becomes the selling tactic, the lure, the point. It's the "cut to the chase" mentality. In the disdian for amore, Marinetti refers to the fact that women are granted more agency over their own lives with technology, and are exposed to a world of substitutes for love. He refers to the general "latest model" which I find sort of presumptious and superficial, and makes said women that Marinetti refers to sound materialistic and lame. (Again, I fail to see the relevance of the telegraph here.) Unless of couse said women are sending hateful telegraphs to ex lovers showing off how much more satisfied they are with the "latest model".

All these products of technology have generated our "pictorial dynamism, our antigraceful music in its free, irregular rhythms, our noise-art and our words-in-freedom." Marinetti makes a bunch of huge sweeping statements in his general "technology" he speaks of. I think the points above could apply to the use of the internet, but not necessarily a bicycle or something. A pencil can be considered technology, for crying out loud. I reckon a pencil won't cloy our humanly senses so entirely that we throw away any conception of amore.

While I'm at it, I think as long as there is Grimaldi's pizza, there will be amore. As long as there's chocolate, there will be amore. As long as there's Jon Cusack there will be romance. And I don't forsee him ever dying.

Besides, noise and words in freedom sound pretty cool to me and Marinetti sounds super old fashioned and frigid. His lament of this futuristic sensibility seems to me like a lament for how damn dreary he is.

Poems on the interwebs !- Oh, accelerated times.

"Cruising", by Ingrid Ankerson and Megan Sapnar, combines spoken word with a crazy interactive reel of black and white images of the speakers hometown. It's story about high school girl antics in "small town Wisconsin" - pink lipstick, sniffing out the street like dogs, cruising mane street in Mary Joes fathers station wagon, (told against a background of what I presume to be Spanish guitar?)

At first I couldn't really tell if my mouse had any effect on the way the image reel moved. When I got patient with this internet contraption, I realized it did - I could make the reel spin by faster or slower, move it closer or further away. It reminded me of a little video game I had when I was a kid - I could drive this little car down a track, the car would stay in the same place but I could move the track with the steering wheel. I reckon if I wanted to get super analytical about this, I would say that the electronic medium allows the viewer to manipulate the presentation of the poem, thereby showing the lack of control the speaker has over her life. (I was a teenage girl once, I had fun once, I'm hip, ok ? I know what its like to grow up in a small town and have life flash before my eyes at times.)

Anyway ...

We've come a long way since Albert Tennyson recorded his poems into a wax cylinder.

Chop wood, regain life.

I think Borgmann was onto something when he said that the focal practises of things sponsor skill and discipline and result in a stronger, more 'real' sense of community.

For example, the focal practises revolving around heating your place with a stove, as opposed to simply paying for central heating, involve the act of gathering wood, chopping it, gathering around the hearth, singing Kuymbaya and making banana boats ...

Borgman laments that we can now buy simulated pre packaged banana boats at Seven Eleven, without having to do much more than tug at a plastic wrapper for a few seconds. (I dont know if these actually exist, it's just my awesome example.)

Anyway, the point is, that while we are slaving away with these tedious tasks that go along with having a stove, something magical happens - We talk, we sweat, we swear, we hate life a little bit, but we form a rapport with our fellow creatures with whom we toil. We achieve solidarity through the communal struggle, we understand each other a little better.

A community happens !

(a low tech life + suffering = community)

It seems to me like that Borgamm laments the loss of the tribe we all once were. We used to travel in packs and search for food together, eat together, build out shelters together, and live together. We aren't animals anymore (at least we think we aren't) and we are becoming increasingly solitary. We have our digital communities to thank for this, I believe. We become less in touch with ourselves and each other as we spend so much time inside our space biased technologies.

I agree that community is more than simply communication, and that the world is comprised of the fruits of our labours, but why can't that include our ethereal productions online? Devices, devices ... these are devices, not things, Borgmann would say. They conceal their inner workings. Borgmann doesn't trust them. Well, just because you can't touch it doesnt mean its not real, or valid. Is an online idea in an essay or article inferior to a hard copy?

The funny thing is though, the space biased technologies that modern western society is so oriented toward are meant to overcome the natural boundaries of space and time, so that we save time. But then shouldnt we have time to do all these focal things?

What are people actually doing now that we save so much time?
Creating facebook profiles? Watching porn? Breeding hamsters?

There are a good many number of communities that revolve around doing things online. Like this student group I'm a part of, we have a blog for other students in the Faculty of Arts to submit poems and fiction and art. We consider this blog a store window of these labours. And it's not easy. There are a good many tasks involved, like layout, selection, organizing.

I wouldn't compare it to buying McDonalds on the way home instead of stopping at a farmers market to buy groceries.

Nor would I compare it to learning to buying an ipod instead of leanring to play the violin. Someone tried to make this comparison in a class I took in first year and I remember it to this day because I found it so positively ludicrous.

There are some things that are simply not comparable. A stove and A/C are not comparable to writing an e-mail to your favourite boy band. These ideas are both based in expediency, but aren't really on the same level. Sure, its easy to get to know someone when your both sweating your asses off chopping wood, but it's also pretty easy to get to know people when you are working on a creative endeavor that happens to be posted on the world wide web.

I don't need to be a part of this student group, but I need to keep my house warm in the winter or else I'll freeze to death. Is it possible that Borgman focuses only on parallel examples that are needs as opposed to wants? I think we could all acknowledge that we dont really need the internet, we could live without it, but life would be a lot harder and more tedious.

and we wouldn't have as much time to breed hamsters.

Viva la Google !

The idea of a quick read is nothing new. They’ve been around since the Victorian Era.

- The Penny Dreadful, 19th century – small chapbooks published on cheap paper for middle class adolescents for mindless entertainment. It was sensational fiction for the masses.

- Magazines. A lot of long stories were originally published serially in magazines. Pinocchio was originally published in sequence in The Strand magazine. No one ever complained about reading small parts of a tale at a time then.

- Comic books / graphic novels. Often more pictures than words, some crazy amazing books are graphic novels – V for Vendetta, The Watchmen ... is their intellectual value compromised due to the inclusion of pictures? Archie is a bloody God as far as I’m concerned.

- The poetry chapbook. Designed to be flipped through.

- Coffee table books. Visually pleasing AND informative. I’ve totally quoted coffee table books in essay’s before, no lie.

The list goes on ...

Google may present a quick and painless way to get at information, but I don’t think it is making us stupid. There are valid points to the argument that Google is detrimental to young scholarly minds, to be sure, but the bottom line is, the human desire to be an expert at something, to live for something, will triumph Google’s brevity and pithiness. We are miners, and as long as there are questions, there will be demands for answers.

(Plus, I'm kind of scared Google can hear my thoughts and might turn me into one of those colourful plastic balls in their headquarters.)

No matter how we may try to pummel his skinny ass, the geek will never die.

The internet will eat your soul.

Digitextuality is a term that expresses the continuities between old media and new media.

It differs from mere intertextuality because it moves beyond a new signifying system, and makes its meaning not only by building a new text through the absorption of influence from other texts, but by embedding the entirety of other text within the new.

The internet has swallowed everything else - how can other media compete?

To be sure, the internet, unlike any other media outlet, can make us believe that we exist as an avatar. I am not my Facebook account, for example. But someone who checks it out thoroughly might believe they are well aquainted with me even though it doesnt show my real name, pictures from only a small segment of a few years of my life, or even a comprehensive list of interests or favourite books.

Turkle stated that it is on the internet that our confrontations with technology as it collides with our sense of human identity are fresh, even raw. Serious gamers out there might believe that the internet is the only true life. And there are a bunch of games that capitalize on this. Second life, Simms, and so many others, are digital identities that we can slip into and out of like a pair of shoes.

There are lots of ways we can interact with the internet. To interact internally is to become a member of a virtual world. To interact externally is to be situated outside of it, controlling it "from above". Then there are exploratory, when we are free to wander around the online world, and ontological, when we determind the world and the story that comes out of it.

Games usually involve internal / ontological participation (especially adventure games, as opposed to simulation games).

If there is anything Noel Caroll taught me with his discussion of horror films, it is the fact that the emotions we experience through fiction are exactly the same as the ones envoked by reality.

It makes me sort of uncomfortable to think I could have control over an entire world, fall in love, kill people, have babies, get rich, and even die, without any of that ever even existing exept in my own mind.

But that brings me to a larger question ... does it really matter ?

After I watched the Matrix I was quite content to decide that if this world simply didn't exist, I wouldn't really care. The experience of life is simply that - an experience. So I suppose it doesn't really matter if you want to live vicariously through an avatar.

My room mates aren't even up yet and I've already had an existential crisis. What ELSE is new?

Walter Ong - Jesuit priest by day, academic truth seeker by night.

Walter Ong thought that writing is the most momentous of all human technological innovations. It isn't merely an appendage to speech, but rather restructures consciousness itself. He described writing as a technology that we have to force ourselves to learn, and it effects the transformation of human thought from the world of sound to the world of sight. Writing allows for the "interiorization of thought", and implies that the word is a thing, not an event.

Such a transition has implications for structuralism, deconstruction.

This is where I can't help but draw on my post modern homeboy, Adorno, and his scathing modernist raval George Orwell.

Orwell maintains that our slovenly modern language is the driving force behind our deteriorating culture. (LOL, brb, ttyl, OMG !!)He believes that a concise style, conducive to logic, reason and consistency, is the ideal avenue to truth. So Orwell kind of takes Ong's idea that writing restructures thought and takes it a step further and gets petty about style.

Howver, Orwell’s style poses too many restrictions to provide an adequate method of communication for particularly radical thoughts, thereby limiting self expression and actually contributing to the downfall of language and culture.

The contrast between Orwell’s intentions see themselves echoed in postmodern aims. Both Jacques Derrida and Theodore Adorno, postmodern thinkers, also had an agenda of political hope and change, but sought to achieve these goals by means of an elaborate writing style. Both Orwell and Adorno recognized a close relation between the corruption of language and the corruption of politics, but disagreed on the need for clear language as a vehicle for change.

The idea that writing restructures consciousness seems to be floating around all over the place, especially in my program Arts and Contemporary Studies.

Ong lamented this fact. He wasn't down with the feeling of finality writing possesses, and the closure it encouraged. (Pressing backspace is impossible, apparently.) But I see what he is getting at. Orality is so up in the air. For example if I ran into a friend on campus and they said "Kait lets do coffee Thursday" and I replied "Oh yeah sure 3 oclock?" I pretty much am free to do whatever I want on Thursday at 3 because there is no sure-fire way my friend can go back and cite this statement - nothing has been set in stone. If they approach me later about it I could just tell them they were going crazy,and I hadn't seen them for a week. But if this conversation goes down via text message, the plans are more finalized.

(I do this often, for fun. Just to test Ong's theory)

Welcome to my Narrative in a Digital Age Blog.

I named this blog after an excerpt from an Allen Ginsberg poem, Howl (1956). Part II of the poem, depicting this line, is a lament of "the monster of mental consciousness that preys on the Lamb". Meaning, the detrimental state of industrial civilization, characterized by the word 'moloch'. Ginsberg expresses resentfulness toward the radios, smokestacks, prisons and buildings he references.

Moloch is also the name of a monster in the movie Metropolis. This 1927 silent film was said to have influenced his poem. I watched this film recently and found it to be surprisingly cynical and depressing, (considering it has no dialogue). It is set in 2026, when the class divide has reached crazy levels such that the working class retreats to an underworld of gloom and filth to live out their days, and the rich live in sunny splendour eating grapes and dancing to polka music. The entire film is dominated by obscure, elaborate technology.

I felt that Howl is appropriate in this discussion of Narrative in a Digital Age because it embodies so much of the popular opinion we hear about increasing technology. It is widely thought that the internet is changing the way we think and read, Google is promoting artificial intellegence, and crazy visual effects are rendering us slaves to visual stimulation as opposed to intellectual.

These are all relevant points, I reckon.
But what can be said of the sunny splendour of convenience? The necessity of accessible information to the writer? The sheer pleasure of talking to my homeboys and girls on facebook chat?

At any rate, we've reached a digital age and can't go back now. So we may as well be look on the bright side of it. And that's what this blog will try to achieve. An optimistic view of digitized narrative. I might fail brutally and throw my laptop out the window onto Bloor street, (but I really doubt this). My idea of high tech is pretty much a gee-haw whimmie diddle. This is going to be interesting.

Join me on the wild ride as I explore the trials and tribulations of the mind that is pure machinery ...