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.