Category: Film

Temples For Machine Gods
Perhaps its not a good thing for conference programmers to reveal their favourite speakers and sessions, but James Bridle's Where The Robots Work was my personal highlight from our programme at FutureEverything 2011.
James' keynote explored how cities were reorienting themselves around our emerging information infrastructure, notably how the built environment was now as much designed for machine habitation as it is for human occupation.
One of the session's more fascinating anecdotes illustrated how the price of real estate in Manhattan is dramatically affected by proximity to supernodes of connectivity; proximity that can shave fractions of seconds from Wall Street trades, and there are real estate lawyers as the KLG Estate Planning & Probate Attorneys which can also help with this.
So it was a nice surprise today to find a short documentary – Ben Mendelsohn's Bundled, Buried & Behind – that relates the story of one of those supernodes, 60 Hudson Street in Lower Manhattan…
60 Hudson Street's art deco motifs underline its role as a communications hub that originates prior to the era of copper lines and early telephony. Its physical architecture is fitting, given its centrality in civilisation past and present.
However, it's somewhat strange that 60 Hudson Street's modern equivalents are so innocuous and prosaic. Given how crucial these facilities are to humanity, shouldn't we beatify and exalt them with the very best in modern architectural practice; aren't they the modern temples of our civilisation?
Though there are pragmatic reasons to avoid drawing attention to these facilities, perhaps their elevation to templehood would put them beyond humanity's destructive impulses. Indeed, could future generations venerate the temples of machine gods as did the surviving humans of Beneath the Planet of the Apes and their veneration of atomic weapons.
Perhaps we wish our machines to remain anonymous and mundane, not only to confine their magic to the Elysian cloud, but also to remind ourselves that humanity remains in charge and they inhabit prisons of our making.
—
(incidentally Life-Art-Us has a great summary of James' talk)
November 9, 2011
The Dreamers
My good friend Matt Maude has been shortlisted for the Virgin Media Shorts 2011 prize, with his piece The Dreamers…
A woman rises from her bed in the middle of the night. As she crosses the city, we see other sleepwalkers congregating to one place.
Matt tells a great story, with few words and some lovely expressive actors – but his talents aren't limited to the screen; check out the story of how he cleared the rights for the use of Sigur Rós in The Dreamers.
October 25, 2011
Shelf Life
Eventually, Everything is Bits. Even you.
And Everything has a shelf life, even shelves.
My shelves are experiencing an accelerating half life – a shelfular singularity if you like. Books, photos, movies, music and games now inhabit the clouds, pixellated, digitised and discless. My media genome is now scattered across many heavenly shelves…
—
Moving pictures took almost two years to turn from these…
into this: (their corporeal forms now grace the shelves of charity stores)

—
Then came the kindling of the pages, turning most of these…
…into things that could be in many places, but mostly in two.
Those that couldn’t make the journey, remain neither wholly binary or atomic.
—

Along the way, I started foresaking these…
…and adopting their etheral brothers, though some still remain in limbo:
—

The most precious, began as atoms, then light, before becoming embalmed in silver hallide…
… and now existing as blocks of light, coarsing through slices of silcon, behind sheets of glass some livpure:

—
My shelves will soon be emptied and no longer required. I don’t own those in distant clouds, but I do own those in the computers that belong to me. I have one, where I own none of the contents, nor the shelf itself… and it hurts when it’s altered without consent.
Is this Better Than Owning? Perhaps.
The absence of atoms isn’t problematic, but my senses can’t yet fully appreciate and comprehend all the bits in all those new places…
October 6, 2011
Y, El Último Hombre
This week's episode of Lost – '316' – features a gratuitously self-referential shot of Hurley reading Y, El Último Hombre, the Spanish language edition of Y: The Last Man, written in 2004 by one of Lost's current principal writers, Brian K. Vaughn…
Nothing's ever a coincidence in the Lostiverse. Hurley is reading the fourth volume, One Small Step, a story with a very Planet of the Apes ending…what does that mean?!
—
Y: The Last Man is currently being adapted into a movie trilogy, but I've always thought it'd make for a great Abrams-esque TV quest 🙂
February 20, 2009
Sheffield: Made from Steel

The festivities of last month’s sophomore BarCamp in Sheffield, prompted sponsor Yorkshire Forward to offer a £500 prize to attendees who could best promote the city. We’ve already seen entries ranging from terror karaoke to hypnotic brain loops.
So here’s my entry, paying homage to the city’s steelworking heritage, it’s celebrated celluloid child – The Full Monty – and it’s bright future, currently very visibly ‘under construction’.
—
Thanks to J.J. Abrams for shooting a bunch of steelworkers and promptimg me to learn to use iMovie 🙂

December 13, 2008
Star Trek
I should be depressed. I should be indignant. I should be angry.
Alongside Bruce Wayne, James Tiberius Kirk was my fictional childhood hero, how can anyone, anyone but The Shat play Kirk?? Oddly, though Batman has been played by countless brilliant, middling and appalling actors, my fanboy-ity for Batman has remained undiminished. But Kirk is Shatner and can only be played by someone with a suitably monstrous ego!
And yet, I feel no Kirk Anxiety watching the trailer for JJ Abrams’ reboot of Star Trek. I just want to squee with fanboy excitement when I see the shiny-shiny production design, the billion-fireflies transporter FX and Michael Giacanno‘s screechy Lost-esque strings – so, in the opening desert chase, what’re the huge buildings in the distance and what’s with the giant quarry?
Regardless, seeing the new Kirk and Spock together, as above, fills me with excitement and perhaps shows that the iconic Kirk can be inhabited by a new actor…let’s just hope he can still do this, this, that, this and this 😉
November 17, 2008
Boxes + Clutter
This morning I serendepitously came across a review of Peter Walsh’s book on decluttering, It’s All To Much and got the chance to catch More4’s documentary on Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes – each work ostensibly a stark counterpoint of the other.
Walsh’s book argues that we generate false relevance by constantly organising things we don’t
want and will never need, occupying not only physical, but emotional and mental space.
Jon Ronson’s wonderful documentary is oriented around Kubrick’s 1000-box archives and the many years that passed between his works, appearing to confirm Walsh’s position; that Kubrick’s obsessively indexed memos, photographs and scripts ultimately obscured his brilliance, constraining his latter years to less than a half dozen movies. Indeed, Kubrick’s brother-in-law, Jan Harlan, relates that Spielberg wrote, produced and released Schindler’s List in the same time that Kubrick was simply gathering pre-production photographs!
In reality, what appears to be the physical detritus of an obsessive procrastinator are the very tangible and palpable artefacts of Kubrick’s genius. His attention to detail, craftsmanship and precision on screen are the direct result of the precision he applied to indexing and archiving the moments, images and conversations which inspired him.
in looking for the item that would provide a final penetrating insight into Kubrick’s process, Ronson’s realises that Kubrick knew he had the ability to make films of genius and to do that there had to be a method…in Kubrick’s case this was precision and detail, manifested in the all the items Kubrick painstakingly collected. The Clutter Is Kubrick.
I wonder what Kubrick would have made of the Google-era, where every message, photo, phone call, song, book and movie can be recalled and shared in limitless quantity and the finest fidelity. When we can archive everything, what can be learnt from Walsh and Kubrick, in understanding that which must be retained and that which should be discarded…
{ Download or stream Boxes from Google Video… }
July 19, 2008
Quote Of The Day: John Cusack On Jesus…

From the June 2008 issue of Vanity Fair…
Who are your heroes in real life?
Let’s go with Jesus. Not the gay-hating, war-making political tool of
the right, but the outcast, subversive, supreme adept who preferred the
freaks and lepers and despised and doomed to the rich and powerful. The
man Garry Wills describes “with the future in his eyes … paradoxically
calming and provoking,” and whom Flannery O’Connor saw as “the ragged
figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of [one’s] mind.”
Neat.
May 16, 2008
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
He’s back! I couldn’t help but grin when the first few bars of the Indy theme play over the classically Spielberg-ian shot of a silhouetted Indy pulling on his fedora…
‘Damn, I thought that was closer’. Cute, but funny enough without the dialogue George.
Check out the HD versions at Yahoo…
February 14, 2008
Persepolis
Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical Persepolis is one of my favorite books and probably the one I’ve most often given as a gift to others.
Until today’s post at AICN, I had no idea there was a movie adaptation in production. The short trailer seems to capture the energy, spirit and humour of the book… I can’t wait to see it on the big screen 🙂
November 15, 2007