All posts by zap-editor

08. on bio-piracy & guerrilla gardening

b. Britta Riley: A Garden in My Apartment

A GARDEN IN MY APARTMENT:
WINDOW FARMS

Britta Riley, TEDxManhattan; New York, USA
2011, 7 min 53 sec

Window farms consist of vertical hydroponic platforms for growing food in city windows. Britta Riley wanted to grow her own food in her tiny apartment. So she and her friends developed a system for growing plants in discarded plastic bottles — researching, testing and tweaking the system using social media, trying many variations at once and quickly arriving at the optimal system. Call it distributed DIY. And the results? Delicious.

Instead of perfecting and patenting the invention, Britta Riley created a social media site where she published the design for free, and even pointed out the flaws, designed in conjunction with an online citizen science web platform, with over 18,000 community members worldwide sharing ideas and contributing to perfecting the Window Farm techniques.

09. sharing circles, (e)conomy & doughnut economies

c. Anti-Slavery Campaign

ANTI-SLAVERY CAMPAIGN

Anti-Slavery Campaign; MTV
2007, 1 min 44 sec

Modern day slavery is big business. There are more people in slavery today than at any time in history… The UN estimates that 27 million people can be classified as slaves. Compare this to the 13 million Africans who were transported to the New World in the 350 years of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. The market in slave made products and services is worth $32bn. The only truly new thing about slavery today is the collapse in the price of people. In Alabama in 1850 the average slave cost the equivalent of £25,000. Returns would have been around 5%. Today as slave might cost you as little as £20. Returns can be as high as 800%. People are cheaper and in more plentiful supply than ever. It’s a good business to be in.

Slavery in the 21st Century is essentially no different from slavery in previous centuries. You’re a slave if you are no more than something to be bought and sold. If you play no part in deciding your future and your fate. If yours is a life without options. Today, child soldiers, debt bondage slaves and women who have been trafficked for sexual exploitation are just some of the more obvious examples of slavery. But the countless asylum seekers and immigrants who are forced to work, often without pay, in the industries that inhabit the twilight world of illegality are also enslaved.

This ad as accessed via an e-mail that was sent to big names in the financial world, promising them a ‘hot new investment’. When they clicked on the link in the e-mail, the found a website for a financial company. Four Continents Capital Management, that seemed to be investing in slave labour. The ad introduced their CEO.

 

03. zombie ontology

c. Shoshana Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism

 

SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM

Shoshana Zuboff, VPRO, Amsterdam
2019, 49 min, 59 sec

Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff wrote a monumental book about the new economic order that is alarming. “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” reveals how the biggest tech companies deal with our data. How do we regain control of our data? What is surveillance capitalism? In this documentary, Zuboff takes the lid off Google and Facebook and reveals a merciless form of capitalism in which no natural resources, but the citizen itself, serves as a raw material. How can citizens regain control of their data? It is 2000, and the dot.com crisis has caused deep wounds. How will startup Google survive the bursting of the internet bubble? Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin don’t know anymore how to turn the tide. By chance, Google discovers that the “residual data” that people leave behind in their searches on the internet is very precious and tradable. This residual data can be used to predict the behavior of the internet user. Internet advertisements can, therefore, be used in a very targeted and effective way. A completely new business model is born: “surveillance capitalism.”

04. other, a hesitant smile

c. Rea Tajiri, History and Memory

HISTORY AND MEMORY:
FOR AKIKO AND TAKASHIGE

Rea Tajiri, USA
1991, 5 min 10 sec

Groundbreaking and haunting, this film is a poetic composition of recorded history and non-recorded memory. Filmmaker Rea Tajiri’s family was among the 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans who were imprisoned in internment camps after the attack on Pearl Harbor. And like so many who were in the camps, Tajiri’s family wrapped their memories of that experience in a shroud of silence and forgetting.

Ruminating on the difficult nature of representing the past – especially a past that exists outside traditional historic accounts – Tajiri blends interviews, memorabilia, a pilgrimage to the camp where her mother was interned, and the story of her father, who had been drafted pre-Pearl Harbor and returned to find his family’s house removed from its site.

Throughout, she surveys the impact of images (real images, desired images made real, and unrealized dream images). The film draws from a variety of sources: Hollywood spectacle, government propaganda, newsreels, memories of the living, and sprits of the dead, as well as Tajiri’s own intuitions of a place she has never visited, but of which she has a memory. More than simply calling attention to the gaps in the story of the Japanese American internment, this important film raises questions about collective history – questions that prompt Tajiri to daringly re-imagine and re-create what has been stolen and what has been lost.

08. on bio-piracy & guerrilla gardening

c. Sam Van Aken, Tree of 40 Fruits

TREE OF 40 FRUITS

National Geographic, Syracuse University, USA
2015, 4 min 5 sec

Sam Van Aken, an artist and professor at Syracuse University, uses “chip grafting” to create trees that each bear 40 different varieties of stone fruits, or fruits with pits. Van Aken says it’s both a work of art and a time line of the varieties’ blossoming and fruiting. He’s created more than a dozen of the trees that have been planted at sites such as museums around the U.S., which he sees as a way to spread diversity on a small scale.

05. poetry is not a luxury

c. Matthijs Vlot, Hello

HELLO,
LYRICS RECREATED WITH EDITED MOVIES

Matthijs Vlot, Ant1mat3rie/ Mattie Harpes, USA
2012, 1 min 18 sec

Lionel Richie’s song, “Hello,” is the basis of the latest viral video making the rounds on the internet!The short video features clips of various films with actors speaking the lyrics of the song. The editing is genius, playing off of the awkward timing of Lionel Richie’s original music video. You’ll want to watch it more than once !!

1.ET 2.Bride o f Frankenstein 3.Braveheart 4.BeingJohnMalkovich 5.Back? to the future 6. Magnolia 7.ToyStory3? 8.Schindler’sList 9.JailhouseRock? 10.AnnieHall 11.TheBirds 12.Avatar 13.Lawrence of Arabia 14. Enter the Dragon 15. Big Lebowski 16. Airplane 17.NakedGun 18.Goldfinger 19. LA Confidential 20.Borat 21.YellowSubmarine 22.From Dusk till Dawn? 23.Back to the Future 24.TheMatrix 25.NakedGun 26.Singing in the Rain 27.PlanetOfTheApes 28. Goodfellas 29.Back to the Future 30.Ben Hur 31.Lethal Weapon. 32.Lawrence of Arabia 33.Easy Rider 34.Schindler’s list 35.Inception 36. Shaft 37.Rambo — First Blood 38. Shaft 39.A Few Good Men 40.Glengarry Glen Ross 41.Taxi Driver 42. Total Recall

03. zombie ontology

d. Jean-Luc Godard, Alphaville

ALPHAVILLE

Jean-Luc Godard
1965, 1 min, 27 sec

Jean-Luc Godard’s film – “a science fiction film without special effects” in the words of the critic Andrew Sarris; “a fable on a realistic ground” in Godard’s own description – is a cry of protest aimed at the worshippers of science and logic. Unlike Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which now resembles a picturesque relic of long-abandoned aspirations, Alphaville still seems to be watching the world come to meet it. And the world is very much closer to the director’s creation than it was back in 1965.

04. other, a hesitant smile

d. Francis Jupurrurla Kelly, Man of Media

MAN OF MEDIA

Francis Jupurrurla Kelly, Ronin Films, Australia 
2019, 2 min 51 sec

Francis Jupurrurla Kelly, a proud Warlpiri Lawman, producer of highly regarded TV programs such as Bush Mechanics, Manyu Wana and Coniston, was a key figure in the foundation of the Warlpiri Media Association. The Association is operating to this day as PAW Media (Pintubi, Anmatjere and Warlpiri Media), from its base in Yuendumu, about 300km north-west of Alice Springs in central Australia.

In 2016 Jupurrurla was elected Chair of the Central Land Council (CLC) to represent the Indigenous people of Central Australia in the Northern Territory. His commitment and contribution as an ambassador for Aboriginal people resonates throughout Australia, having a profound impact on many Indigenous lives.

This film follows Francis as he performs his various roles in official capacities and as a respected leader, film-maker and role model within his community of Yuendumu.

With privileged access to archival material from the 1980s to the present day, the film tells a rich and colorful story of a man, his work, his family and the life of his community.

To this day Francis continues to document history through film so that story and culture can be preserved, and for audiences all over the world to understand more about his people, their struggles and their dreams.

Director, Producer, Writer, Sound Recordist and Music composer –
Josef Jakamarra Egger
Photography – Shane Mulcahy
Editor – Stuart Liddell
Commissioned by NITV and produced by CAAMA Productions, Alice Springs.

06. the thought police

c. John Cage, 4’33”

4’33”

John Cage,  McCallum Theatre, Palm Desert, CA. USA
2010, 7 min 44 sec 

In a world plagued by Muzak, John Cage needed to find a quiet way to make a powerful statement.

On August 29, 1952, at a rustic outdoor chamber music hall tucked on a wooded dirt road in Woodstock, New York, the piano virtuoso David Tudor prepared to perform the most jarring piece of music ever written. Or not written, depending how you look at it.

Tudor sat at the piano, propped up six pages of blank sheet music, and closed the keyboard lid. He then clicked a stopwatch and rested his hands on his lap. The audience waited for something to happen as a breeze stirred the nearby trees. After 30 seconds of stillness, Tudor opened the lid, paused, closed it again, and went back to doing nothing. He turned one of the blank pages. Raindrops began to patter. After two minutes and 23 seconds, Tudor again opened and closed the lid. At this point, exasperated people in the crowd walked out. Their footsteps echoed down the aisles. After another minute and 40 seconds, Tudor opened the piano lid one last time, stood up, and bowed. What was left of the audience politely applauded.

It was nearly two decades before the infamous summer of ’69, but what had transpired was arguably the wildest, most controversial musical event ever to rock Woodstock. The piece was called 4’33”—for the three silent movements totaling four minutes and 33 seconds—and it was composed by John Cage. It seemed like a joke. In fact, it would redefine music.

07. transition town

c. Thom Anderson, Los Angeles Plays Itself

LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF

Thom Anderson,
2003, 169 min

A “city symphony in reverse” (J. Hoberman, Village Voice), Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself dismantles not only popular stereotypes about The City of Angels, but also its most famous trademark, Hollywood. Packed with clips from nearly 200 films set in Los Angeles (not L.A., the nickname despised by the film’s narrator), Andersen’s immersive cine-essay divides and examines the city threefold: as background, character and subject. Drawing us into a fanatical, almost secret urban history Los Angeles Plays Itself is at once a hilarious travelogue and mesmerizing experience.