All posts by zap-editor

11. you tickle, therefore I am

l. Gordon Wasson, The Mushroom Man

THE MUSHROOM MAN

Gordon Wasson
1996, 43 min 09 sec

In addition to being a legendary mushroom expert, Robert Gordon Wasson was an author and Vice President for Public Relations at JP Morgan & Company.1 He studied at the Columbia School of Journalism and then the London School of Economics after receiving the first Pulitzer Traveling Scholarship. After teaching English at Columbia University from 1921-22, he became a reporter for the New Haven (Connecticut) Register. By 1925, he was living in New York City and writing a financial column for the New York Herald Tribune. Wasson joined the JP Morgan Company in 1934 where he pioneered the field of banking public relations. He served as vice president from 1943-1963 when he retired.

Wasson’s introduction to mushrooms came from his wife Valentina Pavlovna Guercken. On their honeymoon in New York’s Catskill Mountains in 1927, Valentina found mushrooms similar to the ones she had known in her native Russia. This discovery sparked both their interest and they went on to study and incorporate mycology with other disciplines such as religion, art, history, and linguistics.

06. the thought police

l. Real-Time Face Capture and Reenactment

REAL-TIME FACE CAPTURE AND REENACTMENT OF RGB VIDEOS

Face2face, Niebnerlab
2016, 6 min 36 sec

We present a novel approach for real-time facial reenactment of a monocular target video sequence (e.g., Youtube video). The source sequence is also a monocular video stream, captured live with a commodity webcam. Our goal is to animate the facial expressions of the target video by a source actor and re-render the manipulated output video in a photo-realistic fashion. To this end, we first address the under-constrained problem of facial identity recovery from monocular video by non-rigid model-based bundling. At run time, we track facial expressions of both source and target video using a dense photometric consistency measure. Reenactment is then achieved by fast and efficient deformation transfer between source and target. The mouth interior that best matches the re-targeted expression is retrieved from the target sequence and warped to produce an accurate fit. Finally, we convincingly re-render the synthesized target face on top of the corresponding video stream such that it seamlessly blends with the real-world illumination. We demonstrate our method in a live setup, where Youtube videos are reenacted in real time.

04. other, a hesitant smile

l. Joshua Oppenheimer, The Act of Killing

THE ACT OF KILLING

Joshua Oppenheimer, Indonesia
2013, 2 min 41 sec

A documentary that challenges former Indonesian death squad leaders to reenact their real-life mass-killings in whichever cinematic genres they wish, including classic Hollywood crime scenarios and lavish musical numbers.

05. poetry is not a luxury

l. Todd Haynes, Superstar

SUPERSTAR: THE KAREN CARPENTER STORY

Todd Haynes
1988, 43 min, 19 sec

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story is a 1987 American experimental short biographical film that portrays the last 17 years of singer Karen Carpenter’s life, as she struggled with anorexia. Directed by Todd Haynes, the film uses Barbie dolls as actors, as well as documentaries and artistic footage. Superstar was co-written and co-produced by Haynes and Cynthia Schneider, with an unauthorized soundtrack consisting mostly of the hit songs of The Carpenters. It was filmed over a ten-day period at Bard College in the summer of 1985. Barry Ellsworth collaborated on the film and was the cinematographer for the Barbie themed interior segments of the film.

The film was withdrawn from circulation in 1990 after Haynes lost a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Karen’s brother and musical collaborator, Richard Carpenter. The film’s title is derived from The Carpenters’ 1971 hit, “Superstar”. Meanwhile, over the years Superstar has developed into a cult film, has notably been bootlegged, and is included in Entertainment Weekly‘s 2003 list of top 50 cult movies. Its apparent metamodern purpose as a film, including multiple perspectives on anorexia nervosa, the pop music industry, The Carpenters themselves, and the definition of a biographical film, has also given it a legacy among fans of avant-garde cinema; Guy Lodge, writing for The Guardian, expressed that ‘while Haynes is working in a vein of very rich irony, there’s not a hint of snark here’.

07. transition town

j. Jeff Reynolds, Garbage Warrior: Earthships

GARBAGE WARRIOR:
EARTHSHIPS

Jeff Reynolds
2007, 1 hour, 27 sec

Imagine a home that heats itself, that provides its own water, electricity and spaces to grow food. One that needs no expensive technology, that recycles its own waste and that can be built anywhere, by anyone, out of garbage. Literally. Thirty years ago, architect Michael Reynolds imagined such a home and then set out to build. Today, there are strong communities of people living in these homes throughout the world, but all doesn’t come without the constant resistance and hindrance from government and big business which are rightly threatened by such communities and alternate, independent and sustainable ways of living…

11. you tickle, therefore I am

m. Errol Morris, Wormwood

WORMWOOD

Errol Morris, Netflix series, USA
2017, 1 min 27 sec

Wormwood is a 2017 American six part docudrama miniseries directed by Errol Morris and released on Netflix on December 15, 2017. The series is based on the life of a scientist, Frank Olson, who worked for a secret government biological warfare program located at Fort Detrick, Maryland (the USBWL). It focuses on the events leading up to and following his controversial death, which the US government originally claimed was a tragic accident, but later admitted was likely a suicide, caused by a mental breakdown brought on after being unknowingly dosed with LSD, while at a meeting with colleagues from the CIA who were involved in Project MKUltra. It also in the present day, follows Frank Olson’s son, and discusses his belief that his father may have been murdered due to being perceived as a potential security risk. Interspersed between interviews and archival footage, are live action reenactments of the final day’s of Frank Olson’s life and the various theories involving his death.

04. other, a hesitant smile

* summary & further research

Jean Rouch: Les Maîtres fous

04. OTHER, A HESITANT SMILE

[ON OTHERING, THE RETURN GAZE AND THE POSSIBILITY OF OTHER]

This module questions modes of ‘othering’ and rethinks the geo-political economies of knowledge and power, lived and viewed from ‘elsewhere’. Revaluating the cultural and political understandings of the world today, it explores the historical formations and political configurations of multiple ways of storytelling and how divergent knowledge and practices make worlds and overcomes ‘othering’ caught between the parameters of power and inequality. How can we open up possibilities for a pluriverse, a cosmos composed through divergent practices of storytelling and the emergence, transformation, and differentiation of a variety of uses of time.

FURTHER READING & RESEARCH

Marisol de la Cadena & Mario Blaser, Eds.: A World of Many Worlds (2018)

Vijay Prashad,  The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (2009); The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (2012)

 Constance Penley, Elisabeth Lyon, Lynn Spigel, and Janet Bergstrom, eds. Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction (1991)

David Abrams: The Spell of the Sensous  (1996)

Glenn Aparicio Parry: Original Thinking: A Radical ReVisioning of Time, Humanity, and Nature (2015)

 Saadawi, Ahmed, Frankenstein in Baghdad (2018)

 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide (2014)

 Chambers, Iain, Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorised Modernities (2017)

 Ursula Münster, Thom van Dooren, Sara Asu Schroer, & Hugo Reinert, eds. Multispecies Care in the Sixth Extinction; a collection of short essays in “Theorizing the Contemporary”  (2021)

Deborah Bird Rose, Thom van Dooren & Matthew Chrulew, eds., Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death and Generations (2017)

Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other, How Anthropology Makes Its Object (1983/2014)

Eric Michaels, For a cultural future: Francis Jupurrurla makes TV at Yuendumu (1987)

 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics (2014)

Helen Macdonald, Falcon (2006)

Jean Rouch, First Film (1947-1991)

Mark Dion on the Economics of Smurf Society and Why is there only one Smurfette (Paper Tiger TV, 1991)

Thom Andersen,  Los Angeles Plays itself, (2008)

Chris Marker, La Jetee (1962) 

Alfred Hitchcock, VERTIGO (1958)

Rea Tajiri, History and Memory  (2020)


FURTHER RESOURCES

12 monkeys movie theater scene of Hitchcock’s VERTIGO

Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizons (1993)

New Media Projects at Yuendumu: Inter-cultural engagement and self-determination in an era of accelerated globalization: Continuum: Vol 16, No 2, 2010

07. transition town

k. Urban-Think Tank, Torre David

TORRE DAVID

Urban-Think Tank; Caracas, Venezuela
2012, 2 min 02 sec

Torre David, a 45-story office tower in Caracas designed by the distinguished Venezuelan architect Enrique Gómez, was almost complete when it was abandoned following the death of its developer, David Brillembourg, in 1993 and the collapse of the Venezuelan economy in 1994. Today, it is the improvised home of a community of more than 750 families, living in an extra-legal and tenuous occupation that some have called a vertical slum.

Urban-Think Tank, spent a year studying the physical and social organization of this ruin-turned-home. Where some only see a failed development project, U-TT has conceived it as a laboratory for the study of the informal. In their Torre David / Grand Horizonte exhibit and in their forthcoming book Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities the architects lay out their vision for practical and sustainable interventions in Torre David and similar informal settlements around the world. They argue that the future of urban development lies in collaboration among architects, private enterprise, and the global population of slum-dwellers. This film is a call to arms to architects and everyone – to see in the informal settlements of the world a potential for innovation and experimentation, with the goal of putting design in the service of a more equitable and sustainable future.

04. other, a hesitant smile

m. Chris Cunningham, Spectral Musicians

SPECTRAL MUSICIANS

Chris Cunningham
2019, 4 min 59 sec

This is a short film made by Chris Cunningham (best known for the Aphex Twin music videos) for Warp Records sometime in the mid-2000s. I spliced together some handheld audience footage and about a minute of video that I found on the Vimeo channel of one of the original editors of the short: https://vimeo.com/39202335​