All posts by zap-editor

a. Johann Lurf, ★

Johann Lurf, unfinished film
2017, 1 min

A film with no answers but as many questions as there are stars in the universe, Austrian structuralist Johann Lurf has chosen an audacious and ever-expanding subject for his feature film debut: the stars of cinema. Not the movie stars, but the stars in the night’s sky, pinpricks of light against the darkness excerpted from films beginning at cinema’s dawn and continuing to this present day in a project that is planned to be expanded yearly. These stellar instances, riven from context with sound intact—ambient hums, grand orchestral scores, pedantic explanations, dreamy speculation—are magical fields of darkness sprinkled with possibilities. Lurf’s jazzy editing, balancing tranquil concentration and jumpy jitters based on his methodology of retaining each clip’s length, image and sound, sends the audience on a journey across the tones of promise and threat that emanate from the cosmos. A subject difficult if not impossible to accurately photograph on film, we are therefore greeted again and again by the varied interpretations of the starry night by matte artists and special effects wizards, gazing now in stillness, now in careening motion across or into space at incandescent nebulae, distant twinkling dots, and the black void in-between. Surveying a history of cinema’s fixation with, and escape to, outer space, we find both what audiences in their own times saw up there, as well as mirrors of our own wonderment: Awe, terror, hope, arrogant confidence, melancholic yearning and blank, awesome silence. These are the rare moments when the movie audience, backs to the projector, in fact faces light projected at them: Our eyes are the screens for the cinema of the stars.
Daniel Kasman in October 2017

a. Adam Curtis, The Century of Self

THE CENTURY OF SELF

Adam Curtis, BBC
2002, 58 min 45 sec

The Century of the Self is a 2002 British television documentary series by filmmaker Adam Curtis. It focuses on the work of psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Anna Freud, and PR consultant Edward Bernays. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, changed our perception of the mind and its workings. The documentary explores the various ways that governments and corporations have used Freud’s theories. Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays, who was the first to use psychological techniques in public relations, are discussed in part one.

* summary & further reading

Tom Scott: welcome to life

03. ZOMBIE ONTOLOGY

 

In a networked information economy, our digital selves seem more and more shaped by corporate media and consumerism. How can storytellers and artists twist and reinvent the digital tools to reclaim a networked world? Can concepts such blockchain help us imagine digital and virtual communities with ‘data sovereignity’.

In what Harvard scholar & social psychologist Shoshanna Zuboff calls ‘surveillance capitalism,’ she states: “We thought that we search Google, but now we understand that Google searches us. We assumed that we use social media to connect, but we learned that connection is how social media uses us. Surveillance capitalists exploit the widening inequity of knowledge for the sake of profits. They manipulate the economy, our society and even our lives with impunity, endangering not just individual privacy but democracy itself.” We are now remotely controlled. Surveillance tools are being deployed as a means to exert social control, and turning security agency tech on their own civilians. Surveillance capitalists have committed a coup: they control the science and the scientists, the secrets and the truth.

Even if we as users would slightly be vigilant about how our data is used, we would have to review over 1000 privacy contracts, and by only questioning these, we would be written out of the system as access would be denied to these very tech tools, that in essence should be a part of our everyday infrastructure as a commons instead it has turned into an info-dystopia. “It is the right to our Future Tense.”

FURTHER READING & RESEARCH

 

Eben Moglen,  “Anarchism Triumphant:  Free Software and the Death of Copyright,”First Monday” ‘August 2, 1999)

 Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas (2001)

Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (2006)

Peter Drahos & John Braithwaite, Information Feudalism (2002)

 The Intercept: How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations  (2004)

Zuboff, Shoshana: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019)

Marina Warner: Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time: The 1994 Reith Lectures by Marina Warner (1994

Scott Bukatman, Hellboy’s World: Comics and Monsters on the Margins (2016)

Mark Fisher: The Weird and the Eerie (2017)

Jaron Lanier: Who Owns The Future (2013) + Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality (2017) + Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2018)

Eben Moglen,  Anarchism Triumphant:  Free Software and the Death of Copyright,” (1999)

Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas (2001)

Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (2006)

Peter Drahos & John Braithwaite, Information Feudalism (2002)

The Intercept: How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations (2014)

David Bollier, Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own (2009)

FURTHER RESOURCES

Front Page: Free Software Foundation

b. The Truman Show

THE TRUMAN SHOW

Peter Weir, USA
1998, 9 min 60 sec 

He’s the star of the show–but he doesn’t know. Jim Carrey wowed critics and audiences alike as unwitting Truman Burbank in this marvel of a movie from director Peter Weir (Witness, Dead Poets Society) about a man whose life is a nonstop TV show. Truman doesn’t realize that his quaint

b. Dennis O’Rourke, Cannibal Tours

 

CANNIBAL TOURS

Dennis O’Rourke, 1988, AUSTRALIA
1 hour, 07 min, 07 sec

Cannibal Tours is a documentary by Australian director and cinematographer Dennis O’Rourke. The scenes in it are presented without comment, but its irony and disquiet at the nature of ‘cannibal tourism’ is blindingly obvious.

The soundtrack of the film is a mixture of music, sounds of nature, and a symphony of camera shutters.

The film follows European and American tourists as they travel the middle Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. Most of the villages in the film are inhabited by the Iatmul people. The tourists enjoy bargaining for local handcrafts such as woodcarvings and baskets, snap endless photos of the colourful savages, hand out cigarettes, watch dance performances, and offer naive comments about native people and how they live in harmony with nature.

b. Frank Zappa interview

INTERVIEW

Frank Zappa, MTV, USA
1984, 18 min 59 sec

MTV is helping with that syndrome because all video outlets and that’s basically the focus of the music today as whether or not what you do is video acceptable let’s let’s look at it realistically if a person likes music that is not enough in the 80s you can like music and you can play music you can sing you can dance you can have all these things going for you but you’re not even going to get to first base unless you have science fiction hair and diagonal zippers on your clothes forget it you go to a record company to make a deal and the first thing they’re going to do is look at your bubble isset a picture if they don’t like that they won’t even listen to the tape in fact they don’t even care about the tape because they can always get Trevor Horn to fix it and so after Trevor is fixed it and they’ve approved your publicity photo then you get the video treatment and everything gets formulated according to the Warner Brothers aesthetic it goes onto MTV and it goes on to any other competitor that hasn’t been bought by MTV yet and the group gets exactly one chance to do one thing and their musical lifespan is in direct proportion to the interest that the audience has in the way they look because the whole thing is based on a visual merchandising so what happened to music?

b. David Cronenberg, Videodrome

VIDEODROME

David Cronenberg
1983, 1 min 55 sec

When Max Renn goes looking for edgy new shows for his sleazy cable TV station, he stumbles across the pirate broadcast of a hyperviolent torture show called Videodrome. As he struggles to unearth the origins of the program, he embarks on a hallucinatory journey into a shadow world of right-wing conspiracies, sadomasochistic sex games, and bodily transformation. Starring James Woods and Deborah Harry in one of her first film roles, Videodrome is one of writer/director David Cronenberg’s most original and provocative works, fusing social commentary with shocking elements of sex and violence. With groundbreaking special effects makeup by Academy Award®-winner Rick Baker, Videodrome has come to be regarded as one of the most influential and mind-bending science fiction films of the 1980s.

b. Kate Raworth, A healthy economy should be designed to thrive, not grow

A HEALTHY ECONOMY SHOULD NOT BE DESIGNED TO THRIVE, NOT GROW

Kate Raworth, TED Talks, USA
2008, 15min 53 sec

What would a sustainable, universally beneficial economy look like? “Like a doughnut,” says Oxford economist Kate Raworth. In a stellar, eye-opening talk, she explains how we can move countries out of the hole — where people are falling short on life’s essentials — and create regenerative, distributive economies that work within the planet’s ecological limits.

b. Svetlana Boym, Slow Thinking

SLOW THINKING

Svetlana Boym, Think aloud
2016, 3 min 40 sec

Boym’s written work explored relationships between utopia and kitsch, memory and modernity, and homesickness and the sickness of home. Her research interests included 20th-century Russian literature, cultural studies, comparative literature and literary studies. In addition to teaching and writing, Boym also sat on the Editorial Collective of the interdisciplinary scholarly journal Public Culture. Boym was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Cabot Award for Research in Humanities, and an award from the American Council of Learned Societies. She won a Gilette Company Fellowship which provided her half a year study at the American Academy in Berlin.