The
idea was a simple enough question. How many ways are there to read James Joyce's
great and bizarre novel Finnegans Wake?
Seventeen different
musicians from all around the world, each assigned to render a chapter aurally.
The only requirements: the chapter's words must be audible, unabridged, and more
or less in their original order. This is a labor of love, not profit. We
have created this to be shared, so please tell your colleagues, students and
friends. To the wonderful world of Finnegans Wake readers,
newcomers and devoted followers alike: Here Comes
Everybody A note from project director Derek Pyle: "It has been
an absolute joy producing Waywords and Meansigns. Thank you to everyone who has
supported us, and a special thanks to all the contributors. You have poured your
hearts into this work, not to mention nearly breaking your backs, and it really
shows."
Waywords and Meansigns would not be possible without the support of many
people. Thanks to the fwread listserv, especially Peter Quadrino, Peter Chrisp,
Roman Tsivkin, as well as Adam Harvey and Mariana Lanari; your collective
knowledge of Joyce is astounding. Marie Broadway, Jake Tozer, Sam Nordli, and
Emma Pampanin co-hosted the Finnegans Wake parties that inspired this
project. Zach Leavitt and Chelsea Westra co-hosted the parties of the future.
Elaine Thomas, Dylan Muhlberg, the Amherst Irish Association, Jacqui Wise,
Krzysztof Bartnicki, Mike Moran, Mike Medeiros, Jason Gross, Rebecca
Hanssens-Reed, Billy Mills, and the James Joyce Gazette played pivotal roles
spreading the word about this project, through press coverage and otherwise.
Thanks to Mackenzie Libbey, and Michael Robbins, for their support throughout.
Thanks to L. Brown Kennedy and Annie G. Rogers for first introducing me to
Joyce. Special thanks to Mark Traynor and the James Joyce Centre in Dublin, and
to Robert Berry. Infinite thanks to the project contributors, and all
who channel the spirit of James
Joyce.
The absence of most Mary Shelly’s literary themes in 1931’s Frankenstein is what created a monster that is classically recognizable today. In 1990, RoboCop 2 got strip-searched and hot-wired to juxtapose his immediate — and previously 100% — good-nature. When Dark Side of the Rainbow hit psyches in 1973, The Wizard of Oz was changed forever. That week, when AceMo and Dali Vision were snowed into their apartment with a stack of VHS tapes, they hooked up an SP-404 and a pedal board to a VCR, and began a collaborative project called Action Figures, which I assumed stopped them from killing each other.
Action Figures, given the context and origin of their sound, holds traces of gestures of digi-spatial violence, cybernetics at work on the body. There’s an inferred feedback loop, an activated figure breaching, transmuting and giving life to a figurative action of extensive exostosis.– DeForrest Brown Jr.
Throughout that bunker of a week, Action Figures took live samples from these movies, used contrasting film-genres while pairing sounds, and mixed them with a 4-track recorder — as one would solve a puzzle. This process infuses their modality of translating art by way of skill, participation, and patience. This is Action Figures’ exterior, at their most basic. Without reading into their music-making process, Action Figures would remain a primitive piece of original work, presenting itself to listeners as if it were another noise or abstract ambient album, invoking a charm of evil, spiritually. Yet, the music is not as adrift in idea, as the conceptual aspect of the release is something more like reading this whole review in Blade Runner font. The three important conceptual aspects of Action Figures I’d like to touch on directly and/or metaphorically are: comedic timing, entrapment, and detachment.
“People buy the cookie-dough roll and slice it, and then they lay it on a cookie sheet. That’s not making chocolate-chip cookies.”– Amy Sedaris
Since AceMo and Dali Vision are graduates of studio production (both coming from a childhood of listening to jazz, both jazz musicians), they have a good sense of improvisation. On Action Figures, the two build up and work around the use of comedic timing to favor and pair specific sounds in order to trip-up listeners. This “trip-up” is common to genres like EDM, beat music, and the avant-garde, but generally this trick’s intent is to snap listeners back into the music, after having put them through something repetitious or intentionally drawl. I consider this to be the definition of sonic psychedelia: less drastic than a heavy hit of DMT and more like something so unexpected that humor overwhelms the audience’s sense of listening and are struck with immediate euphoria.
The euphoria developed throughout Action Figures’ debut is attributed to the faux-psychosis it festers within listeners using maximized layers of samples. It’s like the way heat effects people by way of wanting to go out, but then ice cream sales and murders go up. Or being given directions by someone using a language you’re unfamiliar with followed by your crazy “I’m fucked!” laugh. By balancing the humor between overabundance and psychedelia, Action Figures atones for flagrant thematic direction through their focus on how their music shifts itself, drawing listeners’ attention to the construction of their album.
“Nostalgia is a dysfunction of the historical impulse, or a corruption of the historical impulse.”– William Gibson
As Action Figures coerce listeners to hear the construction of their album via sound-play, they also entrap audience-ears through the materialization of immediate conflict and nostalgia. Considering Action Figures was created during a block of time when both AceMo and Dali Vision were stuck inside an apartment, the intention of using sounds from familiar-but-juxtaposing movies ensnares listeners’ curiosity. Many can just immediately input, “Wait, was that The Exorcist or a piano?” Yet, it was probably neither, because it was actually RoboCop exiting his Ford Taurus through a smattering of effects. Action Figures’ game of memory relies upon their sounds to instigate casual listener examination between recognizable snippets and blown-slowed sounds.
“You’ve got to get out of your mind / It’ll never get out of my mind.”– All The Things You Were
This curiosity teeters a tip that allows audience members to fall forth upon a quest of investigative thoughts. One thought could trigger those last few drags taken before leaving Gina at her job. It could be that unfamiliar cooking sound and not knowing what’ll be on the dinner table. What you think the first interview with a machine would sound like. Or mixing up The Last Boy Scout with Bullet Proof. Basically, Action Figures stems from a culture you’ve been sold on throughout your life, but it only garners their distinct sensibility as unique musicians by turning these sounds toward a territory that’s only marginally familiar — like picking up a book you haven’t read since the age of four, but only NOW you understand what it’s about.
“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.”– Susan Sontag
Action Figures is that face you were making as a child while thinking of how you’d look today. It’s like gluing toys together in the name of production and reappropriation. There’s a detachment element to what listeners hear in Action Figures akin to figuring out how every television show is a gimmick based on addiction and multimedia marketing. Or the feel when a white person does racist humor. Action Figures’ trajectory is intentionally non-immediate, but based around the immediacy of improvisational mixing and sound-clip sourcing. Just give this a try for detachment’s sake: listen to this entire album doing something, anything: writing, working, driving, tanning, eating, showering. Action Figures give their audiences two choices during the album’s duration: (1) ignore the sounds inhabiting your thoughts like a maniac thinks about a Saturday afternoon block of cartoons, or (2) accept what is being played, but ignore the feeling of lashing out into the air with fists, crying unintentionally, or laughing uncontrollably. Make the straightest face you can muster up. Action Figures just made nonmusic consumable. - C Monster
Iskopavanje starog tv-filma sada je ono što je nekada bilo iskopavanje groba kralja Arthura. A i u filmu je riječ o iskopavanju istine, mitova, "čistoće"... itd. Grant Morrison ga je volio.
Written by David Rudkin and directed by Alan Clarke, Penda's Fen was
first broadcast in 1974 as part of the BBC's Play for Today series. It
tells the story of seventeen year-old Stephen, a middle-class pastor's
son who has a bizarre series of encounters with angels, the composer
Edward Elgar, and King Penda, the mythical last pagan ruler of England.
These encounters - whether real or imagined - force Stephen to question
his religious beliefs, his politics and his sexuality.
Central to Rudkin's drama is the timelessness of the countryside and its
place in the construction of 'Englishness'. At the beginning of the
play, Stephen has a solid if somewhat conservative sense of nationality
defined through his Christianity, his belief in the sanctity of
marriage, faith in the military, distrust of socialism and a love of the
music of Elgar. His encounters, coupled with the discovery that his
father's beliefs are far from orthodox and his realisation that England
has a religion much older than Christianity, compel Stephen to
re-evaluate not only his own values, but also his notion of what it
means to be English.
Penda's Fen, with its discussions of Manichean philosophy, dream
sequences and the appearance of mythical creatures, seems somehow out of
place in Alan Clarke's output. Indeed Clarke himself, who was recruited
to direct the play at the behest of Rudkin who saw him as one of the
best TV directors in Britain at the time, claimed he never fully
understand what the play was about. Nevertheless, the exploration of
white English masculinity is a theme common to many of Clarke's dramas.
Whilst Stephen is far removed from the aggressive, urban and often
working-class (anti) heroes typical of Alan Clarke dramas, he shares
their disenfranchisement and their desire to rebel against his
surroundings. -
Justin Hobday
This is a post I’d been intent on writing for the past four years
but kept putting off: why go to great lengths to describe another
television drama which people can’t see? And how do you easily appraise
something which haunted you for twenty years and which remains a
significant obsession? My hand has been forced at last by a forthcoming
event (detailed below) so this at least has some fleeting relevance, but
before getting to that let’s have some facts. Penda’s Fen was a TV play first screened in March 1974 in
the BBC’s Play For Today strand. It was shot entirely on film (many
dramas in the 1970s recorded their interiors on video) and runs for
about 90 minutes. The writer was David Rudkin and it was directed by Alan Clarke,
a director regarded by many (myself included) as one of the great
talents to emerge from British television during the 1960s and 70s. The
film was commissioned by David Rose, a producer at the BBC’s Pebble Mill
studios in Birmingham, as one of a number of regional dramas. Rudkin
was, and still is, an acclaimed playwright and screenwriter whose work
is marked by recurrent themes which would include the tensions between
pagan spirituality and organized religion, and the emergence of
unorthodox sexuality. Both these themes are present in Penda’s Fen,
and although the sexuality aspect of his work is important—pioneering,
even—he’s far from being a one-note proselytiser. Alan Clarke is
renowned today for his later television work which included filmed plays
such as Scum (banned by the BBC and re-filmed as a feature), Made in Britain (Tim Roth’s debut piece), The Firm (with Gary Oldman), and Elephant whose title and Steadicam technique were swiped by Gus Van Sant. Penda’s Fen was an early piece for Clarke after which his work became (in Rudkin’s words) “fierce and stark”.
The most ambitious of Alan Clarke’s early projects, Penda’s Fen
at first seems a strange choice for him. Most scripts that attracted
Clarke, no matter how non-naturalistic, had a gritty, urban feel with
springy vernacular dialogue (and sometimes almost no dialogue). David
Rudkin’s screenplay is different: rooted in a mystical rural English
landscape, it is studded with long, self-consciously poetic speeches and
dense with sexual/mythical visions and dreams, theological debate and
radical polemic—as well as an analysis of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius. But though Penda’s Fen
is stylistically the odd film out in Clarke’s work, it trumpets many of
his favourite themes, in particular what it means to be English in the
last quarter of the twentieth century. Howard Schuman, Sight & Sound, September 1998
Spencer Banks is the principal actor in Penda’s Fen, playing Stephen Franklin, an 18-year-old in his final days at school. The BBC’s Radio Times magazine described the film briefly:
Young Stephen, in the last summer of his boyhood, has
somehow awakened a buried force in the landscape around him. It is
trying to communicate some warning, a peril he is in; some secret
knowledge; some choice he must make, some mission for which he is marked
down.
The magazine also interviewed Rudkin about the film:
“I think of Penda’s Fen as more a film for
television than a TV play—not just because it was shot in real buildings
on actual film but because of its visual force…
“It was conceived as a film and written visually. Some people think
visual questions are none of the writer’s business—that he should
provide the action and leave it to the director to picture it all out.
For me, writing for the screen is a business of deciding not only what
is to be shown but how it is to be seen…
“Penda’s Fen is a very simple story; it tells of a boy,
Stephen, who in the last summer of his boyhood has a series of
encounters in the landscape near his home which alter his view of the
world…
“The first idea for the film came to me from something that happened a
couple of years ago. It almost grew out of a village or, rather, its
name (I won’t say what the name was because I use it for a special
reason in the film). My wife was coming home one day when she found the
road to the village closed. There was a diversion sign—and the name of
the village had been misspelt by one letter. But it didn’t look like a
mistake, more as if the painter had a different pronunciation. I found
that the name had been spelt and pronounced this way—but centuries ago.
And this was a corruption of an older, 12th-century version, itself a
corruption of the oldest name of all, dating from pre-Christian times.
You could, if you like, be fanciful and say that the misspelling was the
old, primeval ‘demon’ of the place opening half an eye…
“The village itself is nothing much to shout about. It’s typical for
the area: Victorian redbrick cottages, council houses, not ‘rurally
picturesque’…
“I began to think of ‘burials’—like the legend of King Arthur, not
dead but merely sleeping underground to wake again on a trumpet blast in
England’s hour of peril. But I was becoming interested in another
king—only a century after Arthur. And, if this king’s name is not
exactly a household word, that’s because he was on the losing side. But
he is a historical reality—we have the dates of his reign, the battles
he fought. He was the last pagan king in England; I was thinking of
Penda of Mercia…
“The wars that Penda waged against his Christianised neighbours were
not religious wars—in fact, Penda himself did not try to prevent his
son and daughter from becoming Christians as part of the dynastic
marriage pacts they made—he was fighting for the political survival of
Mercia. Not many years after the battle in which he died, England was
Christianised—yet the old, dark ‘demon’ of Penda’s England refuses to
lie down…
“Another, more famous figure’s hidden historical reality is also
unearthed in the film—Elgar. But it’s more than Elgar’s music that
haunts Penda’s Fen: there’s something of his spirit, too…
“Some still think of Elgar as the archetypal country gentleman whose
music enshrines the noblest sentiments of patriotism and faith. That
way of looking at him is similar to Stephen’s outlook on the world at
the beginning of the film Elgar was, in fact, a tradesman’s son who
married above himself and was socially over-sensitive all his life…
“But I didn’t want to think merely of the past—I wanted to open a
futuristic window on the landscape, too. So into the story is borne
Arne, the embittered neighbour who offers Stephen a savage political
outlook on tomorrow’s world…
“I also wanted wanted to show that as far as earthly life is
concerned, death is an absolute parting and a farewell. The old Mr and
Mrs Kings, living in their cottage and growing their neat vegetable
garden also show the strength of those people who can accept this…
“So there it is. As Stephen crosses the beautiful, haunted landscape
towards the distant hills, his false certainties are one by one,
stripped away. And finally, he looks back across the landscape and sees
it with a new, harder sight…
Rudkin’s play is essentially a psychodrama in which the character of
Stephen is shocked out of his priggish, conservative attitudes by a
succession of personal and spiritual revelations. His parents inform him
on his 18th birthday that he was adopted; his dreams reveal a growing
awareness of his homosexuality and he’s chastised at school by teachers
and the other boys for not fitting in; he discovers that his apparently
mundane Rector father has authored a study of the Bible which argues
that the original Gospels were malevolently tampered with in order to
distort the radical message of the historic Jesus. The Malvern
countryside becomes a psychic battleground in which the agents of a
“pure” Christianity (the Gospel tamperers, in other words) compete with
the nation’s buried pagan ancestry for Stephen’s soul which we can read
as representing the future of Britain. The wealth of symbolism is rich
without ever being forced and it’s partly this which makes the film so
remarkable. An example: Stephen’s name is almost certainly a reference
to Saint Stephen who was martyred by being stoned to death (in one of
Stephen’s dreams we see him being pelted with mud). Rudkin is a
Classical scholar (he provided the commentary on Greek matters in Tom
Phillips’ and Peter Greenaway’s A TV Dante),
as is Stephen’s character, and both the schoolboy and the writer would
know that “Stephen” is a derivation of the Greek “Stephanos”, meaning
“crown”; Stephen’s character is eventually seen as the inheritor of a
spiritual kingship. Like Lindsay Anderson’s If….,
the film is anti-authoritarian in a distinctly English way, standing
against the orthodoxies of a poisonous and poisoning State and Church,
and against attempts to enforce “purity” and “normality”. It should be
noted that Rudkin is never anti-Christian, he’s against the contemporary
manifestations of a religion which has lost sight of its origins. Stephen (Spencer Banks) discovers his father’s manuscript.
The layered symbolism and discussion of metaphysical crisis was
extremely bewildering to this 12-year-old TV viewer who was somehow
allowed to watch the whole of the film past his usual bedtime. Spencer
Banks was very familiar from a children’s science fiction series, Timeslip
(1970-72), in which Banks played a bespectacled, slightly geeky
character with whom I—being bespectacled and slightly geeky—naturally
identified. In Penda’s Fen he appears wearing a bomber jacket
like one I wore at the time, so the overall impression was of watching
an older avatar of myself undergoing a bizarre rite of passage. None of
it made any sense at all and the sexual aspect was completely lost on
me; what was impressive and somewhat traumatising was the atmosphere of
dread which accumulated in a succession of powerful, supernatural and—in
one startling incident—uniquely horrifying scenes. Alan Clarke gives
the dreams his usual documentary veracity but you’ll have to forgive my
refusal to discuss any of those scenes in detail, to do so would spoil
the effect and resonance of individual moments; the film should be
experienced as a whole. It was the dreams and hallucinatory moments
which I remembered for years after but, to my endless frustration, not
the play’s title. Throughout the rest of the 1970s and most of the 80s
no one I knew had seen it and consequently those disturbing images
developed an additional power and mystery as they entangled themselves
with my own dreams and memories. In the late 1980s the magic words
“Penda’s Fen” came to light when it turned out that comics writer Grant
Morrison was a Rudkin enthusiast who had also been haunted by the film.
Grant later told me that a friend of his had corresponded with Rudkin in
the 1970s so he’d got to Rudkin’s other work a lot sooner, and Rudkin’s
plays have been an influence on Grant’s own work for the stage. What
most frustrates me now is that I distinctly remember an announcement
after the film that Rudkin would be discussing the drama in a following
program. Given the BBC’s negligent handling of its output there’s no
guarantee that this studio discussion has survived. Penda’s Fen might have remained as buried as its ancient
king had it not been screened again on Channel 4 in 1989 as part of a
retrospective season of dramas produced by David Rose. That gave me the
chance to record it at last and I’ve been acting as a cheerleader for
the film ever since. (I also carefully transferred my copy to DVD in
2003, worried that the tape might get damaged and I’d lose the thing
again.) It’s likely that I’m partly responsible for its renewed cult
reputation having alerted various friends in the music and publishing
world to its existence. The film is increasingly cited in discussion of
Britain’s heritage of folk and pagan culture, most recently by Rob Young
in a piece for Sight & Sound. Perhaps inevitably, the film has been ushered into the charmed circle of revenant Ghost Box icons, and will be receiving a rare screening at the Belbury Youth Club event this coming Sunday, March 28th, along with other films and music which comprise the Flatpack Festival 2010. If you’re in the Birmingham area, the Flatpack events run throughout this coming week.
Rudkin’s play wasn’t a one-off, his other work is equally powerful,
engaging and fascinating. A later film for the BBC, the wildly ambitious
Artemis 81,
is three hours in length (!) and explores similar themes, albeit in a
less coherent fashion. It also includes Daniel Day-Lewis’s first screen
appearance and has Sting playing Hywel Bennett’s angelic object of
homoerotic desire. Rudkin’s stage work is fiercely imaginative, using
Joycean dialogue to striking effect, and I’m continually surprised that
no one seems interested in re-staging remarkable plays such as The Sons of Light. As for Penda’s Fen,
whenever a TV executive tries to argue that television hasn’t dumbed
down I’d offer this work as Exhibit A for the prosecution. Rudkin and
Clarke’s film was screened at 9.35 in the evening on the nation’s main
TV channel, BBC 1, at a time when there were only three channels to
choose from. A primetime audience of many millions watched this visceral
and unapologetically intelligent drama; show me where this happens
today.
Finally, as with the Beardsley play, yes, I have my own copy but, no, I can’t copy it for you, so please don’t ask. Artemis 81appeared on DVD in 2007 but a proposed release of Alan Clarke films from the BBC including Penda’s Fen has yet to emerge. A DVD set
of Clarke’s later work appeared a few years ago but these were all the
violent dramas which tends to skew perception of his career and make him
appear as a kind of Stanley Kubrick with a Stanley knife. Given
Clarke’s reputation and the growing cult status of Penda’s Fen it’s surely time to put this unique drama before a wide audience once again.
- John Coulthart www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2010/03/22/pendas-fen-by-david-rudkin/
Susret s vlastitim klonom iz budućnosti? Naravno. Prednost kratkih filmova je što ih možeš gledati svaki dan. donhertzfeldt.tumblr.com/
A cartoon about a clone from the future may be 2015’s best film by Noel Murray
Throughout this year’s Sundance Film Festival, whenever I’d run into my fellow critics, we’d go through the usual ritual exchange of, “What have you liked so far?” Passing movie titles back and forth, more often than I could count, the conversation would end with one or both of us saying, “Of course, the best thing I’ve seen is that Don Hertzfeldt cartoon, ‘World Of Tomorrow.’ I don’t expect anything to top it.”
Can an animated short be the best film at a festival? Or the best of the year? Because although “World Of Tomorrow” is only 15 minutes long, it’s as funny, imaginative, and heartbreaking as anything released so far in 2015, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I could make that same claim on December 31. At Sundance, where I had a link to an online screener, I watched “World Of Tomorrow” nearly every night before I went to sleep, as a pre-bedtime devotional. I’ve done the same a few times since Hertzfeldt recently made the film available as a 30-day rental via Vimeo. For me, the brevity of “World Of Tomorrow” isn’t a stumbling block, it’s a virtue. How often is a movie this outstanding also so concise that it can be watched at least once a day?
“World Of Tomorrow” is about two Emilys. The first, Emily Prime, is a toddler from our near future, who at the start of the film answers a call on an elaborate videophone/computer console. The woman contacting her is a third-generation version of herself—call her Emily 3G—created via a soon-to-be-popular cloning process in which people spawn their own doubles and then upload their memories into them, in an attempt to live forever. But 227 years from when Emily Prime answers the phone, the world is about to end, so Emily 3G contacts her original self to tell her about what her life is going to be like for the next couple of centuries.
Hertzfeldt has said that “World Of Tomorrow” was inspired in part by those old science magazines and short subjects that predicted what the decades to come would be, after we’d developed flying cars and food pills. In Hertzfeldt’s future, humanity is obsessed with preservation and nostalgia. Those who can’t clone themselves store their memories in digital cubes, or allow their dead faces to be stretched over animatronic machines so that they can still be a part of their loved ones’ lives. And since robots do most of the work, the citizens of this new clone-dominated culture spend most of their time accessing old memories, as part of an effort to understand what it means to be human. In recent years, Emily 3G explains, most people’s memories are of themselves staring at screens.
That image of infinite regression—clones watching clones watching clones—is a good starting point for understanding what’s so special about “World Of Tomorrow.” Most importantly, it’s humorous. I don’t want to kill the comedy through over-explanation, but the shot of people remembering themselves remembering themselves remembering memories works because of the blank expressions, coupled with the whole idea of screens within screens. It’s also a sad image, with the figure becoming less animated (and literally bluer) the further it recedes from the original memory. And the picture is aesthetically pleasing, adding layers of lines and shapes that drift through, giving the frame a depth that disguises the overall flatness of the characters and the setting. This goes on throughout the short: There’s nearly always something in motion around the two Emilys, who themselves remain mostly static.
This has been the trend in Hertzfeldt’s work, toward more visual density. The animator first drew attention with the stick-figures and sick jokes in cartoons like 1998’s “Billy’s Balloon” and 2000’s “Rejected,” but over the past decade he’s been mixing minimalism with bursts of eye-popping abstraction, in service of complex explorations of human existence. (The full scope of Hertzfeldt’s ambition is most evident in his triptych feature It’s Such A Beautiful Day, which The A.V. Club named the eighth-best film of 2012.)
In “World Of Tomorrow,” Hertzfeldt opens with a black-and-white side-view of the videophone that looks like nothing more than a random (and somewhat rude) assortment of lines and curves. Soon though, the screen becomes a riot of color and symbols—as though it were a window into a future that our early 21st century brains can barely understand.
Even if there were nothing to “World Of Tomorrow” but Hertzfeldt’s art, it’d still be a delight. Pause the film at random and there’s nearly always something pretty to see, whether it’s the contrast of thick-lined characters and yellowish haze when Emily 3G warns against “getting lost in memory”…
… or the squiggly, light-sensitive robots that Emily 3G once supervised on the moon…
… or the projections on the wall of the “memory gallery” that Emily 3G opens later in her life.
What really brings these pictures to life though is how the visitor from the future puts them into the context of her personal biography. Julia Pott, the voice of Emily 3G, maintains a careful monotone as she describes the extreme social stratification and continued blurring of the lines between technology and biology in her time. She casually drops lines like, “We are all doomed, Emily Prime,” and explains the dangers of time travel—which she pronounces as one strangely accented word: “timeTRAVel”—and then immediately pulls her ancestor into her era, without a second thought toward whether she might kill her in the process.
Then she tells the little girl about her life as a copy of a copy of a copy, cursed with a deteriorating understanding of why she exists. A lot of Emily 3G’s story revolves around all the times she thought she was in love: with a sparkly rock, a fuel pump, a space-monster named Simon, and finally with her husband, an aged clone related to an organic art exhibit she’d enjoyed as a youngster. She explains that when her husband died, she had “no capacity” to deal with it, and that she now mostly just sits quietly and feels bad. “I am very proud of my sadness,” Emily 3G adds, “Because it means I am more alive.” It’s a touching moment—but then it’s also astonishing how much emotion Hertzfeldt is able
to wring out of these little stick-people, just through the slightest tilt of the head or by forming a lovely pattern just behind them.
All of the above makes “World Of Tomorrow” sound heavy, which the film definitely can be. But it’s also frequently hilarious, and cute. Emily 3G’s deadpan adds some dry wit to the scene when she recalls the first messages her grandfather sent after he was uploaded into a digital cube (“Oh. Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. Oh my God. Holy mother of God. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh God.”) or when she recites some of the poetry written by her abandoned moon-robots (“The light is life. Robot must move. Move robot move. But why? Move move move. Robot forever move.”) It’s also unbelievably adorable every time Emily 3G tries to impart mind-blowing information to this confused-but-friendly little kid (voiced by Hertzfeldt’s equally oblivious niece Winona Mae), who responds with questions like, “Do you like my cars?”
The Burns and Allen dynamic between the two Emilys reinforces one of the major themes of the film: the constant push and pull between mankind’s reckless, youthful spirit and our cold, queasy rationality. (“Now is the envy of all of the dead,” Emily 3G tells Emily Prime. “Okay,” the little girl chirps.) Even the visual design and animation makes that point. Emily Prime comes bouncing into the picture, pigtails flopping, while Emily 3G stares straight ahead, her hair thin and flat. And when Emily Prime becomes overwhelmed by what Emily 3G is telling her, she puts her head down on the computer console, looking like a wild, uncontrolled element spilling across a technological marvel.
Yet even though Emily 3G seems disconnected from her past self, by the end of “World Of Tomorrow” it’s clear that she feels a pang of envy at how casual and carefree Emily Prime is. “It is a sad life, and a long life,” she warns. “You will feel a deep longing for something you cannot remember.” Emily 3G says this right after she finishes what she set out to do: extracting a memory from Emily Prime (of her and her mother taking a walk) to use as a comfort during the impending apocalypse. After hundreds of years of extending life and acquiring knowledge, in the end what we all may really want someday is to get back what we had when we were 3.
It’s hard to talk about the overall “World Of Tomorrow” experience without getting into the ending, so forgive the following spoiler. (Or, better yet, pony up the $3.99, rent the short, and then come back and read the rest of this.) Throughout the film, Emily 3G’s callousness is worrisome, as she talks about all the thinking, feeling entities that she’s left behind over the years on her personal journey. So inevitably, when she’s done with Emily Prime, she sends her back into the past but overshoots the mark, seemingly stranding her in a snowy prehistoric landscape. Hertzfeldt holds on that scene for a few uncomfortable seconds, letting the music swell as though the credits are about to roll. Then he pops Emily Prime back into her home, without explanation.
Logically, this is what has to happen, because otherwise there’d be no Emily 3G and no movie. But I like to see this ending as a moment of divine intervention from Hertzfeldt, granting a reprieve to a character too sweet to kill. “World Of Tomorrow” is dark at times, and deeply concerned with the meaning of life, but one of the main reasons why I’ve watched it so many times—and plan to watch it so many more—is that it stares into the void and then cheerily shrugs. “What a happy day it is,” Emily Prime says as she skips out of sight. And for a moment anyway, that’s so true.
Can you name a short film off the top of your head? Something you’d identify as a short film — you know: a film, but shorter. Not a YouTube video, not a skit. A short film.
If you can’t, that’s all right. Short films have long occupied a place in the moviemaking business similar to what short stories are for writers: They’re a way to hone your skills before you attempt the big project. But in the literary world, many writers will remain short-story specialists throughout their careers, even if the form is not generally as lucrative or as popular as the novel. Very few filmmakers, on the other hand, keep on making shorts. Short films are practice — they’re rehearsal.
Forget all of that and watch World of Tomorrow, an animated piece by Don Hertzfeldt that won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Short at Sundance.
Only 16 minutes long, and available to rent on Vimeo, World of Tomorrow is about a clone who comes back from the future to visit her young original self, and to describe the loves — ranging from human to mineral — that will define that child’s soon-to-end life. If that seems absurd, don’t worry: It is. But it’s all rendered so beautifully, on both a visual and emotional level, that by the end of the short, you’ll wonder less why it’s all happening and more what this means for the development of this little girl, a barely vocal sprite, who’s just been burdened with the very adult knowledge of death and heartbreak and need.
Aside from the fact that it might make you cry, World of Tomorrow — which is done in a style you could call avant-Flash; it looks a little like the games you used to play while you were bored in Psych 101, except a thousand times more wonderful — has an impact of a different sort. If a short can suture this much visual poetry into the fabric of a quarter-hour, then the medium must be underrated. That’s efficiency. And it suggests an idyllic future: What if you could get the satisfaction of a feature film in less time than it takes you to rewatch a Gilmore Girls episode for the fifth time?
Obviously, that’s a thought experiment; most filmmakers make features because most filmmakers are not Don Hertzfeldt: It isn’t easy to fit two hours of emotion into 20 minutes. But the point still stands: This is a viable entertainment that we’re severely underemploying. Why is that? Based on the way we consume media now, we should be in the Age of the Short.
Every day, YouTube’s billion users worldwide watch hundreds of millions of hours of video. The range of what they’re watching is the breadth of human existence — I still think regularly about this great Jake Swearingen piece touching on YouTube as the Panopticon — and while art might be only a small part of that breadth, it’s there. Among all the sloth videos and Worldstar fights and confessionals, there’s room for fictionalized entertainment, and not just comedy, which has already landed because it shares well and doesn’t require a full narrative or thematic gist.
The best example of this point might be High Maintenance. Vimeo will suggest that High Maintenance is a television show, because television shows are lucrative and having a television show is prestigious, but High Maintenance is much more a collection of short films than it is an episodic series. Each piece is self-contained and autonomous, with a firm beginning, middle, and end, and while they all exist inside the same world, united by main character The Guy, the overlap is an enhancement, not a necessity. High Maintenance has an audience in the six figures. A significant part of this has to do with the fact that High Maintenance is great, thoughtful and sweet and never glib, a truly sincere piece of work in an aggressively insincere world. Another part, though, comes from the thrill of the reset. With each episode, you have no idea what you’re in for, and that fresh beginning helps establish each character as the protagonist in his or her own world — which, of course, we all are to ourselves. Plus, you can watch each one in 15 minutes or less. It’s consumption tailored nicely to a laptop beside your cutting board or an iPad screen in bed.
Like High Maintenance’s, Hertzfeldt’s success is significantly tied to the passion of his fans, who have patronized his work in the intimate way an off-mainstream artist requires to survive in 2015. But that work deserves a wider audience, and World of Tomorrow should be the catalyst — with its coexistent wonder and darkness, bringing to mind David Lynch and Hayao Miyazaki, this is art that has a place in a tradition of entertainment, not some abstract experiment bound for MoMA. And it takes only 15 minutes. Although, fair warning: You’ll be thinking about it for longer than that. - Kevin Lincoln grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/world-of-tomorrow-and-short-film-in-the-youtube-era/
After looking into one’s past with the profound animation It’s Such a Beautiful Day, Don Hertzfeldt headed to the future for
his next project, a short film marking his work in three years. World of Tomorrow, now available on VOD, is
an exceedingly brilliant odyssey into the outer reaches of a future universe
that channels our inner anxieties of loneliness. The story concerns Emily
(Winona Mae), a young girl, who
meets her future self in the variety of an adult clone (Julie Pott), as the latter guides us
through the bleak destiny that lies ahead. Bursting with creativity and
hilarity, it’s at once a hilarious and deeply affecting piece of work, deserving
of its top awards at both Sundance and SXSW.I got the opportunity to speak with Hertzfeldt ahead of the release of the
short and we discussed his first foray into digital animation and how it fit
within his story, working on multiple projects at once, collaborating with his
niece for voice acting, the current state of independent animation, a potential
sequel, what’s in store next for the director, digital distribution, and much
more. Check out the full conversation below.
The Film Stage: Congrats on the movie.
It was actually the last film I watched at Sundance and it was the best one
there I saw.
Don Hertzfeldt: Oh, right on.
Thanks. I didn’t know you saw it at the big theater in Park City. Well, I actually got a screener of it,
and so I watched it right before I was leaving. I turned off all the lights and
a few other journalists watched it and we all loved it. So it was a great way to
go out. Oh, cool. So, you’ve been animating for almost
two decades now, but this is your first foray into digital animation. Did that
feel like a new challenge, like you were almost animating for the first
time? Yeah, I guess you can say that. You know, the best way I’ve been able to
compare it is it was like trying to read a children’s book that’s in another
language. It seems very basic, like you should know this stuff, but the
vocabulary’s all changed and things are in different places. It was interesting;
I have a lot of animator friends who can’t stand drawing on tablets. There’s a
certain tension when you draw on a piece of paper. It’s not very smooth, like
drawing on glass, and to them the tablet is just way too slick. But I never had
that trouble for whatever reason. I really took to it quickly. And there was a
learning curve for two frustrating weeks and then I kind of got used to it, and
then I really appreciated the speed of it. Just being able to power through
these shots much, much quicker than I’ve ever been able to do before and I
really appreciated that because film is beautiful, but it takes time, and
there’s processing, and the paper, and working with camera, it’s just I’m not
that young anymore. [Laughs] I appreciated being able to power through a shot a day. It got to the point
where it was almost addictive and if I didn’t get through a shot a day, I would
start to get sad, because I didn’t want to fuss over this film. I didn’t
storyboard anything. Digital was my excuse to try everything differently and
with this one it was going to be no fussing, no storyboards. Let’s just everyday
look at the script. Okay, they’re on the moon. Okay, what’s that gonna look
like? I just design everything from the ground up that way, and it was
interesting,. It was different, it was fast. Primarily fast. [Laughs] The story obviously takes place in the
future. Do you think that the themes and plot of the film help with that digital
transition? If it was a more standard Earth-set story, do you think you might
not have used digital or were you going to use digital no matter what for your
next project? That’s a good point. I think it was necessary to the look for the film to go
digital. It’s not something I could have done on film, just like It’s Such a Beautiful Day’s story
would not have been told the same way digitally. There’s certain effects in that
story that are impossible, or would have been impossible to do digitally. So,
yeah, I kind of have to go with what format supports the story you’re selling
and for this it just made perfect sense to do something about the future. Here’s
a guy who’s been living with film and paper for so many years, the last person
still shooting animation on film, to take the plunge into this future, as well.
And the fact that it’s a satire I think I was able to get away with a lot more.
And The Simpsons called the same time,
like two weeks after I started World of
Tomorrow and I just had the future on the brain, I think. It just made
sense to share some of the same blood in those veins, as well. You said it took about a day to do a
shot, so I was curious how many days did it actually end up taking for the whole
thing? And did The Simpsons set your
course off? I think World of Tomorrow took about
nine months, but I was doing The Simpsons
at the same time, which took three or four months. So, it’s hard to say exactly
to a scientific point. It was really good for me to work on more than one thing
at the same time and learning that as I get older it’s really the best way that
I work with juggling more than one project. It’s easier to finish one and leap
right onto the next one while your brain is still in that mode. If you finish a
project and you allow the creative muscle or whatever it is in your head to
relax, the engine slows down, and time goes by, it’s that much harder start a
new project. You need to get revved up again and kind of get in the groove. For
so many years now I’ve kinda just bounced from one to the next project and
lately I’m doing more than one at a time. I think it’s actually enriching all of
them. There was a second part of your question, I think I forgot it already. Ah, you answered it — just the timeline
of the two projects. Yeah, they were pretty side by side. The recording obviously came first,
recording my niece [Winona Mae,
who voices Emily Prime] and recording Julia Pott‘s [voice of Emily] lines
opposite that. Is there a lot of stuff in the cutting
room with your niece? Did you have any guidence for her or kinda just let her
go? I had to let her go. I was naive to think in the beginning that I could
direct a four-year-old – [Both laugh] – which is really just not possible. It’s like trying to herd cats. So I
eventually surrendered to just recording her, being herself, and I just got an
app for my iPad that could record her quietly, so I didn’t want anything too
intrusive. She was in Scotland and I don’t know if you can tell, she has a
little Scottish accent, and I live in Austin, so we only get to see each other
maybe once a year and our recording window is really, really limited. So that
was the first step and I think the key to the whole movie because I knew I
needed a little girl voice. I didn’t want to fake it and if I didn’t get
anything out of each session, there was no point in trying to make this thing.
So we just hung out and drew pictures and played with Play-Doh and talked about
the world, and her being herself and from this little set of recordings I went
through and said, ‘Okay, she’s reacting to something here. What is she looking
at? What is she talking about here?’ And I rewrote the story to make it all fit
and I rewrote Julia’s lines, the other half of the conversation, so it would all
be more seamless. There was quite a few lines on the cutting room floor, so to speak. Just
dialogue, of course. I may still find a home for it, I don’t know. I realize now
that she’s five what lightning in a bottle those recordings were. Because she’s
totally changed now. And this film would have been impossible to make now
because then at four it’s sort of this reactions period in development. She’s
looking at things, she’s asking questions. When we would walk to the park, even
though the park is only a few blocks away, it would take ages. Because she would
stop every few steps and say, ‘Look, flower’, and, ‘Yeah, flower.’ And we keep
going. ‘Look, a car.’ ‘Yeah, it’s a car.’ And you realize, yeah, this is all new
to you. This is amazing, you’re taking it all in the first time. This is so
beautiful, why can’t we all see the world like this? And now that she’s five,
she’s directing me now. Now she’s like, ‘Okay, I’m a princess. You’re a gorilla.
We live in this ice cave and we have to go save magical rabbits from the blah
blah,’ and it’s completely changed. I’m really glad now I have that set of her
in that period because I’m sure when she’s a teenager she’ll be mortified by
this. [Laughs] Hopefully when’s she’s older she’ll appreciate that we did this
and it’s kinda a neat little artifact.
So the sequel for this movie will be
vastly different is what you’re
saying? [Laughs] I’ve been circling it, you know. We’ll see, it would be great to
keep revisiting. I have no idea. I just never thought of it that way but it’s
not too crazy to think about. Interesting, that’d be great. I’d love
to see more of this world. Doing sci-fi here, is there any direct inspirations,
either you had before making this film or just growing up? I think the main thing directly for this film was, visually, I love the old,
50′s and 60′s sci-fi magazines and anthologies and dime store novels, I love the
cover art. I love the very modern illustrations. You usually see a bold primary
color and then these sharp geometric shapes that’s implying something and then
in front of it all are your heroes. And they’re running from something with like
a ray-gun or something. I’ve always loved the bold modern designs of the 50′s
when it seemed like everything looks better designed than today. You know, a
cereal box. So those covers were the direct inspiration for the look, more just
these extra geometric shapes moving all these directions, and colors. I wanted
the film to really, really explode with color, color, color. We made sixteen
different drafts of the DCP that you screen in theaters over and over, just to
get more and more color and density out of it. That’s great. Yeah, and overall also tied into that, I wanted it to look like a children’s
book. I wanted it to look very flat, minimal textures, and again color. Because
we’re seeing this from her point-of-view, and I kinda wanted to run away from a
lot of the other pitfalls that you see in a lot of digital animation today,
which is sort of running towards photorealism and so many textures. It’s almost
getting a little boring. You know, I wanted to try something different. Speaking of the current state of
animation, do you find inspiration or maybe just pure enjoyment out of anything
today? Or do you kinda go back to your favorites? I love what’s going on in the independent scene, of course. It’s funny,
there’s not that many people doing this, and we’ve all become a little, over the
years, more closely knit. There’s more of us at film festivals and things, and
by us, I mean like independent animators who are doing this and nothing else. We
don’t have day jobs. It’s a very unusual job. But we end up chatting online a
lot. We’re all in our own corners of the world, you know. We’re little albino
rats in our underground dens doing our projects. [Laughs] It’s nice to stay in
touch because it’s sort of an unusual support group; to see what everyone else
is working on. I love classic Disney. A few years ago they released these Disney archived
things on DVD in these metal tins. Yeah, one of them is for their Tomorrowland stuff. It’s from the TV show
that they had in the 50′s, it’s all their science-fiction stuff. And there’s a
hour-long special on there that that Ward
Kimble directed called Mars and
Beyond and it’s just amazing. It’s amazing that this was produced for
television, and it’s brilliant. It’s science, but it’s educational and
it’s crazy creative. And it’s again, that 50′s very modern design, and I like
the cheesy-ness of science-fiction, also. But by and large I don’t watch a lot
of animation. I went to a very traditional film school and all my heroes were
live-action guys, and I never even took an animation course in school. I’m
self-taught. Most of my heroes are live-action people. If I’m asked to jury
animation at a film festival I’ll beg them to put me on a documentary or
anything but more cartoons. [Both laugh] With this project, World of Tomorrow, it’s been exciting to just
follow your Twitter account and see you pretty much have full control over the
marketing and how it’s seen. You just teased it with a little picture last fall
and then it was at Sundance and now people can see it two months later. Has that
freedom been nice? Yeah. I’ve had that freedom in my career doing this thing since the 90′s.
It’s one really nice luxury of, not just working alone — well, almost alone —
but working with no budgets. The main investment in the film isn’t money, it’s
my time. And I don’t need to pitch anything. I don’t need to raise money. I can
come up with an idea for something and start animating it that weekend. That
just feels very organic. It feels great. Meanwhile I’m making
a new feature film and it’s going to require a big budget, a big crew, and
there’s just lots of waiting. There’s lots of waiting for the funds, lots of
waiting for the people to work. It’s nice to have these projects to just leap
onto and just do it. And, of course, by proxy to that, you own everything. We
own all the rights. We can figure out the best release pattern for each one. With the project you mentioned, Antarctica, is that something that you feel
like you’ve been building towards? Is it something you could’ve foreseen
yourself getting into five years ago or has it come at the perfect time when
you’re ready to take a bigger step? Well, the script is old. The script is over five years old. It’s been a
project that’s been gestating for a very long time. Back when I was writing it I
didn’t have the time to leap onto it because I was ramping up the Beautiful Day stories. It’s funny, I feel
much, much less intimidated by the size of it than I would have in my twenties.
I feel like animating independently, especially working with film stuff, it’s so
grueling and it’s so time consuming. It’s really hard to explain or describe to
people who haven’t animated, but it’s months and years of your life. It’s like a
time hole you enter – [Both laugh] – and you work, and you work, and you work, and you emerge and these friends
have gotten married, these friends moved away, these guys have kids now. They
look at life as the same. You’re frozen in a block of ice, because all you’ve
had time to do is finish this project. So to me, approaching a project that’s
like this, with actual crew, with an actual budget, I almost feel like — and I
don’t wanna jinx myself here — but I almost feel like it’s going to be a bit of
a vacation for me. You know, I’m putting in the same amount of time, but my
hands aren’t going to be bleeding over this thing anymore, you know? I’m not
going to be having to work every single day without a vacation, the weekends,
constantly, as much as I used to. So I almost feel like I’ve been through basic
training — the worst kind of marines basic training for animation you could
imagine [laughs] and now, I can’t see it being as difficult as it used to be. It
might be kind of nice. So, Snoot Entertainment is producing
Antarctica. Have you seen like The Guest or Faults, their previous movies? The Guest, that’s the Adam Wingard film, right? I haven’t seen
that one yet. I saw the one they worked on where they are making bets all night,
Cheap Thrills. They were
involved with that one. I actually haven’t seen The Guest yet. I should put that on my
Netflix queue. That one is your favorite? It’s a fun one. Yeah, that one and they
just released a new film a few weeks ago called Faults. It’s really good. Okay. I’m just excited for you to be working
with them, because they seem like a very smart producing team. Oh, good to know. [Laughs] I’m familiar with them of course. They’re
wonderful. They seem to get it. I’m glad that someone can verify that it shows
through in the work they do. I haven’t had the chance to catch up on a lot of it
but I will be doing so now. Yeah, I would recommend it. Well, thank
you so much, I’m very excited to let people know they can finally watch [World of Tomorrow] soon. [Laughs] Cool. Yeah, it’s gonna be interesting to see how the film does
online. It’s an experiment for me. I’ve never released something new like this
and hopefully if it does well we can follow through with more stuff like this in
the future. We’ve got all the old films too on HD that haven’t been put out yet.
I’m just trying to feel out how people want to consume them these days, you
know? Is it more streaming? Is it something else? I think everyone in the
industry is trying to figure out the same thing. Yeah, definitely. It’s definitely a
tricky area depending on the movie. I think for your short, it’s the perfect way
though. I would assume, let’s hope. I hope so. It’s going be a great experiment. There’ll be no excuses if nobody
shows up for it because we’ve really done everything we can. Okay, it’ll be a
clear message if nobody wants to do the streaming thing.[ Laughs] Well, have a great day and thank you so
much for talking to me. Thanks, I appreciate it. - Jordan Raupthefilmstage.com/features/don-hertzfeldt-talks-world-of-tomorrow-the-state-of-animation-his-next-feature-and-more/
Remekdjelo glitch estetike. Što se događa kada se protok informacija namjerno iznutra pokvari, naruši, zakoči, sruši... kada ontologija ne funkcioira "kako treba"?
MOGA is the latest work in Mark Amerika’s collaborative
series of transmedia narratives. MOGA tells the story of The Artist 2.0,
an online persona whose personal mythology and body of digital artworks
are rapidly being canonized into the annals of art history. The piece
traces the life of the artist and his ongoing commitment to a practice
of “glitch aesthetics” that leads to the museum of the title. MOGA
features a wide array of artworks intentionally corrupted by
technological processes including net art, digital video art, digitally
manipulated still images, game design, stand-up comedy, sound art, and
electronic literature. The project also includes a full color museum
catalog available in both free e-book and limited edition print
editions.
The entire project is now online at glitchmuseum.com. Director: Mark Amerika
The Artist 2.0: Mark Amerika (Boulder, Portland and Kailua), Aaron
Angello (Denver), Saoirse Crean (London), Mary Fé (Rio de Janeiro), Will
Luers (Portland), Ruth McCullough (Manchester), Chad Mossholder
(Austin), Julie Rooney (Boulder), Rick Silva (Calgary), Joel Swanson
(Denver), Steve Wade (Lancaster) and other free spirits everywhere and
nowhere.
Whereas
it's true that the avant-garde artists and writers of the 20th century
served a variety of artistic, social and political purposes, The Artist
2.0 is historically canonized in the Museum of Glitch Aesthetics
as a collaborative and pseudonymous creative force whose collective
body of works, though limited in number, have been able to employ
networked and mobile media communication strategies unavailable to the
artist's radical predecessors. According to online curator and
performance artist Margot Kittler, the main aesthetic strategy of The
Artist 2.0 is to create “an alternative dream world of inclusion where a
utopian collective, comprised of networks of like-minded artists and
intellectuals, use all available new media technologies to intervene in
and/or disrupt global capitalist flows.” The fictional personae who
drive the energetic activity that powers these networks often turn to
what Kittler refers to as “glitch aesthetics” as a way to undermine “the
predictable protocols of exclusion” found in the upmarket commodity
culture generally associated with the art market. According to Kittler,
“artists like 2.0 are on an aesthetic mission to disrupt mainstream
perceptions of how these art market venues stage faux objective
standards in determining the aesthetic value of a work of art.”
“These creatively inclined hacker networks, particularly those that
operate over Internet and mobile media protocols,” Kittler writes, “work
against this idea of scarcity and challenge us to rethink the
Benjaminian concept of ‘aura’ as something to be measured vis-à-vis
sharing and the collaborative remixing of source material instead of
focusing on the unique art object located in a specific space and time.”
“The works brought together in the Museum of Glitch Aesthetics are
conceptual, glitchy, beautiful, pedagogical, humorous, and at times
political reflections on the role that networked and mobile media
communication systems play in today's digital culture. The Artist 2.0's
unique trajectory through network-mediated art history includes works of
digital photography, animation, Net art, digital video, live
performance, installation, electronic music and spoken word art, mobile
phone films, 3D game design, and conceptual writing. This body of work
is now internationally acknowledged as a large-scale transmedia hack and
the continuous transmission of conceptual personae throughout the
digital networks indicates the artist's desire to critique an elitist
art market that goes out of its way to acknowledge both the appeal and
seduction of accumulating artworks that are canonized in the annals of
art history.”
–from “Portrait of the Artist as a Live Remix” (included in the MOGA catalog)
Mark Amerika Discusses Corrupting Lake Como, His Inspirations, And The Spy State Economy
Today we're all familiar with the term "net artist"—whether there's a defining
answer to exactly what one is, or does—is another question, but we know
the phrase. But it wasn't always so, back when dial-up ruled the web
artist Mark Amerika
was experimenting with this new (but painfully slow to load) digital
world, writing pioneering hypertext novels and exploring the
possibilities of narrative art in the information age.
His GRAMMATRON (1997)project, the first in a trilogy of works, is one such artwork which merged ideas of the novel,net
art, gaming, and cinema to create a transmedia narrative. It's a format
and approach we're much more familiar with now in an age of
increasingly sophisticated viral marketing, where alternative reality games have long been used as promotional campaigns for TV series and films.
But Amerika has explored many different styles in his career and currently has an exhibition of some of his glitch art on at the Furtherfield Gallery in London, which are part of his Museum of Glitch Aesthetics(2012) project. Complimenting this is the work of his contemporary Shu Lea Cheang, whose work transgresses web-based installations as well as film.
To find out more about the exhibition and also what Amerika thinks of
the current state of net art, I emailed him a few questions.
The Creators Project: Are there any over-arching themes or concepts being explored in your current exhibition at Furtherfield?
Mark Amerika: Both Shu Lea and I are partly rooted in
cyberpunk culture as it relates to storytelling and media hactivism. The
works on exhibit, though very different in content and execution, are
remixes from larger narrative works we have made. In my case, the
Furtherfield exhibition showcases three works from the over 25 artworks
collected in my recently commissioned Museum of Glitch Aesthetics.
MOGA, as it's sometimes referred to, tells one version of the story of
The Artist 2.0, a kind of net artist/hacker who, over time, evolves
their own glitch aesthetics across a variety of media formats.
Gallery entrance. Photo courtesy of Mark Amerika
How did you decide on what works to exhibit?
As with other curatorial remixes of MOGA, the pieces were
selected in consultation with Ruth and Marc, the directors of
Furtherfield. Given the size of the venue and that it was a two-person
show, we came up with the three works. The first piece is Lake Como Remix, a wild trip through Google Street View in that part of Italy that the title refers to. You might think of it as a kind of cyberpsychogeographical dérive
through a beautiful landscape that's made even more beautiful by
corrupting the software functions that would otherwise create the
illusion of actually being in northern Italy.
The second piece is The Comedy of Errors. MOGA
is a commission of Abandon Normal Devices, and although most of the
story takes place in the Northwest of the UK, at one point The Artist
2.0 is teleported to Boulder, Colorado, where he meets up with the
artist Mark Amerika and, together, the two of them produce this
full-length comedy album that transforms the artist-professor into a
stand-up social commentator. He delivers his contemporary art shtick
before a completely made-up audience that is actually a new sound
composition by Chad Mossholder. The composition is made out of laugh
tracks and sound effects. At a certain point, it ceases to become a
comedy album per se and instead becomes an experiential concept art
album.
"8-Bit Heaven (London-Soho 3)" by Mark Amerika
The last pieces we're showing at Furtherfield are from the 8-bit Heaven
series. Once again, I have captured images from Google Street View but
this time they were produced last year on April Fool's Day when Google
offered navigators an alternative 8-bit filter for all of their
psychogeographical drifting. For them, it was a fun joke, which I liked.
But for me, it was also a chance to expand my aesthetic investigations
into portraits of city life, beach life, and isolated landscapes. For
the show, two of the images, one from Manchester and one from Morecambe,
have been enlarged and transformed into large vinyl wall prints.
What do you feel the appeal of the glitch aesthetic is? What does it mean to you both?
I wouldn't want to saddle Shu Lea with the glitch aesthetics framework.
She's doing her own thing, as always. But for me, it's a way of
challenging the false consciousness of high-definition video. There's
this tendency to think that if you can get a perfect high-def image,
then you are getting closer to portraying reality. But as the 20th
century process philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, who I write about in my last book, remixthebook,
suggests, reality is less about false representations of high
definition data and has more to do with the process of taking hold of
the data and creatively remixing it into the reality of the moment.
Glitch is a powerful way of foregrounding that process and can also lead
to some remarkable stylistic effects that oftentimes challenge the
viewer to feel the sublime tendencies of the digital image. There's a
kind of vital beauty to it and I have been able to share these kinds of
images in a lot of different contexts including the largest video screens in any US airport and with Sedition where two limited edition video works have been released as a featured curation and are now available.
"Lake Como Remix, MOGA (2012)" by Mark Amerika
The world of digital art has no doubt changed since you both
began, but has also built upon its past and legacy. What are some of the
changes/differences you've seen between when you started and now?
The big difference is that when we started, everything felt so open and
free. It was like you were reinventing art and writing and curating and
exhibiting all at the same time, and that you could do it with other
net artists and the networked intelligentsia who were all discovering
the Web's amazing potential with you. You really got to feel what it was
like to be totally ahead of the institutions which meant that you did
not really even need them. Now that has completely changed. Now all of
your data is for the most part owned by corporate entities who willingly
or unknowingly—they claim innocence—allow the spooks in the Spy State
Economy to turn you and the demographic you represent into more cyberwar
fodder. It's as if all the dystopian cyberpunk fictions were right and
it's no longer purely fantasy sci-fi to watch your most private thoughts
become part of the spy machine. It's your Big Data Condition.
From Amerika’s “8-Bit Heaven” series of vinyl digital prints. Photo courtesy of Mark Amerika
And what are some of the similarities?
Net art is still doing its own thing. It has not been recuperated by
the art markets or the cronyistic infrastructure that buttresses so much
of the rest of the art world. But, having said that, each new
generation of twenty-something net artists—and how many have there been
now?—somehow believe that for them it will be different, that they will
find a way to crack the market and edge their way into the art market
infrastructure. It seems to be a goal. So this really relates more to
what I was talking about when looking at the differences.
Like I was saying, in the early days—which were actually not that long
ago at all, about fifteen years—we were ahead of the institutions and
now there seems to be this succession of follow up net artists who
actually are chasing the institutions in pursuit of—what? Success? The
truth is that net art is already a success story. It's been in the
Whitney Biennial, is in major institutional and private collections, and
has entire books written about it and that have been published in
places like the Thames and Hudson World of Art series. Besides, the
market always has a way of catching up with those who stick to their
guns and perhaps this is why now I may be the most financially
successful net artist in the history of the genre. That's not saying
much, compared to other successful artists who were actively involved in
new movements, but still, sometimes it feels weird.
Still from "Lake Como Remix"
Your pieces in this exhibition are said to be the "latest work
in [a] collaborative series of transmedia narratives". Can you explain a
bit about what these are? And why you choose to work using a transmedia
approach?
Basically, I work across media platforms and am constantly
experimenting with narrative structure, writing style, story content,
technology, and the field of distribution. SoImmobilité,
my feature-length "foreign film" shot entirely on mobile phone, was
really an experiment in mashing up the European auteur approach to
filmmaking with the Web 2.0 amateur's approach to net art making. The
work centers on the 78 minute version but also includes an elaborate web
site with video and audio remixes, a director's notebook, digital
images, and an early iPhone app. That's one kind of transmedia narrative.
Then with MOGA,
I decided to focus on the story of the amateur net artist from the
perspective of sanctioned culture, particularly foregrounding museum
directors, curators, art historians, and media critics—essentially the
core roles that make up the commercial art market's infrastructure of
value and legitimacy—and satirically portray them all as doing
everything in their power to canonize and historicize this eponymous
figure who defies them all. The transmedia element, though, really
explodes in this work because the nomadic net artist's work and the
museum catalog are distributed across a lot of online platforms. Of
course, this goes against the grain of the Hollywood system that tries
to use transmedia to market its media entertainment complex.
Still from "Museum of Glitch Aesthetics" located at glitchmuseum.com
The other cool thing about working with the various transmedia elements in MOGA
is that when I was invited to exhibit the work at the AND festival and
the Harris Museum, I knew I could open the work up to the various
curators so that they essentially became remixers and accomplices in the
story. This idea of the curator as a remix artist who then because
another character in the MOGA story proved fruitful. Omar Kholeif for
the AND festival and the team at the Harris Museum for Digital
Aesthetic, and now the minds behind Furtherfield, have all embraced the
idea of using the exhibition to remix the story of The Artist 2.0 in
conjunction with my own personal narrative as an artist.
The exhibition context for the work goes through an interesting
admixture process where it's being experienced both online/offline, in
print and on the Web, part of an open gift economy but also encased
within institutions open for public viewing. It's net art, wall art,
tablet art, book art, etc.—and I've been remixing it into both live
performance art events as well as keynote presentations where I'm
invited to present my current thoughts on the state of contemporary art
and media theory.
Still from "Museum of Glitch Aesthetics" located at glitchmuseum.com
What are your thoughts on how you think network culture is
affecting culture-at-large, now that we can be almost permanently
plugged in through phones and tablets (and potentially wearable tech)?
I think it's a very challenging situation that we're in right now.
We're unconsciously addicted to the devices that connect us to the feed
and feel we have no choice but to leave our data traces while
simultaneously tracking the movements of all of the transient others who
populate our social networks. Meanwhile, the networked nipple keeps
pouring its fountain of formulaic milk into the mouths of its hungry
babes and if you're a socially conscious artist, you've got to be
thinking, "How am I to negotiate collaborative forms of networked
creativity in an all-pervasive Spy State Economy?" It's time to dust off
our old copies of Pat Cadigan's Synners.
Who are some of your own influences and inspirations?
It's an interesting question because, these days, I find myself less
inspired by people and more stimulated by things, moods, and places. But
people turn me on too, sometimes more than I would otherwise like. And
as the saying goes, "I don't care who I'm influenced by as long as it's
not myself." Still, a list of stimulants would include metafiction,
cyberpunk, situationism, hard bop, noise, ambient, silence, loop,
repetition, filter, Beatnik, zine, grammatology, écriture feminine,
accidental promiscuity, open content, free strangelove, kale chips, raw
chocolate, quinoa pilaf, organic goji berries, Mallarmé's Book,
Roussel's fictionalized performance art installations, Duchamp's green
box, Acker's transgressions, London, Portland, Boulder, Melbourne,
Sydney, Kailua Beach.
