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'Flick-werk zusammengestückelte Arbeit; stümperhafte Arbeit, Pfuscherei; Sy Flickschusterei
(Wahrig - Deutsches Wörterbuch)
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Monday, January 28, 2002
Yesterday I used a stormy Sunday to show The Lionheart Brothers to my friend who'd never even read anything of Astrid Lindgren's.
This morning, Astrid Lindgren died. Aged 94. But still ....
9:36 AM
Sunday, January 27, 2002
btw. in case you have (or have seen) a copy of Soviet Russian black-and-white movie Leonid installiert eine Zinkbadewanne (Leonid installs a zic bathtub) - drop me a line. I keep seeing the trailer, bit no-one round here is showing the movie.
1:18 PM
Cybernarium Days in Darmstadt (Zentralstation). Last day is tomorrow, Monday, but there's no need to rush.
Cybernarium is a project of the Fraunhofer IDG (Institut für Grafische Datenverarbeitung) set up to be the first theme-park for virtual and augmented reality. There's to be entertainment and education and industry-applications. Check the site.
Cybernarium Days offered a little preview: 3D-laser-projections, laser-projections on non-flat surfaces, video-feedback: you take a digital "spray-can" and "spray" onto the projection of a wall. The computer reads your movements and generates an "image" on the "wall" that you can then save onto the internet. Tron with head mounted displays. Minimal invasive surgery on a plastic knee.
I guess I found it a little lame because there wasn't really anything new - but for people not dealing with _cyberspace_ on an everyday-basis it was ok. Judging, if not from anything else, from the enormous queues. Obviously, buying tickets over the internet has not caught on yet. Even though internet-tickets gave you no-wait admission at a speficied hour. (When I arrived, the wait was about two hours.)
Also, the exhibition was pretty well-designed (for Germany ...): Stuff to read, stuff to look at and hands-on stuff. Too full, sadly. To play Tron, one would have had to manually jostly an ever-growing bunch of kids first ...
Nice twist: the catalog. A slim, CD-sized cardbord-booklet with a pocket. From every station you visited, you could pick up a leaflet or two and assemble your own catalog.
More of the like, please.
1:05 PM
German TV screens two episodes of the new BBC series on prehistoric wild-life, Walking With Dinosaurs - a documentary that puts thoroughly researched computer-animated animals into a real-life background. The technology is really impressive, specialists in forensics calculate muscle distribution from bone-structure, researchers get new ideas about how the beasts looked from digital animators (who claim that "with muscles like this, movement wouldn't have been possible"), and modern animation, unlike the stuff we're still used to, even considers how moving animals break the light.
Still, watching this, I know that it's not real in any way, it's animation.
Q: Why do we know animation is animation?
A1: I know because they told me. I mean, I don't watch nature programs much. I watched this one because it has state of the art animation. So I expect computer-generated movement and of course I get it.
On the other hand, I don't get to see much nature in the first place. The other day, driving on the A 3 from Darmstadt at 3.12 pm, a small I think mouse or rat scurried across the lanes, looking for all in the world like a piece of fur on tiny wheels, pulled by some special effects guy.
I only knew it was a real whatever-it-was because no special effects guy in his or her right mind would pull some expensive sfx equipment across the A 3 from Darmstadt when instead of a camera there is only an innocent passer-by (= me) in the right position to see it.
It's all about perspective.
A2: It's all about staging. The episode I saw contained no end of significant animal-on-animal interaction - each incident set in a little clearing or so so that we all could get a good view.
What the camera did was add some of the blurring-effect that one sees a lot in computer-animated films - probably used in order to add some more "reality", like edge-blurring a computer-generated image that would look super-real otherwise. But exaggeratedly blurred movements are about to become a trademark of computer generation.
Also, the camera was too mobile. For all I know, making wildlife-movies is all about hiding a couple of cameras, waiting for several years to collect enough footage and then making up some sort of narrative that strings several separate incidents together in the likeness of a plausible plot. Not close-up actions scenes.
(The episode I saw was also annoying for its rhetoric of killer-birds, killer-ants and killer-lakes ... but that's another blog.)
12:20 PM
Wednesday, January 09, 2002
Berlin Babylon, dir. Hubertus Siegert, prod. S.U.M.O. Film, rel. Piffl Medien, shot 1996-2000 in Berlin on 35mm, first showing International Filmfestspiele Berlin 2001.
The movie Berlin Babylon is about the rebuilding of Berlin after the wall came down. It shows architects and politicians and construction workers and endless, endless Berlin streets, facades, helicopter perspectives of the city, views up cranes and of cranes and from cranes, staircases, blown down buildings. The soundtrack is by German punk (?) band Einstürzende Neubauten ("new buldings tumbling down" - pun intended). This goes on for 88 minutes.
Notable is the absolute lack of narrative elements or structure. There is no omniscient voice-over to offer bytes of meaning, no time-line, no color-coding, no rhythem, even, introduced through the soundtrack (the trailer suggestes a certain anarcho-MTV-aesthetic and I was only half disappointed that the film did without it).
Truth be told, this makes the film a bit boring: the eye tries to assemble to images into something it can process, the mind has long stopped to wrestle meaning from word or picture. You quickly slip out of the movie, back into your seat, and wait till it's over.
But this plain dismissal of narration and learned sense-making techniques is also quite exciting. You sit there and watch your mind trying to produce meaning from information. It's an experience a lot like reading hyperfiction. One node, one info-bit after another and you are so used to expecting there is a referential structure of elements in there somewhere that you're determined to find it.
Conclusion: Berlin Babylon is *about* the attempt to reconstruct sense (via architecture) from a broken-down structure - and the futility thereof. It's about the failure of grand narratives (cast in stone) in the face of givens of modern life. It's about the utter disassociation of modern life.
Walter Banjamin's Engel der Geschichte (Angel of History), quoted in the last quarter, only adds to this sense: history as entropy.
Or maybe, at the end of the day, the film is *about* nothing at all, does not even want to tell a story.
...
Then you go check out the website and find that the film is actually about ... The structuring element is topological. The topography of the city of Berlin. The camera moving in from different directions, chosing different spots and showing them through time. Too bad, however, that you, and probably the better part of the German audience cannot read this language. I have a hard time decyphering aerial photographs of a quarter I've lived in for years or historic photos of my hometown or even tv-cameras flying through my street.
But that's a bit like reading hyperfiction, as well: the topological metaphor that does not really help to get you oriented ...
2:27 AM
Sunday, January 06, 2002
Sylvia Brownrigg's The Metaphysical Touch (1998) - the first novel of the internet-age? (At any rate more so than the likes of Carola Heine's Liebe auf den ersten Klick or Nan McCarthy's Chat / Connect / Crash -series.)
Pi loses her hand-annotated philosophy-books and half-finished dissertation on Kant and metaphysics in the great Berkeley-fire of 91. She turns bookstore-phobic and seeks a life of little serious thought and much experiencing nature first-hand in Mendochino.
J.D. loses his job quite unglamourously to the a current recession. He also decides to lose his life - that of the body as opposed to Pi losing her life of the mind.
They meet - or encounter - over the internet, where J.D. posts his "Diery" (pun intended) - endless Salingeresque (quoth the back-cover) whinings that, to the untrained eye, read rather boringly at times - and Pi keeps a some small and body-less communication with friends from her former life. After several hundred pages of soul-searching exchanges, Pi and J.D. find their (different) outlooks again. The book, however, ends inconclusively.
The internet, in The Metaphysical Touch mostly just sits there. There are some musings about disembodiedness and distance, but mainly, the web is a prop like a car or a boiling kettle (more like the later, in fact ...).
At first, though, it seems that this is just another one of those "how to introduce the web and some basic communication techniques to a reading public that is liable to go "oooooh" in horror at the mere mention of the word"-tracts: Pi gets send her first modem and needs to be told how to use it. J.D. is/was a computer consultant and relates a couple of work-stories while he whines. Unlike other "internet-novels" I've read, however, that use the crude didactic trick of wrapping a thin shroud of narration around an AOL-manual in order to reassure their parent-generation that this "line" they're always "on" will not get them convicted any time soon, Touch doesn't bother to give much room to techniques and technologies. (In fact, Brownrigg seems to have a knack of unceremoniously introducing subjects that might cause the reader to go "ooooh" in horror at the mere mention ... ;-) In fact, some of the stuff that happens online is quite improbable, the kind of online-community described and the technology-determined actions open to them do not seem to come from the same era and some more slight clues of this kind ...
The fact that the internet is slightly below a side-kick in The Metaphysical Touch is imho what makes it an *internet-novel* in the first place. The characters, their communication, their thinking is informed by communicative and conceptual structures of the internet - or of the time that created the internet. There is no need to state the obvious. There is no need to let imagination run wild and create cyberspatial fantasies. There is no need to educate the readership ...
Sylvia Brownrigg's The Metaphysical Touch is a, maybe *the first* novel of the internet-age because the net is simply there and the reader is expected to be able to deal with it.
9:41 AM
Thursday, January 03, 2002
Mark and Jill have already commented on Jan Van Looy's review of Bill Bly's "We Descend" but, please, I want to, too.
Now, my first impulse is to dismiss the review with a line like "One reason not to read Looy's review: It's too tedious to read it as a joke." (L's own reason no22). But serious criticism is what's asked for here.
Honest - the first page of the review I found hilarious. It reads so much like a take-on of uninformed, technophobic criticism of digital literature. Here's a quote:
01.It costs $20
02.The only time you sense history is when you open the envelope
03.The interface reminds you of times you do not want to be
.....reminded of
04.We use more of our brain than We Descend of its medium
05.Its writing style is undetermined
06.It is implausible
07.It is not exactly visually stunning
08.It is barely longer than a novella
09.There is no suspense
10.The narrative voices are unconvincing
11.It is superficial
12.It is written in the philosophy of early hypertext theory
13.You have a PC
14.It is linear
15.It contains poetry
16.This is a man's world, but it would be nothing…
17.The plot smells funny
18.It is crammed with clichés
19.It lacks sense of time and temporality
20.You care for your eyes
21.It is too tedious to read it as a joke
22.It is incoherent
23.You have read this review (you know it has a happy ending)
But when Looy goes on to elaborate on 16 of his 23 points, it stops being funny. Jill concludes her comment on an optimistic note:
It could be seen as a sign that hypertext fiction has matured when it is reviewed by people who aren't so close to the writers that they can only be positive, or by people who hate the idea of electronic fiction by default. Perhaps a few extreme reviews like this are just a phase before we can find a balanced, thoughtful, constructive and critical way of discussing electronic literature.
However, as the note on the author in Dichtung Digital points out, Looy is an "insider":
Assistent Professor at the K.U.Leuven (Belgium), preparing a Phd. in interactive media studies. He has worked on multimedia productions like Galatea, Terranova and CD-roms like Rockox and Mercator. His main fields of interest are hypertext poetics, poststructuralist theory (review at altx) and cyberculture.
He should know better. I don't mind if he simply doesn't like "We Descend" or if he finds fault with the way the text is executed. But Looy steps into some obvious traps of the criticism of digital fiction - which, I admit, makes the review an interesting item. As far as reviews go, however, I'd say it's a pretty awful one, not only because it ignores the difficulties of digital criticism but also because Looy does not state his premises and holds the text in question up against oblique quality-criteria.
Now for the interesting issues the review raises. Looy finds the text "tedious" (item 22, also 6, 9, 17) and the language atrocious (10, 15, maybe 5). OK, I'm not that firm on Bly, let's dismiss those points as matters of taste. Also, let's not talk about content (11,18) and the lack of women (or was it the surfait of gay men???) (16). The other issues are
- handling of literary techniques (mainly coherence and timing)
- being rooted in the "philosophy" of a specific era>/LI>
- not making sufficient use of the medium
It's always difficult to compare digital fiction to print literature - even more to to judge digital fiction on an unquestioned background of literary preferences. For most of the issues of literary quality Looy brings up, one could easily find an example from "high" literature that could be convicted of the same "fallacy". And most could be countered with examples from postmodernist writing (conherence, credibility of characters, "depth" of story, suspense, ...). In a review, it would be helpful to name and place one's criteria - which would, however, quickly lead to the realization that this sort of "Pritchard-chart" approach must fail. Would I judge medieval heroic epics on a background of Jane Austen's novels? Or Jandl on Goethe?
The same goes for being "written in the philosophy of early hypertext theory" - what do you expect? "We Descend" is an Eastgate Hyperfiction published in 1997 and reflects its background. So? Shakespeare is a monarchist. Thomas Mann is burgeois. Of course, the writings and opinions of a given era are interrelated - but that's a different story, hard to assess as an aside in a review and not very well treated in the one at hand.
Finally, technological shortcomings, from too small font to awful Mac-to-PC adaptation. First thought: we're talking 1997 here. That's what? in relation to the development of literature? Sterne?
So, can we include the technological execution of a digital text in judging it? And for how much does age account? Reminds me of the discussion about computer games in Zuerich last November ... I think it takes a lot of know-how to determine where a piece falls short of technological standards of its time - and some more know-how to determine where it's a shortcoming and where it is a choice.
It seems that as more critics and scholars are turning to digital literature and their thoughts get published, we find out, maybe not more about the texts they're analysing, but about which are the issues in digital literature studies we'll have to address in the near future.
6:03 AM
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