Visibility

When you see a brand name or consumer item in a movie or TV show, you know that a non-trivial amount of cash has changed hands. Not so, it seems, for Apple computers. I remember an advert for a German furniture-comapany (though I don't remember their name ...): it showed half a shelf with an iMac on it. It seems that everybody hopes that the cool of Apple will rub off on their product and Apple are happy to take the extra advertising space. Or aren't they?

At least once during a given episode of Sex and the City, columnist Carrie Bradshaw is depicted writing on a G3 Apple powerbook. In last weeks's epsiode, we got the usual camera-glide down over Powerbook's slim waistline but instead of the ghostwhite glowing apple-logo, there was a very obvious piece of black tape that covered the brand. Cut. In the next scene, Carrie's current lover is reading her column: we see the back of the newspaper - with a full-page Apple advert.
What happened? Have the tables turned so that even Apple have to pay to see their products appear on popular TV shows? Only this time they'd missed the deadline, so HBO decided not to show the logo. Of course, they have to rent the machines so they shoot all the scenes with Macs in them on the same day. Then the next day the check is in the mail, so they put in the advert in the column-reading-scene. - Or had HBO simply failed to pay for the right to cool-up their show with a Pismo.

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A couple of years ago, I googled my old classmates. Only two of them were online. One with a pic from his Fussball team and another with an entry in a guestbook somewhere. Of about thirty college-level graduates, I was the only one with a coherent and recognizable online-presence. This time, those two were gone, another one was there - and I find I can't even remember the names of more than half of the people I spent my teenage years with.
The web and esp. blogging is such an easy way to stay in touch, I am so used to read up on my friends' lives on websites and in e-mails. Most people I meet these days are google-able. But thoses guys from school are quietly slipping away ....

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Markus Kiefer from Mainz university film department has made his graduation-film about the island La Reunion. About a culture that is based on a mix of cultures and ethnicities, about people that are resolved and at peace with themselves and the land.
Markus' favorite technique is picture-in picture. Sometimes, the extra images illustrate what is being said in the "main" panel, sometimes they add to it, very rarely they go off on different tracks.

For one thing, I wonder if this story could have been told differently, with an eye on the strati. On hierarchies. On the poverty that must exist on this island and the power and the money that must be there, somewhere, as well.

But above all, I am very impressed with picture-in-picture. Markus made a slow movie. It's not hard to follow and the competing images are similar enough so that one can take them in as a homogenous message. Maybe this is where our viewing-habits are going. Multiple images, multiple messages. A news-speaker, with supporting and competing film-clips in the background, a ticker with more news or stock quotes beneath. My computer-screen with a spread sheet, my webmail and a TV-stream in the corner. My computer and the TV on. Reading the paper while listening to the radio. Immersed in a continuous stream of push media from which I pull to my immediate attention those that I want to concentrate on for the moment.
In another two or three years we might be ready for more and faster art that uses picture-in-picture. Not Sliding Doors which strings along scenes from two different plots. But two or more plots playing simultaneously on the same screen. And for hypertext fiction, no longer struggling to make linear sense of the whole, but happily taking in serveral stories and readings of one story at a time. The whole is more ...

Commercial Break(Down)

Flickwerk watches TV.

Sometimes, advertising is cool. Most times, it's plain boring. And sometimes advertising is so outrageously way out that I wonder whether I've missed something. Here's an example.
Trigema produce rather unfashionable sportswear. They also have a TV spot they've been running intermittently since the early 1980s. The central claim is that Trigema's entire production is located in Germany, preserving hundreds of jobs in the process. Fair enough. Many products are being advertised not based on their quality or functionality but on abstract "values" such as "cool" or "well-to-do" or "upper class". Why not sell "fashion" on political issues (unemployment). (Except, of course, for the slightly nationalistic undertones.)

Buuut. The key scene of the advert, the ceo walking along a row of women sewing hideously pink materials, is framed by a monkey in a news-anchorman-pose who introduces the spot. The monkey is "Ronnie", erstwhile "star" of Otto Waalkes's commedies and "Ronnies Pop Show". I.e. even in the 80s the epitome of uncool. Plus, the spot has been running unchanged all the time, except for new voice-overs for the monkey.

So what is it they are trying to tell the close-to-catatonic viewer? That "Trigema" is a traditional German idiom that translates roughly into *not cool* or that only a primate would boast to "buy German" and think he's saving quality jobs that way?

Fresh From Our Servers

Magen Online, www.iberogast.info, a Flash-trip into your stomach. Ever wondered what makes a nervous stomach nervous? If you know German, here's where you can find out. If you don't know German, just check the animations.

High Expectations

Jill is anxious about finishing her thesis, about having to keep up one and the same opinion for 200+ pages. And right on. If you spend your formative years as an academic exposed to postmodern theory, how are you supposed to hold only one opinion about any given topic at all?
Maybe "phd dissertation" would be a less underrated genre if candidates were encouraged to pick up a hypothesis, look at it from different and opposing angles and arrive - not at a conclusion or synthesis but at a methodological statement, another hypothesis or a bunch of interesting questions.

A pro pos of theses: for mine, I studied (among other games), Ripley's Believe It Or Not: The Riddle of Master Lu (Sanctuary Woods, 1996). Master Lu ends (and climaxes) in China, in the grave of Qin Shi, first emperor of China. Through a hole in the ground, down a narrow passage, character Robert L. Riply stumbles round a corner and there is - the emperor's terra cotta army, whole and with the "original" painting. I am usually amazed by a new game's visuals during the opening titles and my first tentative clicks around the scenery. But the underground tomb in Master Lu is easily the most impressive simulation I have seen in a game. The whole scenery is incredibly rich and life-like (although modelled largely after written accounts, not the actual archaeological findings) - and of course there's music to add to the atmosphere.
Now 122 replica and a small-scale model of another 1000 soldiers are on exhibition in the Frankfurt Palmengarten. This exhibition is, I'm sorry to say, less than exciting. The whole thing takes place in a large tent with creaky floorboards, Chinese-y muzak and fake torches.
The first room has clay body-parts and weapons, alternating with background info on posters that are made to look old and scorched in a slightly amateurish way. (Why scorched I don't know, some of the original soldiers were, but there's no historically proven explanation for this and it's a minor detail. But I guess fire-marks are a sure-tell sign of "authenticity".) Then there's a room with the model and "original" paintings of some of the soldiers. I'm not sure what's "original" about the portraits and I suspect they are modern. Then the full-size statues, a small "cinema" with a pretty low-key info-movie and a stall with merchandising (though nothing you might not as well get from the Asia-store down the street).
The really disappointing thing is that they tried to dramatize the exhibition and just about failed: When you're in the room with the small-scale models and read along the walls, you cannot but look into the adjoining room with the full-size figures. Spoiled. It would have been so easy to put a curtain before the entrance and leave the impact of the first glance complete. The figures, then, were placed in the center of the room with an elevated cat-walk around them. Instead of looking the figures in the unpainted eye, able to grasp their size and all, you look down on them, past them. And the unfocused light does the rest.

But I wonder: Do I need expert dramatization to appreciate more than 2000 year old artifacts of monnumental size and import? Am I so used to the wall-to-wall experience-scapes brought to me by Hollywood, malls, and popular museums? Experiences that come with the right background music and an option to save-and-replay (or come away with the interactive CD).
Or am I just, as I'd like to believe, disappointed with the failure of the attempt to provide just this sort s(t)imulation?

The terra cotta army will be in Frankurt till October 6th, in Munich from Oct. 26th to Dec. 8th, and very probably touring Europe after that.

Of interaction and meddling

Hullo Luvvies,
I am blogging this to the sounds of Edgar Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 in D minor (listen to the Real Player version from the BBC before Sept. 21st) as performed last night during this year's Last Night of the Proms (alternatively, check the unofficial homepage), possibly one of the world's first interactive events of so-called "high" culture.

The "Proms", now in their hundredth season, are a series of concerts that are played every summer, while the gentry has left the city for the residences in the countryside and only the "common people" are around to imbibe culture, in London's Royal Albert Hall. The series was invented, so to speak, by director Sir Henry Wood, who used them to introduce mainly contemporary international composers to a British audience, and since 1927 they have been sponsored by the BBC. The last night tops off the season with a medley of British evergreens and inofficial national anthems. (This conglomerate of nationalism is made bearable only by the fact that international flags in the auditorium just outnumber local ones.)

The Proms have a tradition of witty speaches by the directors (most notable, I think, a couple a years ago when Sir Andrew Davis rendered the Proms in a nutshell in his own version the Modern Major-General from Gilbert and Sullivan's the Pirates of Pensance) and also of an audience-work-interaction that goes beyond simple standing ovations and da capos.
During Wood's Fantasia on British Sea Songs (listen to the Real Player version from the BBC before Sept. 21st), the audience in the "cheap seats" acts along with the orchestra. While during Charles Dibdin's Tom Bowling the audience take out their hankies and start to sob quietly (until a year or two ago when he got replaced (hope they had a good reason), even the solo cellist always squeezed a tear), during The Sailor's Hornpipe, the audience "rides" and claps along the to rhythm and accompanies high-points with little fanfares and bursting balloons. The idea is for the audience to speed up the piece's original crescendo and accelerato to a point where the orchestra can no longer follow suit. A kind of feedback-loop I'd like to liken to the one we know from modern performances where the music played is channeled through a computer and the output is used to influence the performance in some way.
According to the programme notes on the BBC's Proms-page, this audience-driven tempo has been in use since the time when Wood himself conducted the music.


One other notable thing about the Proms is the version us Germans get to see on ARD each year. The Proms come with a commentary by Rolf Seelmann-Eggebert, the ARD's specialist on all things Royal and British. Whenever a member of the British Royal Family has a birthday, wedding, or funeral, Rolf Seelmann is there to point out the Count of Whatnot's second cousin on horseback from behind. (Most of the time, the worthy general later turns out to've been Princess Anne, but that's a different story). Seelmann-Eggebert is an intimate connoisseur of Royalty, especially when it's British. What he is not, is a simultaneous translator.
I don't mind Seelman-Eggebert happily chewing the cud while on the screen there's marching, riding, colour-trouping or the like. But during the Proms ... A couple of years ago, Seelmann-Eggebert started his commentary by anouncing that the ARD alway receives many letters in reply to their screening of the Proms, many of which threatened murder or worse if Seelmann was to do one more Last Night. Which sentiment I can fully understand.

A common sight (or rather, sound) is Eggebert saying something to the effect of "Now the director is embarking on one of his well-known and -liked witty speaches" and when the director is well into his first bonmot (which we have missed), S-E remarks that "the audience is laughing so the director must have just made one of the jokes he his famous for". Agck. Come on! About 50% of the Proms-on-TV audience in Germany are hardcore anglophiles who *know* English. the other 50% percent are their friends and family who are made to sit throught the event and will get a first hand-translation from the hardcore anglophiles. If anything, subtitles with elucidations of the finer points of British intracultural humour might be in order at some points. What I don't need, however, is for Rolf Eggebert to drone out Audra McDonald's witticisms with the remark that "tonight's solist is talking to the audience in a very animated and charming way". That much, I could *see*. (Or, as my very own friends-and-family remarked, is he a radio-DJ or what?)

Come on, ARD, give us a break!

endlessnessless

So. I decided to try and run Flickwerk as a weekly column. Thing is, a while ago, blogger.com started not to like my tags. Maybe because I fiddled with them. Maybe I always tested while blogger.com was wobbly. So I started to do this manually (yes, Mark, I still use Tinderbox) which is pretty uncomfortable. Let's see if I can keep up a weekly rhythm, so that you, dear reader (are there any?) don't have to check Flickwerk time and again and go away disappointed cause there's nothing new.

Now, I'm not going to comment on the "Kanzler-Duell" on TV this night.
But did you realize that Douglas Hofstadter, in Gödel, Escher, Bach gives (almost explicit) reasons why hypertext fiction is a good thing and single-handedly sweeps away the closure-problem? Here goes (I have the 20th century anniversary edition, 1999, form Basic Books, New York and the following is on pages 402/403):

"You've undoubtedly noticed how some authors go to so much trouble to build up great tension a few pages before the end of their stories - but a reader who is holding the book physically in his hands can FEEL that the story is about to end. Hence, he has some extra information which acts as an advance warning, in a way. The tension is a bit spoiled by the physicality of the book. It would be so much better if, for instance, there were a lot of padding at the end of novels.
... a lot of extra printed pages which are not part of the story proper, but which serve to conceal the exact location of the end from a cursory glance, or from the feel of the book."
(Hofstadter, or rather, Achilles and the Tortoise, go on to speculate about how the reader could best be deceived - empty pages, of course, are too easily seen through.)
"Say, I have a suggestion. The transition between genuine story and padding material could be made in such a way that, by sufficiently assiduous inspection of the text, an inteligent reader will be able to detect where one leaves off and the other begins. Perhaps it will take him quite a while. Perhaps there will be no way to predict how long it will take ... But the publisher could give a guarantee that a sufficiently assiduous search for the true ending will always terminate, even if he can't say how long it will be before the test (I think he means "text", here, but on the other hand ...) terminates."

Neat. Don't you think.
A case for endlessnessless.

On another topic that pops up again and again in my posts: advertising. Coffee-Roaster Jacobs, owned by Kraft Foods launched a new site, das-bin-ich.de.
das-bin-ich.de (translates into "that's me", "this is how I am") targets, it seems, young, dynamic women, offering them a way to find out more about themselves and put their capabilities and characteristics, their "nature" as they say on the site, to better use. The method they employ is called "Psycho-Physiognomik", as propagated on German TV (Pro7) by a certain Dirk Schneemann.

das-bin-ich.de is a sophisticated website that offers a tool that measures your features and calculates your character: your intelligence, your emtionality, your will-power. You can apply for "analysis of the week" and find your pictures with lines and circles for measuring and an in-depth analysis of your so-called nature. This week, we can learn that Anne H. can concentrate well because the distance between the bridge of her nose and the back of her head is rather large.
Kind of reminds me of Albert Camus, who said (more or less) that "at age 40, everybody has the face they deserve". But it also reminds me other people, a bit later in the 20th century, who calculated your right to live from the distance between your eyes.

Jacobs reserve the right to take your data while you're browsing their site and to use it for anonymous statistics.

The data they collect probably fit nicely with the data German TV station RTL (sorry, no deep links) collected last Friday during their "IQ quiz". A nation-wide, televised IQ-test. You could download the software, play along during the show and enter the competition to win fantastic prizes. Even now, you can register and take the test.
RTL, too, collect visitors' data and use them for demographic and statistical purposes.

Yikes.