lange nacht der medienkunst

Happen to be at the lange nacht der medienkunst (part of the international\media\art\award events arranged by the SWR) in Baden-Baden Friday night? Come on up and say Hi ...

Rant-about-able

And suddenly the week-end was over and I hadn't flickwerked. Which may have been due to the fact that the film I'd seen on Friday, K PAx was simply not rant-about-able. It was boring.

Reason to rant was last week's Morgenmagazin, German early-morning news & light entertainment show on public TV (alternating between ARD an dZDF). Every now and again, the Morgenmagazin dedicates a week to visiting social subgroups in Germany. Last week, it was gay people.
Honestly, last Monday I thought I was going to be 15 years early for work. Watch Wolfgang Korruhn ask a gay hotel-owner: "Would you like to be normal?" ("I am normal," says the hotel-owner in a very small voice). And a bit later, a pro pos a gay man's plans to marry his partner: "But are you sure this love will last as long as a normal marriage is supposed to last?" And when the interviewee replied, that of course you never know but neither do all heterosexual marriage last till death does part the partners, Korruhn concludes: "They're living for the moment."

Tune in next week for "All Turks smell of garlic", "The Polish are all little thiefs" and "Women who think too much lose their femininity".

Commercial Break(Down) 002

I'm not going to promote Nike here. But remember Jocobs' unspeakable phrenology-project? Now Nike have a site for women, too. http://nikewomen.com Nice. Makes fun of (though in a well-bahaved way) of the character-casting and sportsy-identity-moulding they're usually doing themselves. And it does *not* contain a personality-test. Feel free to go identity-browsing and be sure to send me an e-card.

Minority Report

Seen Minority Report. My eye.

If you've seen the film, this opening is actually pretty funny. Well. a bit.

M.R. goes down well enough, visually. It's got easy film quotes which give you the satisfaction of recognizing Mission Impossible or The 5th Element. It even has a nicely arched tension-line: where you'd expect a normal film to finish (dramatically and time-wise), it stops, takes a breath, and goes on and off in a different direction, some of the tables turned. Very good.
It's also boringly about how the good guy always wins and how the family always wins and how the devious ones are those in high places. How very American. And how very not new. (Got to read Dick's novel, sometime!) Go see it on a big screen for a relaxing brain-drain with the latest and futuristic design.

M.R. claims to be about choice: You always have a choice, medium Agatha intones over and over again. Having a choice also means that no-one is necessarily a killer (or not a killer), until the bullet's left the barrel. Family-friendly values all around. But with a bit of good ole' 90s over-interpretation, there is another message to this movie:

You can never be sure that the prepetrator is really the perpetrator. Despite all evidence, despite a confession, a convicted criminal may be innocent after all. And with the example it uses, the film (the book, too?) most explicitly says: even if everything points to the "fact" that a man is a sex murderer, don't punish him, he's likely to be innocent.
Throughout the first part of the movie, we see John Anderton chase evil and prevent crimes, driven by losing his son - most likely to a crime. When the "precons", crime-envisioning mediums, see Anderton's murder of a man, the plot turns into a chase against time and a struggle to accept and then to change his obvious fate.
John Anderton does not want to kill. And he does not want to kill a man he's never seen before. He's the good guy. A loving (ex-)father. A man who's lost his wife because he couldn't live with the pain of losing his son. A keeper of law and order. But when Anderton finally ends up in his victim's hotel room, polaroids of kids strewn across the bed and the man confesses that he raped and killed the boy, we are ready to accept that this man must die. We see Anderton crack up and realize that there are reasons he would kill for - and if we go along with the film at all, at least for this moment of immersion, we go along with that, too. It seems that this is what M.R. means to say: there may be circumstances that very radically reverse all your beliefs, don't think yourself excused from basic human reactions.
But then it turns out that the whole thing's a set-up, the would-be killer a poor soul, ready to die, who's sold his life to some string-puller who's promised to pay up and support the starving family he's leaving behind. After the first release (don't underestimate what you could be driven to do if someone hits the right button), there is another, more powerful one: you cannot hand out capital punishment for the tiny chance that the culprit is in fact the victim.

But as the tension of the first part heavily relies on the father experience of loss and his suspicion of a crime that gradually hardens into the knowledge of rape and murder, it is hard not to read the film, especially on the background of recent events in the US, as speaking not in generel but explicitly: beware accusations of sex crimes tend to be ungrounded.


Another noteworthy detail of M.R.: the use of product placement. Not only does the Nokia-logo get more screen-time than the images the characters view on the computer. Not only does a long scene play in the GAP. Etc. The film is set in a town that is saturated with advertising, advertising that scans your iris, retrieves your profile and offers you personal shopping-suggestions in public. During the scenes that are set in the mall or in the underground, the "sponsors'" contemporary commercials serve as props as well as in-film advertising. In fact, the first cut into the mall-scene is executed like a commercial break. I had a short moment of actually thinking, wew, commercial break, no, wait, something wrong, I don't know this station's break-screen, no, wait, this is a movie, it's intermission, no, wait ... while the cut merged into a pan across several moving billboards - that did indeed produce something like a commercial break.

Life x 3

I went to see Yasmina Reza's Life x 3 basically because Sarah Hemming's review in the complimentary airport-Financial Times (Oct. 3 2002, p. 12) made it out to be something like a hypertext-play. Life plays out the same (or not the same) "non-dinner party from hell" three times over with different slants, different outcomes, different predispositions. Hemming:

"So the situation plays out differently, depending on who assumes responsibility for the mistake, who takes the upper hand in a conversation, how someone responds to a piece of news. Since with every replaying we retain more information about the true state of affairs, dramatic irony play a huge role." (emphasis mine)
- Sounds a bit like a hyperfiction or a reading of one rolled out into one evening's perfomance. Happily does not sound like the "same event from different perspectives"-approach.

The "morale" was something like "no matter how you go into this, the end will always be desastrous" - at least that's how I understood it, despite the review's (and several others') interpretation that the outcome of a given situation depends on who takes control and how they take control. All three acts ended in lives wrecked or characters in utter dejection. And the acts did not differ so much in small bits that drove the plot in different directions, either. In each act, the background-situation, especially the relationship of the fist couple, was significantly different. Whether Sonia and Henri despise or respect each other makes a world of difference when Hubert drops the bomb (that Henri's work of the past three years might be made futile by the fact the someone beat him to the publication of his results).

This, however, is a typical trait of hyperfiction: Arrive at a given point from three different threads, the cards have been dealt differently, the constallations are new and the action takes on a different light, or, depending on where (to) you exit the scene, it develops into a whole new story. A poignant find, after passing one and the same scene from two or three directions, might be that whatever you do, you specifically do *not* have a chance to influence events (read Sarah Smith'd King of Space for a good example).
This may be a weakness in Life: maybe the play is indeed about choice and the applied techniques just did not work out. Or maybe Reza failed to get her point across because on-stage hyperfiction has even more pitfalls than on-line hyperfiction.
One problem certainly was that the turning points were not visible enough. With a rather bare stage and characters who got drunk gradually but uniformly, there were few landmarks to anchor turning-points; the well-rehearsed couples-therapy-chatter did not really lend itself to repetitions and slight but meaning-bearing changes.

This is one problem hyperfiction-critics often bemoan: you cannot leaf back in a hypertext. It's like re-dreaming: you can never be sure you really had this dream before, you really passed this exact node before (unless, of course, you bookmark, printout or use some sort of history-function, should one be available). In a play, once you get the impression that something's been said before, that some point might be a turning point, there is no way to go back. And a play that uses few visual markers and relies on natural language and gestures has a very hard time emplyong hypertextual techniques that really work.

Digital Responses

Between 16 May 2002 and 9 March 2003, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London is hosting Digital Responses (Follow the link to the "Digital Responses Kiosk" - it's rather well done): "Twenty-one artists have been invited to create work in response to objects and spaces in the Museum." About two displays every month.

The idea is quite cool - extend the V&A and it's exhibits into the 21st century. Reflect the awareness that everything has always been done (more than) once before. Alright. But I was a bit disappointed when I saw this month's display (Charlotte Hodes "Untitled" and Chris Meight-Andrews "For Wiliam Henry Fox Talbot (The Pencil of Nature)").
[disclaimer: I don't know much about visual arts and I did not have much time in the V&A, either, having spent all day in the Science Museum] But still. Hodes sampled images from the V&A, photoshopped them and printed them on vases. For the schmock I am, they look a bit like the display I passed by at IKEA the other day. Meight-Andres set up a complex contraption to reproduce a 1835 Photograph by Talbot. The result, a pale image lacking in contrast, is less than exciting.

I find that digital art is often like this: very unspectacular until you've read the booklet - at which point it turns out to be ultra-complex. But this usually does not make the piece more aesthetically pleasing. Some pleasures are hard-won. The joy of hyperfiction, for example, takes some toil. Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose discloses its quiet humor (and most of it's depth) only to those who applied themselves to postmodern theory first. But the Name works on different levels, you can read it as a crime novel or a historical novel - and enjoy it. To get the in-jokes only adds a little extra satisfaction.

The established concept of "art" somehow includes "non-triviality" and "no ease of access". But digital art seems to hide behind concepts as much as it hides behind the machine. Won't be the real thing unless it involves a broad-band internet connection. The more tools a signal has to pass through, the arter it seems to get. But at the bottom of the last feedback-loop there remains the question: is there really anything origial I can do with this technology? Can it do more than explore (or extend) concepts of repetition and reproduction?

Tube-fiction

A familiar sight from the London tube: escalators rolling past regularly spaced about A4-sized framed adverts.
Sometimes, the adverts are not individual posters but series. Most notably at the moment: London Transport explains about why escalators have to be repaired and what this involves.

Is there an instance of tube-fiction, where the posters are used (or were used) for (linear) story-telling or poetry maybe?
And what about using the whole tube for an "embodied" hypertext: linear bits along the escalators and associative or random connections from station to station. Loops produced by the regular paths you take: to work, to go shopping, downtown. Would people go out of their ways to experience (German: erfahren - fahren = to drive, to ride) other plots?

How much would it cost to rent every single excalator-ad on the London underground for, say, a month? Who are the media-agency for the tube, anyway?