Weblogging from the Pop!Tech Conference

“Great web philosopher” David Weinberger weblogged several talks at PopTech 2002, which had the theme of Artificial Worlds. From his posts, it sounded like a lot of thought-provoking fun. But what’s in it for me you ask? (Me meaning me, of course, not you.) Some speakers addressed stuff that matters to the Animated Musical (which now has a future-based flashback-to-the-present structure, as noodled over here):

  • Ray Kurzweil spoke about the future (of computing), where human brain power and computing power intersect in 2029 (he didn’t give a date, so keep your calendars open).

    Bonus Weinberger question: “I said last summer I stood in a wheatfield that 100M stalks of wheat. If we take left-leaning is on and right-leaning as off, for 5 minutes, that wheatfield completely represented Casear’s brain state when he was stabbed. So, I asked, it seems to me that hw-sw is entirely the wrong paradigm for the brain, intelligence, consciousness. (Unfortunately, I chose not to draw the explicit connection, in order to save time, and thus sounded like a lunatic.) “

  • Alvy Ray Smith, co-foundar of Pixar, presented the case against digital actors. Acting is founded in consciousness, and would be impossible to model/program without conscious computers. [And even if computers achieved consciousness, how many do you have to make to get one Emily Watson? -ed.] Oh, and Pixar’s still at least two orders of magnitude away from modelling real humans satisfactorily.
    Bonus outside reading assignment: Dr. Antonio Damasio’s The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness

  • Warren Spector, game god, said games are “part of the real world.” Games as a story-telling medium, or a story-facilitating medium, really, with the explosion of continuous multiplayer games.
    Bonus video game-as-research:The Sims, duh, and Grand Theft Auto 3 (“reprehensible” but “revolutionary”).

    • Pseudonyms

    Not being a rabid fan of Hunter S Thompson, Jerry Seinfeld, Beck, Leno, or their literary agents, I somehow missed the original brouhaha about Asterisk, the pranksterish pseudonym of some reasonably well-known writer/comedic person (rumors have/had it to be either Thompson himself or Jerry Seinfeld).
    A rant-filled fax sent–seemingly from HST–to HST’s agent complained that some Asterisk was ripping HST off, but it turns out the fax itself was from Asterisk in the style of HST. Anyway, now 3AM Magazine has an interview with the as-yet-unidentified Asterisk. The Beck connection? A Spike Magazine reader named Andreas Gursky [thunk! Um, Spike, I think you dropped something.] pointed out a Fimoculous anecdote where Beck asked Seinfeld who Asterisk is during a taping of Jay Leno.
    As a media circle jerk, it’s a bit tiresome, but because The Animated Musical has some pseudonymous characters in it, the idea’s been on my mind. Recently, a greg.org reader and very respected editor [thunk!] suggested I employ a pseudonym to write on topics other than my film projects. With the advent of online communication, pseudonyms aren’t just for Deep Throat anymore. In a world of complete Googlability, compartmentalizing one’s thoughts/activities/output is probably not all bad. But after you’ve admitted you liked Star Trek: The Motion Picture, I figure there’s nothing left to hide.

    The sorry state of the world, or Seen it. Hated it. What Else You Got?

    While some people have emailed about the Animated Musical (specifically, how long the As-Yet-Unannounced thing’ll go on), more than a few have pointed out that a string of bad-to-middlin-but-with-a-couple-of-classic film references is an unlikely/inauspicious beginning for a great movie. One kind reader suggested I should “write what [I] know, rather than cut and paste a bunch of other peoples ideas.”
    I have angsted a bit over describing the script indirectly like this, but I’m gonna stick with it for a while, at least until I’m satisfied with it creatively and I have some more substantial business/development/legal traction for the project. But then I read an excerpt of a letter from Abraham Lincoln in John Perry Barlow’s recently circulated Pox Americana. My script is based on the catalogs of movies I referenced in the same way South Park: The Movie was based on Abraham Lincoln’s letter.

    Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose – – and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after you have given him so much as you propose. If, to-day, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, ‘I see no probability of the British invading us’ but he will say to you ‘be silent; I see it, if you don’t.’

    Read Sen. Robert Byrd’s Oct. 3 speech, which included this excerpt. Listen to it on MP3.
    Other highly relevant research/source material, Bruce Schneier’s canonical Applied Cryptography. Last month in The Atlantic, Charles Mann wrote an interesting, disturbing article on Homeland Security, starring Schneier.

    1979 Star Trek, or The Thin Line Between (Punch-Drunk) Love and Hate

    punch-drunk love poster

    I’m watching Star Trek: The Motion Picture right now, and it’s blowing me away. It’s the first movie, the one with the original crew, the bald chick, and V’Ger, a cloud-like alien vessel with the Voyager space probe at its core. Anyway, wide swaths of the movie are a nearly psychedelic trance, which I never remembered. There’s an incredible 10+ minute abstract FX sequence of the Enterprise entering the vessel. It’s similar to Jeremy Blake’s digital work and the passages he did for Punch-Drunk Love. Or, it’s as abstract, at least. A very unexpected place for such a confluence.
    Syd Mead's rendition of V'Ger

    [The visual effects on STTMP were originally led by Richard Taylor, then Douglas Trumbull took over after overruns in the chaotic production’s budget. So far, I think the V’Ger sequence was John Dykstra‘s and Trumbull’s realization of Syd Mead‘s concepts. An interview with Taylor survives for now in Google’s cache: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6. Charles Barbee wrote about lighting and shooting the V’Ger Flyover, including accounts of 10-pass in-camera composited shots and finding just the right “glare angle.” Syd Mead discusses creating V’Ger.]
    While I mentioned before that elements of the Star Trek IV story inspired the latest script for the AYUAM, it turns out that several ideas from this Star Trek worked in as well. I’m not unaware that these are considered two of the lamest Star Trek films made (“The V’Ger flyby was interminable.”). Combine this with the fact that I don’t like musicals, and I find myself deeply engaged in something I should be hating, but instead, I’m loving it. Can someone explain this to me?

    How New York is still Scorsese-town

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    “The city belongs to the hoodlums, the pimps, and the hookers. Bickle starts hoping that ‘some day a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets.'” [via]

    Tourists marveled at the multicolored glass skyscraper, but also gawked as evidence technicians took measurements and snapped photographs of the crime scene… “They might have cleaned up some of Times Square,” said Jason Fallon, who picks up trash for the Times Square Business Improvement District. “But when I get to work at 6 in the morning, it’s still all pimps and hookers and hoodlums.”
    – “Old Times Square Surfaces in Brawl on Eighth Avenue”, NY Times
    Gangs Of New York gets new release date, Dec. 20 (Miramax prexy Weinstein blinks: “The Souvenir November 2001 debut on the 19th made us nervous.”)

    More on the influence of art on film, and Contact as Dante’s Paradiso. Seriously.


    Last night, I talked about the     artists and filmmakers post with an artist friend who passed through town. He pointed out Lars von Trier’s collaboration with the Danish romantic painter Per Kirkeby on Breaking The Waves. Kirkeby created deeply romantic landscapes to introduce each chapter of the film. Von Trier points out that the movie’s setting, the Isle of Skye, was a favorite destination of many 19th century English Romantic artists and writers.
    Interesting because it dovetails so nicely with my other current fixation, is how von Trier envisioned these painterly interludes to Kirkeby: “God’s-eye-view of the landscape in which this story is unfolding, as if he were watching over the characters.” (from the Journal of Religion and Film)
    Moving from interesting to unsettling, this JR&F paper discusses the parallels of Contact and Dante’s Paradiso.
    Nevertheless, so much of the holy kingdom
    as I could treasure up in my mind
    shall now be the matter of my song.
    -Dante
    They should have sent a poet.
    -Ellie Arroway

    Mystics, Astronauts & Filmmakers, or Is Becoming Jodie Foster in Contact The Best I Can Hope For?

    contact_jodie.jpgPalm recharging at home, I had a little red notebook with me on the train last night, and, still stuck on the entry from the other day, I wrote “Who are such mystics, astronauts, filmmakers, ?, people with a Knowledge, but limited means to convey that knowledge/experience?”
    Film technology and technique go so far in “accurately” communicating/realizing what is in the director’s (realisateur, in French, you know) mind, but how long does it remain effective? Early filmgoers reportedly jumped out of the way when they saw an image of a train chugging toward them. The War of The Worlds usurped the medium of radio news reporting and scared millions of less alert listeners. Yet by 1998, the spare-no-CG-expense afterlife in What Dreams May Come had all the impact of a rendering demo at Macworld.
    There may be many paths to the top of Mount Fuji, but the techno-theocratic path seems to be leading off somewhere else. Seeing the earth from space may be a transformative experience for the engineer/colonel/astronaut, but their flatly telling us so doesn’t change us that much. In Contact Jodie Foster’s character is “reduced” to pleading for faith after her $600 trillion, globally engineered space trip appeared to go nowhere.
    felix_bed.jpg
    So as I wrestle with how to realize my own vision, the simplest means seem the best. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s brilliant film, After Life [DVD] not only portrays the next world as a shabby but genial bureaucracy, it contains documentary-style segments that celebrate theatrical geniuses who use the humblest means to re-create the happiest memories of the dead. For all Matthew Barney’s baroque dazzle, a single Felix Gonzalez-Torres photo or a lightstring (components bought on Canal Street) strike a deeper chord. The vision is more perfectly realized/transferred.
    Three tidbits that I couldn’t fit in:
    I thought it was scary enough when Alec Baldwin was the one saying, “I am God.”
    On a Harper’s panel about film/literary adaptations, Todd Solondz “defended” James Cameron when someone decried the soulless banality of Titanic: “Oh, I believe that Titanic did come from deep down inside James Cameron.”
    The first book I read on my Palm was the 1841 Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds, by Charles MacKay, which we all should have read 3-7 years ago.

    Liz Deschenes, artist/photographer

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    Beppu, 1997, Liz Deschenes [image via artnet]

    I can’t believe it’s been five years since I saw photographer Liz Deschenes’ first solo exhibition, Beppu, at Bronwyn Keenan Gallery. It’s a show that has stuck with me ever since, and not just because I go to sleep and wake up looking at photos from it (the first one I got is visible in this installation shot. It’s in the middle of the far wall, to the left of the monochromes.)

    Liz Deschenes, Beppu, 1997, Bronwyn Keenan Gallery, installation shot salvaged via artnet’s archives


    Listening to Deschenes talk about photography and her work was a stimulating challenge; my eye&brain had to work hard to keep up. Needless to say, I vouch for the artnet.com reviewer: “I cannot help but think that Liz Deschenes has carefully considered the entire history of color photography.” Looking at her deceptively simple, beautiful landscape photographs, her deep understanding of photography is quickly apparent; they’re spatially complex, with no easy fore-, middle-, or background.


    In fact, they turn out to have a great deal to do with painting, especially the modernist’s concern with the painting’s surface, and the minimalist’s interest with color, form or object. A later, nearly all-white photo of the salt-crusted sands of Death Valley could be a Ryman, at least until you figure out that’s a rock there near the top. And of course, the print itself is so sleek and intentional there’s no mistaking it for paint or canvas. The materiality of the photographic, printing, mounting process also matters, it turns out.


    Over the years, as my looking and collecting increased–and now that I’ve gotten into the imagemaking business myself, albeit in a far less accomplished way–Deschenes’ work continues to be a touchstone for me. It’s a demanding favorite of connoisseurs which I somehow stumbled upon early, and which I’ve been trying to live up to ever since.

    Souvenir (November 2001) to premier at MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight

    Just got formal notification, although I was contacted a couple of weeks ago. The Documentary Fortnight runs from Dec 13-23, and Souvenir will screen December 19th. From what I understand, they have put together a program of three WTC/September 11-themed films, including mine.
    The Director apparently heard about the movie after the preview screening of the nearly completed version in June.
    Needless to say, I’m stoked. Stay tuned for more info and updates, and start making your Christmas in New York travel arrangements now.

    Sergeant! Take this back and gimme that Titanic CD instead

    According to this Washington Post article [via Boing Boing], Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” is Sadaam Hussein’s campaign theme song for today’s presidential referendum. Before it became a the most popular Valentine song in England, it was the love theme for The Bodyguard. I imagine somewhere in the Pentagon, a psyops playlist is being revised; Whitney’ll have to find some other way of contributing to the (Bush, not Husseini) war effort.
    With Houston off the (turn)table, I wondered what does Operation MC Hammer play? Most accounts of the 1989 US invasion of Panama universally mention just generic “rock music” or “hard rock music”; in Iraq I, it was “grunge and death rock”, but actual bands and titles are hard to come by. But not impossible. And the throwaway labels, “rock” and “grunge” turn out to obscure more than illuminate the actual operations.
    Piecing together the US Military and FBI Psychological Warfare Compilation Tape, it seems that they’re programming more for themselves, not for their opponents. Like Robert Duvall’s Col. Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, who clearly relishes the Wagner he blasts out of his chopper, when the ATF plays “These boots were made for walkin'” in Waco, it’s just a morale booster for their own guys. (Did it drive Koresh mad? Wasn’t he already there? And how many people actually put on those boots and walked out?) When it comes to psyops, you have to wonder whose heads are really being messed with.
    The playlist so far:

  • Nowhere to Run, Martha and the Vandellas (Noriega/Panama)
  • You’re No Good, Linda Rondstadt.
  • Highway to Hell, AC/DC
  • We’re Not Gonna Take it, Twisted Sister
  • If I Had a Rocket Launcher, Bruce Cockburn
  • I Fought the Law, Bobby Fuller Four
  • Jimi Hendrix
  • Flesh for Fantasy, Billy Idol
  • Metallica (Iraq I)
  • Tibetan monk chants (Branch Davidians/Waco)
  • Achy Breaky Heart, Billy Ray Cyrus (reportedly a joke)
  • These Boots Were Made For Walkin’, Nancy Sinatra (not a joke)
  • “Pop music and Christmas songs”
  • Clock ticking
  • Busy signal
  • Jet engines
  • Screams of dying rabbits
    [Correction: Two readers–neither of them Sandy Gallin–wrote to demand credit be given to Dolly Parton for that Whitney song. They were more worked up than the Klingons who corrected my (only other) previous error (ever). With fans like that…]

    • Well, I’ll be damned, or How Norman Mailer IS The Center of The Universe

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    earthrise [image via]

    Had a man been always in one of the stars, or confined to the body of the flaming sun, or surrounded with nothing but pure ether, at vast and prodigious distances from the Earth, acquainted with nothing but the azure sky and face of heaven, little could he dream of any treasures hidden in that azure veil afar off.
    – Thomas Traherne, The Celestial Stranger, mid 17-th c.

    Effusively compared in this Guardian article to the Apollo astronauts’ first views of the earth from space, Christian mystic Thomas Traherne’s writing “can turn your understanding inside out, thrill, surprise and exhaust you” with his revelatory view of the world.
    This is a review of Ronald Weber’s 1986 book, Seeing Space: Literary Responses to Space Exploration (Amazon Sales Rank: 2.2 million. Let’s help the guy out.) which wonderfully uses the last line of Thoreau’s Walden to identify the greatest impact of space travel: ” ‘Our voyaging is only greatcircle sailing.’ This is to say that the most important aspect of our travels, whether inward or outward, is that they bring us back to our point of departure with a new appreciation of that beginning place.”
    Norman Mailer begins with a complaint that the whole space thing is closed to him: since he can’t talk the techno talk or get inside those astronauts’ heads, all he can do is watch dumbly “from the visitors’ bleachers.” He has an epiphany at the crassly commercialized Plymouth Rock (where only “an immense quadrangle of motel” marks the hallowed spot), and sees the Moon Rock anew. The whole adventure represents “the…reawakening of an older and non- mechanical view of life, one in which we are brought to ‘regard the world once again as poets, behold it as savages.”‘
    These ecstasy-riven testimonies– utterly self-contained, yet reaching out to (potentially) affect us all, something we must accept in imperfect transmitted form (unless you’re John Glenn or Lance Bass. Actually, being Lance Bass doesn’t do any good, either.)–may help in understanding Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle.
    This seriously ecstatic Guardian review (What IS in that tea, fellas?) attempts to affix Barney’s work in the heavens. It is an omniscient, mysterious creation myth, ultimately incomprehensible to mere mortals. It is at once “dense,” “rich yet fragile,” “of our time,” and “aspiring to be eternal.”
    Like the “great American novels” (Moby Dick and Gravity’s Rainbow are mentioned), Cremaster embodies the “desire to reawaken the language and imagery of ancient, organic patterns of thought [which is] central to modern American art and literature.” Heady stuff. And there’s Norman Mailer again, right in the thick of things, starring as Harry Houdini in Cremaster 2 (the most successful of the series, IMHO). But for all the praise and allusion heaped on it, does Cremaster take us “greatcircle sailing?” What does it say about the place we return to after seeing it?
    In Artforum, Daniel Birnbaum argues that “no one makes a stronger case than Matthew Barney for visual art today.”
    All that the world most needs today is combined in the most seductive way in his art: Barney’s work is brutal and highly artificial, as Nietzsche came to think Wagner’s was, yet it also offers up the pure joy of the beautiful–which is, I think, not unrelated to what Nietzsche meant by “innocence.”
    Whatever Barney’s goal, his achievement is notable. But at what price? Buzz Aldrin wrote candidly of his most significant challenge: dealing with life after returning from the moon. His goal accomplished, his life suddenly lacking direction, his marriage unravelling, he grew frustrated that “there is no experience to match that of walking on the Moon.” For Barney’s sake, I hope he doesn’t mimic Aldrin too closely, cursing his own hairy moon on the screen, “You son of a bitch, you’re the one that got me in all this trouble.”

    On Invention learning who his mother is the hard way

    from to

    Finished the MemeFeeder project on time. The scene I thought I’d do turned out not to be the scene I’d actually been asked to do, although I only saw the email with the actual scene assignment yesterday. So, no sooner did I complete the shoot, then I found out I had to do it all over again, with a scene I’d never thought about. And, I’d have to do it in <1 day. This, after I completely rethought and shot the 1-minute scene (#3, titled “Commute”) and shot it in a way that 1) didn’t require going to CT and JFK; 2) didn’t require editing, since my Final Cut Pro computer wasn’t available enough, 3) fit the images in the storyboard, and 4) would be interesting. Wanna see what I came up with? Watch it here. (It’s a crappy 1.1mb quicktime file).
    from to

    So, I had about 12 hours to come up with the scene above (#7, titled “Escape!”), with all the restrictions above, and on a cold rainy night. So I took a different take on the title, “Escape!” The story is, well, it’s pretty self explanatory. I am pretty happy with it, frankly. I edited it entirely in the camera (using only the “Record” button). Watch the scene here (again, in crappy quicktime).
    I have no idea what the MemeFeeder folks’ll think, but you should definitely check out the completed project (which launches Monday, Oct. 14). It’s been nervewracking, but a lot of fun.

    On the influence of contemporary art on film, or Gurskyspotting

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    99 Cent, Andreas Gursky, 1999

    Watching Paul Thomas Anderson and Adam Sandler discuss Punch-Drunk Love on Charlie Rose. The overly bright 99-cent store in the clip looked familiar, eerily familiar, and, sure enough, it is the same as Andreas Gursky’s photo99 Cent, down to the giant “99-cents” banners on the back wall.
    Anderson also tapped Jeremy Blake to create abtracted hallucinations experienced by Adam Sandler’s character. Although Blake has become best known for his digitally animated abstractions, he is also quite fluent in film; he exhibited an illustrated screenplay, props, and digital “set” renderings in his first gallery show and has created at least one narrative animated short. [Thanks, Travelers Diagram.]
    Mark Romanek used a Philip-Lorca diCorcia photo to communicate to Robin Williams his character’s situation in One Hour Photo. “This is everything in terms of warmth and connectedness that your character can never have but desperately would want.” Judging from the pronounced lighting and extremely deliberate framing of the scenes I’ve seen, diCorcia references are not just limited to mood or motive.
    While you could chalk up the Bruce Weber-ish look of American History X to the general zeitgeist (If you’re shooting muscly, shirtless Aryans in 1998, whose style would you appropriate?), it’s something else when “important” but certainly not mainstream artists’ work turns up. I don’t know what that something is, though, and it’s 1:30 in the morning, so I doubt I’ll figure it out right now. I do know that we’d call the throwaway-sublime landscapes Richters, (but we were just kidding, I swear). And Jonah’s shots got called Vermeers (or Vermers, to be precise) by a woman at our hotel in Albert.

    On Arches, Now and Then

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    Padre Pio Pilgrimage Church, Renzo Piano, 1991-2004 [image via]

    The architect Renzo Piano is conspicuously absent from both the discussion and the process of rebuilding New York City. Conspicuous because he has already designed Manhattan’s next important skyscraper, the headquarters for the NY Times [see the model]. Conspicuous because he is clearly one of The Times’ critic Herbert Muschamp’s favored architects (“Piano is a humanist, perhaps the leading exemplar of that tradition in our time.”) Conspicuous because he developed the master plan for what is the only recent urban undertaking of comparable scale, Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz. Conspicuous because his innovative, forward thinking design for extremely conservative clients (the followers or the controversial saint, Padre Pio) is being hailed as a miraculous masterpiece by the Guardian before it’s even completed. (That Muschamp link above praises it, too. While I like Kansai Airport, my favorite Piano work is still the Menil Collection in Houston. It’s subtly but completely transformative.)
    For this massive (6,000-person) pilgrimage chapel, Piano reinvented and reinvigorated the use of the arch–specifically the stone compression arch–a technique with a 2,000-year old legacy. Another interesting characteristic is the building’s discrete siting; “In fact,” Piano says, “it will not be visible until visitors are very close.” These remind me of another “pilgrimage site.”

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    Memorial to the Missing, Sir Edwin Lutyens, 1932

    Lutyens’ Memorial to the Missing at Thiepval has been called the “most imaginative and daring use of the arch form.” According to Alan Borg’s War Memorials, the venerable Lutyens took a thoroughly modern approach to an ancient form, infusing the Roman triumphal arch with the essence of even more ancient burial mound architecture. And like Piano’s chapel, the Thiepval memorial is meant to reveal itself (and its lesson on the wages of war) only gradually.
    Last December, according to Muschamp, Piano said the architects who could design well for Ground Zero are now only 4 or 5 years old. I don’t think that’s right. Piano also said, (rightly) “Whatever is built, there should first be a great deal of thought and reflection. It’s not only an economic issue but a cultural one. What is at stake is saving the soul of a city, its spirit.”
    Lutyens completed Thiepval nearly 14 years after the war ended; he was in his sixties. Considering it’s the exact opposite idea I had when I decided to make a movie about Thiepval, I surprise myself. I wonder if what Manhattan needs is a Lutyens, and if Renzo Piano is it. I hope I’m wrong, because he’s nowhere near the place.