Having seen many of the tentpole blockbusters this summer, I feel confident in remarking that the spirit of sacrifice is MIA. Bruce Willis lives free (Live Free or Die Hard), all is well for Harry Potter (HP 5, 6, 7), and Will Turner is predictably resurrected into a more pleasurable career as sea captain (Pirates 3). If narrative fictions permit humans to contend with fantastic, monumental scenarios, and fight against overwhelming odds, much of that tension is lost with the recent assuring trend that the protagonist survives without fail in the third act. Strangely, this new story standard doesn’t bother many viewers. I would even argue that for most people, the satisfying resolution of today’s Western cinema is to see how a character’s actions of survival unfold. If we witness Orlando Bloom’s head submerge violently underwater, the new pleasure is to see how (NOT IF) his head finds its way back to the surface. Is the image of a purposeful death no longer fashionable, post 9/11?

So it’s a big fucking thrill for me to see that in Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, everyone dies. Some die in heroic fashion, some die in acts of extraordinary violence, but all the deaths belong to a collective cause. Even more thrilling was to see characters approach death actively, in advance of the plot’s action. There’s a scene in which the crew hold a symbolic vote for killing off an inoperative member in order to ensure that there is enough oxygen to complete their mission. Cillian Murphy swiftly says, “Kill him.” The viewer never feels that Murphy’s brevity implies a coldness or an absence of compassion; this is just how one should act. As a twist, the crew soon discover that the inoperative member has already slit his wrists and bled to death. Chris Evans remarks, “He took responsibility,” understanding just as well that a consciousness for self sacrifice is as necessary as a consciousness for performing violence on another.

Even if we cannot yet locate a place for the spirit of sacrifice in our contemporary times, it is very positive to see a film that portrays a future in which sacrifice is our only ethical option. Thumbs up!

Leave it to PT Anderson to release a movie trailer with cuts longer than .5 seconds and absolutely no music. It’s refreshing to finally hear sound design NOT in competition with a Linkin Park chorus or a Kronos Quartet remix.

Beautiful.

I wish to purchase the electromagnetic spectrum.

In the United States, all U.S. television broadcasts will be exclusively digital as of February 17, 2009, by order of the Federal Communications Commission. This deadline was signed into law in early 2006. Furthermore, as of March 1, 2007, all new television sets that can receive signals over-the-air, including pocket-sized portable televisions, must include digital or HDTV tuners so they can receive digital broadcasts. Currently, most U.S. broadcasters are beaming their signals in both analog and digital formats; a few are digital-only. Citing the bandwidth efficiency of digital TV, after the analog switch-off, the FCC will auction off channels 52–59 (the lower half of the 700 MHz band) for other communications traffic, completing the reallocation of broadcast channels 52–69 that began in the late 1990s. The analog switch-off ruling, which so far has met with little opposition from consumers or manufacturers, would render all non-digital televisions dark and obsolete on the switch-off date unless connected to an external tuner or analog cable television. The FCC has determined that an external tuning device can simply be added to non-digital televisions to lengthen their useful lifespan. However, as of May 2007, external tuning devices are not widely available, are relatively expensive, and require bulky AC power supplies.[citation needed] Starting in 2008, the government will take requests from households for up to two coupons to reduce the price of some converter boxes by $40. Currently, even the earliest televisions continue to work with present broadcast standards. This mandate was designed to help provide a painless transition to the new standard.

Digital Television - Wikipedia

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Towards a materialist virtuality…
More real than reality::deader than dead

A game where the landscape really mattered.

Huyghe is so helpful in interview form.

George Baker:
Is a “relational aesthetic” about a reformulation of a political project? Is it instead about an avoidance of the term political? Or is it a kind of pragmatism or realism that we face here–a realization that false political claims for artistic practices were made in the 1980s, and one must not falsely claim immediate political functions for cultural or aesthetic projects?

Huyghe:
Your last point is key. And it should apply as well to critics and historians. It is obviously difficult to define oneself after a postmodern period where we all became extremely self-conscious and aware about the consequences of our actions. This is why conclusions should be suspended but the tension should remain. There is a complexity that must be recognized and that produces a fragile object.
And this is why I have had some problems with the last two Documenta exhibitions. A false claiming of the political. It is a huge problem when the “political” becomes a subject for art. For me, Buren is a political artist. It is a practice that is political, not the subject or the content of the art. Politics is not an apple that you paint in order to legitimate the fact that you paint. That is a moral issue.

Baker:
You are interested then in a politics of form?

Huyghe:
Always, what is crucial is not the arrangement but the rules of arrangement.

-excerpt from an interview in October, MIT Press Journal, Fall 04, on the occasion of Streamside Day Follies at the Dia.

I found out today that ILM worked on Sweet November, the Keanu Reeves romantic drama. Keanu Reeves could not cry on cue, so ILM went to work on some digital tears.

In our ‘society of the spectacle’, in which what we experience as everyday reality more and more takes the form of the lie made real, Freud’s insights show their true value. Consider the interactive computer games some of us play compulsively, games which enable a neurotic weakling to adopt the screen persona of a macho aggressor, beating up other men and violently enjoying women. It’s all too easy to assume that this weakling takes refuge in cyberspace in order to escape from a dull, impotent reality. But perhaps the games are more telling than that. What if, in playing them, I articulate the perverse core of my personality which, because of ethico-social constraints, I am not able to act out in real life? Isn’t my virtual persona in a way ‘more real than reality’? Isn’t it precisely because I am aware that this is ‘just a game’ that in it I can do what I would never be able to in the real world? In this precise sense, as Lacan put it, the Truth has the structure of a fiction: what appears in the guise of dreaming, or even daydreaming, is sometimes the truth on whose repression social reality itself is founded. Therein resides the ultimate lesson of The Interpretation of Dreams: reality is for those who cannot sustain the dream.

from Freud Lives!

From the 2006 ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology, 14-16 June 2006, Hollywood, California.

Keynote pdf
abstract:

The relationship between military and entertainment is well-known and scarcely misunderstood. How has this relationship shaped the production and circulation of entertainment cultures in the early 21st century, wherein digital networked, massively multiparticipatory online games have become social life simulations? Is it possible to learn from the military’s eminence in translating 2nd Life experiences (training simulations) into 1st Life action (deployments and operations) so that we breech the 2nd Life/1st Life barrier so as to create tangible actions that mitigate 1st Life catastrophic failure? How can 2nd Life experiences offer productive couplings to 1st Life actions in a way that avoids the dramatic folly of the character Ender from the Orson Scott Card novel “Ender’s Game”?

Bruce Sterling gave this keynote at the New Media & Social Memory symposium, UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Jan. 18, 2007.

From BAMPFA:

On January 18, 2007, the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive presented New Media & Social Memory, a public symposium to discuss strategies for preserving digital art at at time when digital technologies are evolving and becoming obsolete at an astonishingly rapid pace. While focusing on digital art, the symposium also addressed larger concerns about the long-term conservation of our increasingly digital culture, including how we decide what digital content-from websites to video games-are worth saving. The full day included presentations and panel discussions by leading experts in the field of digital preservation.

Excited or scared?

World Press Photo of the Year 2006. Spencer Platt, USA, Getty Images.

“BEIRUT, LEBANON - AUGUST 15: Affluent Lebanese drive down the street to look at a destroyed neighborhood August 15, 2006 in southern Beirut, Lebanon. As the United Nations brokered cease fire between Israel and Hezbollah enters its first day, thousands of Lebanese returned to their homes and villages.”

In Apocalypse Now, the Wagner, surfing and documentarians were in the background…this photo is amazing!

Artists deserve to eat and make rent, but the distribution tradition of editions doesn’t really map well onto video art.

http://www.freehomepages.com/crhughes/ will sell you a video work from his massive collection for a “nominal or negligible cost.” The Cremaster Cycle, as you would expect, is the most requested title. But there’s loads of other stuff on there too, including work by Douglas Gordon, Pierre Huyghe, Gary Hill, Bruce Nauman, and many other videos you can’t ever really see. (DVD quality, allegedly)

On January 22, 2007, French artist Pierre Huyghe gave a lecture at CCA in San Francisco as part of Berkeley’s Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium.

Here is a shaky (but audible) video recording of approximately 3/4s of Huyghe’s lecture, shot by myself and Heather Lawson.

From ATC:

Abstract

Note: This lecture is co-sponsored by the California College of Art and the French Consulate and will be presented at CCA’s Timken Auditorium in San Francisco, 1111 Eighth Street, from 7-8:30pm witih reception following.

Beginning with an introduction to the Association of Freed Time, this talk by Pierre Huyghe will focus on time based projects and exhibitions, scripted situations, and the construction of scenarios. While presenting his work, Huyghe will discuss a variety of methodologies, taking into consideration the exhibition as a form, the formats of representation as exhibition venues (theater, cinema, books, newspapers, parks…), placement and timing, the ‘becoming image’ of things, the exhibition versus the show, the principle of equivalence. Representation as a performative means, the activation of space, the rules of the game. Comedy, the recent mainstream attraction, celebration and celebrity.

Bio
Pierre Huyghe, born in Paris in 1962, lives in New-York and Paris. Huyghe explores the territory of reality and fiction, creating a site of convergence for interpretation, representation, and transformation. His work incorporates film, objects, and staged events such as celebrations, puppet shows, and musicals to address how we construct and translate experience. Although the final artwork often takes the form of a projected image, Huyghe’s primary interest lies in the production of situations. Since founding the Association of Freed Time in 1995, Pierre Huyghe has sought to introduce new paradigms to the art exhibition by extending its temporal mode.

Since 1994 he has mounted solo exhibitions at institutions including the Tate Modern - London, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC - Paris, Carpenter Center - Cambridge, Dia Center for the Arts - New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum - New York, 49th Venice Biennial (Pavillon Français), Musée d’art contemporain - Montréal, CentreGeorges Pompidou - Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art - Chicago, Kunsthalle - Zurich, Museum of Art - Santa Monica, Wiener Secession - Vienna. He also contributed to Whitney Biennial - 2006, Documenta 11 - 2002, 48th Venice Biennial - 1999, Manifesta 2, European Biennial ofContemporary Art 1998, and to many other group exhibitions and festivals. Awards : Hugo Boss Prize, 2002, Special Award, Venice Biennial 2001, DAAD, Berlin, 1999-2000.

For reference, here are some republished images of Huyghe’s lecture slides.

L’Association des Temps Liberes (The Association of Freed Times)

A Permanent Construction Site

Remake

Blanche Neige Lucie (Snow White Lucy)

No Ghost Just a Shell

The Third Memory

This Is Not a Time For Dreaming

L’Expedition Scintillante, A Musical

L’Expedition Scintillante, A Light Show

A Journey That Wasn’t

Streamside Day