Things as They Are.?

Ozzel just isn't the creative type.

Via Slashdot:

The Darth Side: Memoirs of a Monster

Genius. We haven't seen the sensitive side of Vader since The Star Wars Holiday Special. I missed it dearly.

Plastic Soul.

Chris Cunningham, director of Bjork's All is Full of Love video, is prepping to release Rubber Johnny, a genuinely disturbing-looking pairing of a short film and artbook. The description of the project is as follows:

Johnny is a hyperactive, shape-shifting mutant child, kept locked away in a basement. With only his feverish imagination and his terrified dog for company, he finds ways to amuse himself in the dark.

Although it remains to be seen whether this narrative is vertical (expansive) or horizontal (remediative), I don't think it'll be a comfortable experience. After all, Aphex Twin is scoring the film.

Every half meter. Everywhere.

I watched the movie Primer last night and, if constant speculation paired with a large dose of confusion is the judge of a successful film, then Primer is indeed a real success.



The story is quite simple: a group of bright software/ hardware engineers who spend their spare time creating inventions in a garage somewhow manage to create a time machine (though even this categorization is debatable). The first journey is taken by a weeble, the second is taken by, well, that, too, is up for debate.

I don't want to play spoiler for anyone who hasn't seen this yet so I'll stop there, but I do have to say that one of the more clever subtleties of this film (and there are many) has to do with handwriting, and the apparent significance attached to one's individual marks of inscription. The ability to write in this film equals the ability to clearly define one's own subjective reality. But again, I'll stop before revealing too much.

This film is getting quite a large DVD release from New Line and it should be available at most rental stores (online and off). I'd love to hear some other opinions/ theories about what does or doesn't happen in this film, including some thoughts on how, or why, Granger manages to find out what he does.

By the way, my attraction to this film could be attributed in no small part to the fact that, while watching it, I forgot my bedroom clock was still set one hour behind, effectively engineering my own sort of time travel the minute I stepped out of the room and looked at the "real" time. Strange paranoias soon followed.

Narrative Networks + Xmen + EA.

As I make the push towards my oral exams, I expect to begin using this blog as research tool, posting various bits and pieces of my ever-so-nascent dissertation on what I call narrative networks or, put simply, narratives told across media (Henry Jenkins call them transmedial narratives, a term that I like but also feel doesn't describe the complexities that these stories sometimes take on). In a paper I recently wrote titled "Hybrid Channels, Hybrid Stories, Hybrid Minds: Defining Narrative Networks", I argued that narrative networks predominantly take one of two forms: vertical intersiting, in which multiple, linked narratives are expanded across forms, or horizontal intersiting, in which a single narrative is told through divergent media. These structures, I feel, present some real challenges to most narrative and media theory, and they hint at a type of convergence that occurs across media channels, and not within single sites.

I mention all of this as a preface to my first of what's sure to be many postings on the development of this form, seen (and read and played and heard) most famously in the (still expanding) Matrix narratives. Coming soon: Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects, a dream collaboration between Marvel Comics and EA Games (ignoring, for a brief moment, the sweatshop-like conditions that EA supposedly fosters in their offices):





Although it remains to be seen how successful either format is (these networks tend to produce very uneven levels of content quality), the fact that the "game will feature Super Heroes™ from the Marvel Universe as well as a new set of characters created through collaboration with EA and top comic book industry talent" has me rather interested. I wonder how much of the game will try to reproduce the storytelling devices of the comics and, conversely, whether the comic book tries to reproduce the sure-to-be hyperactive action of the game. I'll be keeping an eye on this one....

www.abstract-voyeurism.google.com

Since I seem to be stuck in a Google fixation at the moment, it's only appropriate that I post a link to Google Sightseeing, a blog dedicated to the newest web obsession, Google Maps.

Turns out that Phil Collins has a bunch of trees in his front yard. That's always good to know.

Google Video, er, Television.

Google quietly unveiled their new video search engine this week, which allows you to "search a growing archive of televised content". I've played around with it a bit and, though I've managed to find some funny old Simpsons clips (or, rather, still captures of clips), I'm kind of put off by the lack of (re: none) non-televised material and, crucially, the lack of actual video (most searches return results listed as "Video not currently available"). That Google Video lacks moving images is, in itself, a serious discussion point but one that I'm willing to suspend until the archive deepens or, more precisely, opens a bit wider.

There is a real use for searchable video content-- IBM's Almaden research center has been developing such technology since 1997 under the banner of their Cue Video project. As they see it, the "two bottlenecks preventing video from becoming an integral part of distributed learning are not the cost of basic hardware and software but:

a) the cost and time to index and hyperlink the video; and
b) enabling users to easily search and browse the video content."

Presumably, the decision to spider network television clips has as much to do with the practicality of using the transcripts of these shows to tag content as it does any sort of macro-->micro principles of archiving. Yet it seems that we lose so much by focusing on just the transcribable content of the medium of television (or, by extension, film). Although we've yet to see any cinematographic visionaries like Conrad Hall or Kazuo Miyagawa in television, I think it's suffice to say that, as a primarily visual medium, we rely on more than just dialogue for obtaining televisual information.

I suppose I was somewhat optimistic in hoping that Google Video might search based on a model similar to IBM's QBIC (Query By Image Content), which sorts and indexes an image not by preset descriptors but, rather, by the content of the image itself, such as color percentages, color layouts, visual lines and textures. But, seeing as how I've yet to use anything that can do that for even static images, I know that this hope was nothing more than a Wired-inspired delusion. I guess what I'm getting at is that text still figures into the center of even the most basic image searches. We still rely on that sleight of hand, that off-setting gesture, to store and retrieve image-oriented data. Google's (and many other's) search engines have proven themselves quite able in this capacity. I don't see this changing anytime soon, unless we undergo some sort of mass sudden evolution whose by-product is a heightened visual language. But there I go again, talking about words in a post about images. And this is as much a rhetorical question as it is anything else, but, coding aside, can a search engine ever exist that doesn't rely on text? And, if it does, will we use it?

UPDATE: Looks like I jumped the gun here. Google Video is only now beginning to accept video submissions for their service.

Like a Camera Set to Expose.

Poet Robert Creeley has died. I don't know how I didn't catch this, but thanks to Matt K. for the memorium. I can't say that I knew Professor Creeley that well (I met him only a couple of times while at UB and a couple more outside of there) but, as someone who grew up in Buffalo, NY, I can certainly say that I witnessed some of the impact of his life firsthand. For a while back in 1999, I was lucky enough to teach at the City Honors School, a local public inner-city school that was both a magnet for some incredibly gifted students, and a haven from some of the meaner streets of Buffalo. It was also a magnet for Robert Creeley.

During my time at City Honors (where, incidentally, some of Creeley's children attended school), I never quite got used to walking down the green carpeted hallways, hearing the distant hum of his voice as he spent an afternoon (an entire afternoon) reading, talking, arguing, and engaging middle and high school students who gradually and gracefully grew to love the man. He was as much a living part of City Honors as the ghosts the students claim they've heard roaming the school's abandoned attic, trapped for hundreds of years. His poetry and presence will be felt in the classrooms of City Honors for equally as long, stomping, whispering and bending the floorboards he once walked upon. On behalf of myself and all the students who were fortunate enough to spend such an afternoon, thank you. No sentimentality, just thanks. You gave quite a bit of yourself to us and, in return, we offer you a home.

Scrobblers Unite [Redux].

Now that Audioscrobbler has finally reached a point of server stability, I feel comfortable in posting a link to my account:

Great_Migration

Anyone else have a profile yet?

Back to the Start.

The artwork for the new Coldplay album, X&Y, due June 6th. I've heard some tracks off this already and, considering the heavy Kraftwerk influence (or some might say pillaging), the pixellated simplicity of the design fits quite nicely. I'm looking forward to this one.

2GB and Growing....

Those with Gmail might have noticed a running ticker on the login page of the site yesterday which claimed to keep track of Google's plans to increase each user's email storage to "infinity + 1". A link at the bottom of the page hinted that this was all an April Fool's joke, but the ticker keeps on running, and my use percentage keeps on dropping (18% from 34% the other day). Looks like this is legit. As of right now, storage is at 2050MB and counting. Who knows when they'll stop adding capacity. More importantly, who knows how any other email service can possibly compete with Gmail now.

UPDATE: Looks like someone's found the solution. ;-)