More Accurate
“We live in a world where there are actual fleets of robot assassains patrolling the skies. At some point there, we left the present and entered the future.”
- Randall Munroe, xkcd
Goldsmiths: The Fourth Week
Fourth Week (19/10 – 23/10)
First tentative forays in student radio. 15 minutes of cheese. Nic Clear (of The Bartlett) talking about his ‘Architectures of the Near Future‘ project. Insomnia. Successful NHS registration. Mouse in the Matrix. My continuing inability to buy a winter jacket. How Like a Leaf, an excellent book-length interview with Donna Haraway.
Photo of the Richard Hoggart Quad:
Lottery of the Sea (2006)
Spent a significant chunk of my Saturday afternoon watching Allan Sekula’s documentary The Lottery of the Sea (2006). Here’s the blurb:
“Iconoclast photographer and documentarian Allan Sekula unfolds a series of variations shot in the Netherlands, Spain, Greece, Japan and other maritime countries around two of his major obsessions: globalization and the sea. In this rumination on the sea as a “primordial source of sublimity,” Sekula explores a matrix of narratives – Greek myths, American movies, and stories of longshoremen, lost sailors and displaced populations – and rejects on the globalizing effects of Adam Smith’s notion of the seafaring life as a form of gambling.”
At 179 minutes, it’s a bit of an endurance test, with the unashamedly grim and grubby worms-eye-view of global capitalism thudding regularly, as a hammer pummelling you into submission. This isn’t to say that it’s a bad documentary, because it isn’t. And if it was, that wouldn’t be the point. Sekula’s VO work is lyrical and seductive. There are some really striking sequences, particularly those focusing on the Panama Canal and the Prestige oil spill. The politics is a bit heavy-handed, but there’s an interesting contrast between the diffuse “affective politics” of the anti-globalisation movement and the more overtly class-based syndicalism of the dock workers.
It does hang together well, with the pieces least relevant to the narrative trajectory being interesting enough to warrant inclusion on their own merit. More importantly, it’s a powerful antidote to the digitality of most media coverage of globalisation (the BBC Box being a rare exception, but still – by its very nature – hitched to the digital) … focusing instead on the gunk of the oil spills, the metallic bulk of the shipping containers.
Overall, it’s a gruelling and unevenly paced documentary, but with enough interest to sustain a viewing. Doesn’t require much active brain work, but will leave you with questions and images – a beached squid dragging itself back to the water // a domestic servant, behind glass, moving to the drumbeats of the anti-globalisation protesters in the streets outside // bored-looking junior Panamanian government personnel, overseeing the endless rubber stamping of paperwork for flags of convenience …
Goldsmiths: The Third Week
So, I’m shifting these MA updates from a fortnightly to a weekly format. The ideas and theories are coming thick and fast, and – frankly – I’m struggling to hold them in my mind. Here, blogging & note-taking are tools to pin down the vague and the evasive … forcing permanence, turning thought-processes into texts …
There’s a need to trace the trajectories of meaning, the superimposition of ideas, as you can mark the trail of a star in long exposure photography. Highlighting the unexpected links and parallels, I can hope to trace the genealogies of resonance // the ideas I find myself returning to (unconsciously), time after time … invariably, the things in which I’m most interested.
Strong with the photography metaphors, this week. As a loosely linked aside, here’s a photo of Deptford Town Hall, from my increasingly temperamental Nikon camera:
Ace. So, what happened in this, the third week (12/10 – 16/10)?
Goldsmiths: The First Fortnight
At the end of September, I left rural Sussex for the bright lights and concrete decay of southeast London – where I’ve just finished my first fortnight at Goldsmiths, University of London, where I’m studying for an awesome Masters degree in new technologies and digital-type-things. To balance the relatively hardcore heart of the programme, I’ve also picked some contrasting (slightly “lighter”?) option modules, which I’m hoping will help me slant the degree towards something a bit more engaged with issues of representation, narrative and political economy …
Assuming I’m not distracted by something shinier along the way.
Here’s some spiel about the courses I’m taking this term, and what we’ve looked at so far. I hope it’s of some interest …
Micro Men
Following on from the whole #WeLoveTheBBC thing, I’ve been up late tonight watching Micro Men – a BBC drama charting the stormy relationship of Clive Sinclair and Acorn’s Chris Curry in their race to dominate the British market for personal computers.
My dad bought an Acorn Electron in 1983. I spent the early 90s with an Archimedes firmly installed in my family’s “downstairs loo” – a tiny room created by partitioning the back of our garage, and the only free space for such a machine. (With all available deskspace now colonised by laptops, it now houses a tumble drier.)
Hence, I approached Micro Men on some level already rooting for Curry (portrayed by the incredibly likeable Martin Freeman), and – as such – couldn’t quite work out whether the writers had deliberately tried to set up Clive (below) as the “bad guy” of the narrative. Certainly, he was angry and arrogant, but I’d be interested to see how I might have reacted if I’d been born earlier, and my first exposure to computing had been through the Pickard family’s ZX Spectrum (rediscovered in the early 2000s while clearing out the loft).
(Sir Clive Sinclair, as portrayed by Alexander Armstrong)
Taken as a whole, the programme was light, frothy, 1980s nostalgia porn. While the narrative arc was clearly simplified and sanitised in the retelling, the programme was none the worse for it. The sound and production – in particular – were fantastic, anchoring the narrative firmly in the look and feel of 1980s broadcast media.
If you’re in the UK, you can catch Micro Men on the BBC iPlayer, where it will remain until sometime in the tail-end of next week. And if you do, I’d be very interested to hear your reactions, or – for that matter – your memories of early British home computing.
Film & Multimedia Journalism Material Digital Culture Politics & Economics
by Justin
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Why #WeLoveTheBBC – Digital Revolution
A near-perfect marriage of medium and message, the upcoming BBC documentary Digital Revolution (working title) is everything I could ask of a public broadcaster. Indeed, if I owned a television, this alone would justify my license fee for the next five three years.
They’ve given me a platform to rant and rail against Baroness Susan Greenfield; made their interview rushes available for people to download, embed, and remix; and actually seem to be listening to the comments and suggestions they’ve recieved.
This clip – in which web pioneer Tim Berners-Lee turns the camera on his interviewer, Aleks Krotoski – is one of my favorite videos of the year:
Two people sharing a passion – it’s intimate, authentic, and utterly of-the-moment. So zeitgeisty it hurts your teeth. And I love it.
(Admittedly, this video is an off-the-cuff clip from Tim, rather than an official output of the documentary, but the BBC enabled this meeting of minds – so my point on the BBC being awesome stands.)