Justin Pickard

We Live in Public (2009)

Ondi Timoner’s video documentary of the last days of Rome, where Rome is the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. Rolls along like something out of Coupland, all the more absurd and disturbing for the fact that it actually happened.

“It took me a beat to realize that what Josh Harris created in 1999 was a physical metaphor for where the Internet would take us,” she said. “It was his way of saying, ‘No matter what I put together, no matter how fascistic it may appear; whether you have to wear uniforms or you have to be interrogated, or the fact that you can’t leave — people won’t care about that. They won’t bother with the details.’ He knew they would pour through the doors for the promise of 110 surveillance cameras and being part of what, right then, was the place to be.”

- Timoner, quoted in The Washington Post

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 …

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.

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.)

Visual Effects

Totally charmed by some of the older clips used in the video above. I remember being thoroughly unsettled by Ray Harryhausen’s bestiary of monsters as a kid, when Jason and the Argonauts (1963) was repeated on Sunday afternoon TV. As far as I’m concerned, a lot of the earlier effects have stood the test of time brilliantly – from Ray right the to something like Return of the Jedi (1983). They’re just as watchable now, tapping into the same emotions and reactions as first time I saw them. And that’s ignoring the various remasterings and reboots, natch.

One of the reasons I’m so excited by Gentlemen Broncos (2009) is the way the film sections look and feel. The production team are pitch perfect on the late-analog aesthetic. Look at the pyrotechnics.

And then, well, there was that awkward stage where the studios were shooting for photorealism, which lasted right through to the 1990s. At the time, it looked pretty good, but – in retrospect – it’s clear they aimed too low, and fell, limbs flailing, straight into the the uncanny valley.

But starting with, say, The Matrix (1999), there are a number of  more recent films which have made impressive use of the digital tools at their disposal, either in the service of spectacle (as with the oldest clips, above), or – alternatively – in a ways that circumvent or support the more mundane aspects of film-making: generating large crowds, filling the gaps in partial sets, and so on.

Disagree with my choice of bookends if you want; haggle over the precise dates when things got good or bad, but it doesn’t really matter. Far more interesting than any one of these films, dates, or opinions is the way visual effects (of all stripes) have rippled outwards – jumping shipping from film to computer games, Time Team, CAD suites, augmented reality, and the weirder technologies where all these come into contact. Project Natal, anyone?

There’s definitely something big to be said on this subject; something analytical woven from the locative art subplot in William Gibson’s Spook Country, online gaming, the uncanny return of 3D cinema, and the vice-like grip of virtual reality on the collective unconscious (other than the flying car, is this the legacy future of our times?). I’m not yet sure quite what it is, or how to say it, but I’ll be back.

Until then, here’s a video of The Hoosiers being thematically appropriate.

My Winnipeg (2007)

My Winnipeg is a challenging film, in the best possible sense of the word. Despite falling asleep halfway through my first attempt (or perhaps because of it?), I really got on with this noir Canadian autogeography.

It’s a film which – to my mind – shares a lot with, and stands as a companion piece to, something like This is my City. Both take as their subject specific places as filtered through the eyes of specific people. With the latter, it’s this kind of viewer tension between (a) those insiders curating their city’s sights (sites?) & hotspots, and (b) our self-designated heroes, who stumble into existing dramas and unfamiliar landscapes. In My Winnipeg, it’s the eyes of our narrator and filmmaker, Guy Maddin, with the film’s visuals filtered through his melancholic half-memories of  urban legends and familial traumas.

So while the team behind my City aims for authenticity by keeping their curation & mediation to a minimum, presenting things (more or less) as they happen, Maddin’s gone to every effort to simulate and recreate a city which – in reality – may never have existed. A re-enactment of the past which echos, then exorcises. Memory versus documentary … not quite opposites, but – I don’t know – different ways of approaching the same goal, maybe? Of representing a subjective experience of the real? Of the city and its built environment, supposedly external to the body; objective, immune to memory’s holes and biases.

This is my City

(Via Digital Urban)

I’d argue that this is what the internet does better than traditional broadcast media – empowers those with the skills to bypass the gatekeepers, plugging their output straight into an audience. As ever, the watchword is authenticity. Admittedly, I may be carrying a certain nostalgia for my own 6th form-era travel documentary exploits, but from the look of it, these guys deserve an audience.

The Lighter Side of Seasteading

From what I can make out, Open_Sailing = seasteading + SEHIs + Oekonux + Driving Over Lemons, with the scary libertarians replaced by something like the old-school, Victorian scientific expedition.

In other words, a more palatable brand of seasteading from the Sundance generation – far more likely to win round the sympathies of venture altruists, social entrepreneurs, and the general public.  There’s a full presentation (opens pdf), with some useful stuff that resonates with quantum governance, stigmergy, open source infrastructure, aquaculture, and all that Superstruct-y goodness. A welcome departure from the global guerillas & Somali pirates, and a potent booster shot for those looking to top-up their optimism.

So raise the kite and steer us westward – to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and beyond!

Stateside Superstructing, Some Notes

I return from the mirror world with a surnburnt nose/forehead combo; a bag bulging with books, papers and wallcharts; and a brain almost literally humming with new inputs.  Along with @mathpunk, @rtgarden, @stevepuma and @genebecker, I was representing the Superstruct game community at the Institute For The Future’s 2009 Ten-Year Forecast in Sausalito, California.

Through communicating & mediating my experiences of the game to the other conference attendees (representatives of some of the big organizations in the economy and public sphere), in an environment heavy and humid with ambient information, I was able to link up some ideas that have been floating in the recesses of my consciousness, assembling and superstructing them in interesting ways.

Before the event in question, I was in San Francisco for a good 6-7 days – immersing myself in the city, and scoping out the lay of the land.  At once strange and familiar (embodied above and beyond my experience of the city through film and the media), the real San Francisco threw my mediated experiences into focus – the American sitcoms syndicated endlessly on British TV are now five, ten years out of date. This, then, is an emerging social imaginary; a land of corporate bail-outs, green-collar jobs and (as @mathpunk was later to tell me) hybrid hypermiling – in which we can see the overwhelming drive of the competitive, of the concrete challenge … even when it risks endangering the self.

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Sleep Dealer

This looks incredible.