notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

Jane Yager writing for the Paris Review: (via)

A man with a briefcase arrives in a place called City-A looking like a double agent from 1973: mustachioed and trenchcoated, forever ducking into phone booths for cryptic conversations. The man, Mr. Holz, is a geophysicist of unknown origin. He has come here to work for the New Method Oil Well Cementing Company. City-A is mesmerizingly bleak, a grid of concrete high-rises set between a brackish sea and a wintry industrial wasteland, all of it reeking of environmental contamination and failed utopia. Many things, Holz notices, are amiss here. Clocks don’t run sixty seconds to the minute in City-A. The drinking water is spiked with lithium, a shadowy entity has confiscated his passport, language is rationed, and what exactly is this New Method Oil Well Cementing Company, anyway? As the bewildered-looking Holz moves through the city, is he piecing together clues to solve these mysteries or just being shuttled around by a powerful unseen force?

This, roughly, is the storyline of whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir, the new film by Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation. But because this noir is, as the title promises, algorithmic, the film has no beginning, middle, or end. At each screening, a computer program live-edits a movie out of more than three thousand film clips, eighty voice-overs, and 150 pieces of music. Each of these movable parts is marked with loosely content-related tags (“horizon,” “anxiety,” “white”), and the computer fits the pieces together according to an algorithm that matches tags. Sussman calls this apparatus the “serendipity machine.” Containing more than thirty hours of material, the movie never comes together the same way twice, and it never loops. A small screen to the side runs the metadata of the algorithm while the film plays, reminding viewers that a computer is chugging away busily as they watch, matching “discomfort” tags to “discomfort” tags, “surveillance” to “surveillance.”

Hopefully this is enough for you to go off and read the rest of the article. It’s worth it.

A poster for Cypher, a somewhat silly but definitely enjoyable techno-thriller type thing from 2002.

(I rewatched this last night while pottering with Photoshop, and there are some nice touches in it. I also decided to create a movieinframes four-frame version of it, which is more about the protagonist’s relationships with women in the film than the other direction I could have gone, focussing on the whizz-bang gadgets. Maybe I’ll do another take later.)

dailymeh:

Muybridge is mostly known for his photographs of horses in motion. Above is part of one sequence. These pictures were taken in order to settle the question of whether or not all the horse’s hooves at any time during the trot are off the ground simultaneously. As can be seen here, the answer is yes. But that’s precisely it: it can only be seen because Muybridge has frozen the motion. By animating these pictures, you negate their whole reason for existing: they exist because they allow us to see something we can’t see when the horse is in motion.

The whole post is worth reading. That said, I stand by my posting of an animated gif re-animating the Muybridge photographs, because of the format; there’s something odd about that analogue-digital repurposing split.

There’s also something zoetropic about Google’s presentation that is a nice effect, even if the 

A few weeks ago, I posted some screenshots from Aliens that I thought might show a touch screen. Sadly, during the overdue re-watching of the films, I saw that instead Ripley is actually controlling the display with a joystick.

Ah well. File this one as another case of science fiction not having enough imagination when it comes to computers.

Thirty Five Images of Space Helmet Reflections by Eric Ulrich.

I’ve been able to use Google Images and their nifty “upload an image and we’ll match it” to figure out the source of thirty one of the images. Top to bottom, left to right:

• 2001, Sbtrkt, Solaris (2002), 2001, Explore the Unknown
• The Astronaut Farmer, Radiohead, unknown, Moon, The Right Stuff
• Alien, Up In The Air, unknown, Barbarella, Getty Images
• Space Cowboys, Anna Fisher, iStockPhoto, unknown, Moon
• 2001, Apollo 13, 2001, Hubert Vykukal, 2001
• Solaris (2002), Space Odyssey, Space Camp, 2001, Alien
• 2001, 2001, Cargo, Richard Branson, unknown

If you know the provenance of the final four, please let me know.

Table-based touch? screen, from Aliens (1986) (via) 

Costumes in Alien, from an excellent post on uniforms and characterisation, the first in a series on the films, at Hello Tailor. (via)

fuschia by heather, on Flickr.

The latest batch of PX 70 Color Shade film from the Impossible Project looks like it might just be a winning replacement for the older, discontinued (for three years or so, now) Polaroid 600 film.

Heather also has a good post about the evolution of the Impossible Project films.