I'm a hundred quid better off now. The look on their faces when I was right was priceless, still at least they paid up. When will people learn that you can't just skim top-layer data for your model source. That makes five aborted runs due to crashes.
Stick that in your performance review and smoke it.
Meanwhile, mine and Adams' teams? Not one single crash in six months. Because we're [EXPLETIVE DELETED] old-school. Hah.
Mind you, I'm not entirely sure having us dredge up the aggregates for Harvest Festival works, but what the hell do I know – I think they're tweaking it, probably blend it with the Vernal Equinox so the country's proud of its English produce or something.
In all honesty, the whole thing feels like a bad rip-off of The Archers, like my Mum used to listen to on the radio, but I suppose if they want to hammer home the notion of ENGLAND REBORN into the psyche, you could do worse than hit up the old seasonal festivals.
Frantzen says it's all a bit Wicker Man, and I'm inclined to agree. Blake seems to predict it'll work though. Mind you, the way we've been bumped up the paygrades makes me think this project is going to get even bigger.
I took a look at the INDEX the other day – it's tripled in size in just under two months. Just like our budget.
[LAUGHTER]
The shame of it is, I've been looking at the projections, and the fact is, to get the levels of fidelity and accuracy we need in our predictions, we're going to have to piggyback on pretty much everyone's stream 24/7.
The processing power required is going to be phenomenal, not to mention the backups. If what the ideologues are saying even half comes to pass, there simply cannot be any downtime.
Hell, you're going to have shifts of miners working to keep Blake up to date. Which means, at this rate...well, I'm not sure what it means. I've seen some of the papers floating around from psychiatrists and neurologists that are in the loop, and it looks like there's going to be an absolute [EXPLETIVE DELETED]storm when the findings are made public.
How do you tell a population that it's destroying itself?
Of course, no doubt it'll take a couple of years for the outrage to set in – NGO think tanks and that sort of thing, white-papers and all that. Then Whitehall can serve us up as a solution. It's really quite devious when you think about it, to be honest.
The thing that bugs me, is how exactly we'll be presented. More to the point, its almost axiomatic that the more data we have to deal with, the more ferocious and dangerous those ripples we've been seeing will become.
Surfing the riptides and tidal waves of a nation's psyche? I wonder how many more Campbells we'll have by the end?
This article forms part of the series Rapture & Decay: The New Eschatological Cinema. Read the Introduction here.
...modern mankind found itself in the midst of a great absence and emptiness of values and yet, at the same time, a remarkable abundance of possibilities -Marshall Berman.
From Adbusters and the anti-capitalist movement to discussions of "post everything syndrome" and more recent analyses of the London riots; the notion that we live in a disorientating, overloaded, media-driven, celebrity-obsessed world is not a new one. Revolutions are televised. Ikea can help us to sleep better (whilst we may experience the beginnings of split personality disorder leading to the erection of international fighting club franchises, at least we won’t be hospitalised after tripping over badly stored shoes on our way to the bathroom in the middle of the night). Plastic mannequins are more attractive than real women (see case of H&M in the media this week). Disneyland is the ultimate escape from handling your hyperactive, unable-to -play-by-themselves children this Christmas. Lonely? Call in the entertainment factor of your mate Dave, available at the flick of a Freeview remote control.
Semioticians such as Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard have utlitised the term hyperreality to describe how, in advanced postmodern cultures, we are increasingly unable to distinguish fiction from fantasy, the real from the unreal. Our world consists of hollow signs and simulacra where the fake offers a better experience than the real thing. How many Facebook friends do you have? How much of your holiday did you spend snapping away on your digital camera, constructing the perfect narrative to describe the experiences that you want to look like you were having? Did you truly experience anything or were you just projecting your explorer fantasies onto an 18-24, ten day guided coach tour of Hidden India?
Science is beginning to produce results which suggest that the hyperreality hypothesis is more than just an idea; earlier in the year I posted this link to a paper which describes how "digital doppelgangers" can induce false memories in those exposed to them.
Now as an actress, I deal in fictions. But I don't deal in fakes. I’m all for exploring imagination, total unreality, multiple realities, and so on. Yet the fictional worlds which I dip in and out of are ones which I feel very deeply connected to indeed. They become my reality. The problem with hyperreality is that illusion reigns, nothing is felt, everything is sign, simulation, replication, masquerading as reality. It’s the lie that is the dangerous part. We seek simulated stimuli, no longer sure of what is real and what isn’t, not even questioning experiences, forever unfulfilled no matter how much we gorge on "culture" or engage in "exercise" or participate in "down time". We seek out highs and stimuli and entertainments like overwrought addicts.
We are organised and enchained and bored out of our minds.
Take television, for example. Do we ever ask ourselves why we would rather watch a recreation of a scene in an accident and emergency ward rather than doing anything else out of the infinite range of possibilities of "activities" available to us at 8pm on a Wednesday night? As Baudrillard points out, "television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the night, of the other side of things".
Ah- ha, so, we’re afraid of the dark! Baudrillard takes this even further whilst discussing aspects of modern excess and its inherent emptiness:
"Tentacular, protuberant, excrescent, hypertelic: this is the inertial destiny of a saturated world. The denial of its own end in hyperfinality; is this not also the mechanism of cancer? The revenge of growth in excrescence. The revenge and summons of speed in inertia. The masses are also caught in this gigantic process of inertia by acceleration. The masses are this excrescent process, which precipitates all growth towards ruin. It is the circuit that is short circuited by a monstrous finality".
Perhaps we are, ultimately, afraid of this monstrous finality. Afraid of death. And what makes us afraid of death? Fear of our limited time here, fear of underachieving, of lacking a legacy, fear of pain and suffering, fear of a wasted, meaningless existence. Fear of the meaningless of existence. Some people face this fear, decide to drop out, and commit suicide. Some people read Camus and decide to hang on for a bit. Some people join mega churches and pin their hopes on salvation and eternity. Some people audition for X Factor. Some people eat too much. Some people eat too little. Some people turn to drink. Most people try to construct a sense of meaning. Most people try to "think positively". Some people, as Umberto Eco obsesses over, write lists:
"We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That's why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It's a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don't want to die".
There are undeniable forces at work. Forces of chaos, of craved for and enforced order, of seeping unreality and of desperate attempts to reconstruct a former reality. I’m waiting for my box of locally produced organic veg delivered by a fairly paid driver to arrive at my door any minute now.
Sometimes it’s hard to face the future, sometimes the future is uncertain. Sometimes it feels like the world is ending and we wish it would just hurry up. Next time, I’ll take a look at ways in which contemporary filmmakers are exploring the hyperreality hypothesis, of how they are projecting this sense of disorientation and saturation onto film, and why they should even bother attempting it...
Upon the purchase of Lars Von Trier’s recently released end-of-the-world movie Melancholia, Boris Kit, the head of Magnolia Pictures, commented, “as the 2012 apocalypse is upon us, it is time to prepare for a cinematic last supper”. Subtitled by Von Trier as a “a beautiful film about the end of the world”, Melancholia delivers not only on Kit’s promise but also succeeds in providing a brutal social critique, masquerading as an archetypal character study which explores the nature of the depressive mind versus that of the socialised individual. Switching from a staged social realism reminiscent of the Dogme films to the fantastical science fiction of the movie‘s second half, Von Trier utilises cinema’s possibilities for the hyperreal similarly to, and as effectively as, Gaspar Noe's nihilistic exploration of life after death Enter the Void.
Both directors specialise in bombarding their audiences with visual and auditory spectacles to numinous ends via shock and awe. But in addition to their shared technological preferences and overridingly nihilistic outlooks, there exists a shared sense of the ecstatic, of the seductiveness inherent in destruction. Von Trier and Noe are masters of the numinous realm, of the creation of cinematic rapture and loaded technological attractions. This often serves the purpose of translating their individual visions of oblivion into the minds of the audience. The results are undeniably beautiful and cathartic. But let's not be bowled over by mere aesthetics, or be fooled into believing that either director believes in shock for shock's sake.
It is apparent, in light not just of 2012 but of the current global situation, that both Von Trier and Noe have captured something of the zeitgeist. They have channeled particular kinds of feelings of futility in the face of a dying planet, a dying capitalist order, a consumerist cultural wasteland, in addition to a more generalised sense of existential doom. But why does this sense of doom, of living in the end times, resonate? Have people of every generation and social order contemplated the notion of living in the end times or is this phenomenon specific to the late capitalist period? What separates the current apocalyptical discourse from previous, more ancient visions of Judgement Day? And why is it that, as Jameson once remarked, we find it easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism? Finally, how is cinema reflecting these feelings, or even, moulding them?
Over the coming weeks and months I shall be posting a series of articles which explore the history and nature of eschatological thought and how these ideas have come to bear on cinema. Along the way I shall encompass elements of film theory, philosophy, psychology and cultural theory in exploring the concept of time itself and the seemingly inevitable outcome of a dead-end consumer culture, all with a focus on The End (of the world, of time, of capitalism).
I also aim to reveal the way in which Strange Factories can be placed within this mileau and how its themes manifest in both the content and form of FoolishPeople's forthcoming Film Fantastique.
Perhaps there will be some light at the end of the tunnel. Perhaps, to paraphrase Half Man, Half Biscuit, the light at the end of the tunnel will be the light of an oncoming train. Nevertheless, I hope you'll take your chances and bear with me. After all, have any of us anything to lose...?
(Images: Lars Von Trier's Melancholia; Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void)
Last night the Strange Factories technical whizz kids (Mr Punch and Yiannis to be exact...Punch insists on a credit...) once again proved their versatility by providing entertainment for the masses; setting up an outdoor cinema at Stronheim's settlement and beaming Aussie indie flick Bad Boy Bubby onto the wall of our beautiful new home. What better way to spend an evening's break from a hardcore shooting schedule than wrapped in blankets under the stars, eating out-of-date popcorn and working our way through a crate of local Czech beer? We look forward to sharing our new screening setup this weekend with our latest arrivals - the winners of the Strange Factories Secrets, Dreams and Storytelling Competition.
As we move into the final stages of our gruelling month of what can only be described as guerilla filmmaking, the transformative nature of our working progress becomes ever clearer. Art and life seep further into one another; a new reality (or rather, surreality?) has been born. Over the past week we have seen actors going missing, animals behaving very strangely, costumed archetypes trudging up hills at sunrise, long journeys with wheelbarrows full of equipment, all events tainted by sleep-deprivation induced delirium. There's something distinctly odd about living on our own filmset. Odd in a good way. We ask ourselves daily, where exactly do we end and our characters begin?
We have been blessed with a technical crew so aligned to the FoolishPeople vision that they are able not only to participate in this month long ritual, fulfilling the most vital roles with a complete understanding of both performative, aesthetic and practical aspects, but also to serve as our audience too. In this sense the camera has become something of a voyeur, a key player in the live performance aspect of the work. The nature of the Strange Factores experience has been, from the outset, defined by such blurring of boundaries, masks and role play, revelations of truth within fiction and vice versa.
Already this film is very much alive. The switch has been flicked. The curtain well and truly lifted. The words cannot go back on the page. And audentia, we are so incredibly excited about sharing our manifestations with you...
The Affliction is a group show by Faye Winslade, David Underwood (both of The Mourning Press), Eleanor Pearce, Laura Barrett and Rowan Meacock
The Affliction is a collection of work, which marches solemnly through the vaults of human intrigue and rests its head upon the steps of melancholy. It serves as a visual exploration into the dark and foreboding provinces that lay outside the walls of logical thought, and in doing so pays tribute to an age when sorrow became an art.
Within this exhibition, the contributing artists are bound by their penchant for the unknown and the extraordinary, yet are set apart by their highly personal approach to themes that have inflamed creative minds for thousands of years. Death and obsession come to the fore as the prints and drawings of The Affliction work to untangle the complex relationship between beauty and the grotesque. Diabolical scenes are played out among the ruins of classical mythology, while the black petals of Eastern Mysticism unfold. The vital roles of both physical process and visual narrative are evident in the haunting, funereal collection.
In this, a show dedicated to the study of the intangible, five artists describe the indescribable and stand together beneath the banner of contemporary gothic art.
27th May (Private View) - 1st June 2011
The Real World Gallery, 65 Hanbury Street, London, E1 5JP
Sponsored by Casillero del Diablo.
Above: The Heartbreaking Tale of the Escaping Twins by The Mourning Press.
"I cannot carry us both!" she cried, as she dragged her sister alongside her!
"For whatever reason birds have been a big part of my life ever since I can remember. Like the lives of fish, the lives of birds have formed an integral slice of my internal myth. But it is only in the past few years that sparrows have begun to take a central role in that internal myth."
A writer, possessed by a terrifying fiction hunts for the heart of his story in a pagan landscape, haunted by the infamous hum emitted by a Strange Factory.
Strange Factories is the first feature film produced by FoolishPeople.
1957- Seascale, the North of England. Cirxus; an old English circus lost in the shadows of the smoke stacks of Calder Hall, the world's first commercial nuclear power station.
Athalia the ballerina waits in the ring for Loudon the clown to return with directions to the Black Pool, the mythic site of the Home Sweet Home, the final show of the season. Join her as she begins a bizarre and wondrous search for Loudon through the irradiated secrets of Cirxus, where she must face the macabre atomic menagerie, haunted by circus animals and navigate her way through the maze of strange, hallucinogenic sideshows to the other side of time.
Cirxus defies genre and form and offers a literary experience like no other. A combination of hallucinogenic novel and blueprint to a physical experience.
A rowdy gang of Tracey Emins wrestle half a dozen dazed Andy Warhols to the ground. IT IS THE FUTURE AND ALL FORMS OF ART ARE FREE. Perfect replicas exist of every masterpiece ever created, artworks and ideas are stolen from the mind before they’re even created.
Copyright or ownership is meaningless. FLESH-WORTH is all that matters. Arm yourself with weaponised art and explore the notions of open-source myth. What are intellectual rights worth in a decomposing culture?
Featuring full archival material from FoolishPeople’s performance run of Dead Language at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
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