Review « Pete Hindle

October 11, 2009

The Non-Art of Subtitling and the Reductionist Use of Humour within Critical and Artistic Elements of the New Media Artwork

On Friday, I left the house for Datarama, Newcastle’s software version of Dorkbot. Well, maybe it’s a more artistic, friendly version of Dorkbot, without all the posturing that can be seen at the Limehouse. That’s not strictly important.

What is important is that, whilst there, I presented my resubtitled version of Gran Torismo.

Gran.Torino.subtitles (that’s the subtitle file, you’ll need your own copy of the film to watch it with)

Now, I have a deep problem with this work. Born out of my constant need for procrastination, whilst trying to work on a thesis-like document for my Masters degree in Digital Media, it is a collection of bad jokes that destroy whatever craft has been put into play in the creation of Eastwood’s Gran Torino. Torino might be a very good film; I have no idea. Almost immediately, rather than watch it, I began subtitling it using the cultural reference points of Clint Eastwood as a famous person.

I’m making it available as a file for others to look at and use, if they want to. The humour is crude and full of swearing, so don’t expect many shining examples of wit, and I only did the first ten minutes or so of the film. It is not, however, an exercise in art – it is an exercise in ill-placed mockery, and should be seen as something crude.

1 comment

August 2, 2009

An Ironic Reading of Portions from Silver Surfer, Issues 5 and 6

In my teenage years, I had a big comic habit (graciously funded by my parents). It all started with the Silver Surfer double-issue where the Kree-Skrull war kicked off, on a holiday in Saffron Walden. I can’t remember the year it was, but it was before my reading speed kicked into the ludicrously high speed it is now, and those 60-odd pages of space battles and cosmic forces made me want to read more comics.

Fast-forward to today, where myself and Brian dragged ourselves to the Newcastle SciFi, Comic and Card Fair, run by these folks. And it kind of sucked, because there wasn’t any SciFi, just comics and cards. But it had cost a pound to get in, so I forced Brian to root around in the comic sections, and whilst he was suspiciously eyeing the covers of Witchbreed I was reminiscing about when comics used to be good.

Warren Ellis’s comics commentary column Come in Alone (also see here) laid it all out ten years ago, saying that the two party system of comics, which only produced comics that existing fans wanted to read, was a slow boat to suffocating the industry. Well, he was right, and all the interesting comics like the Silver Surfer have been culled. These days it’s all ‘dark’ heros such as Wolverine, Superman clones, and the odd offbeat black and white.

(Webcomics are where it’s at. Shhh! Don’t tell the capitalists.)

But coming across a stash of old Silver Surfer comics, I had to buy them. For starters, they were only 50p each! So I ended up buying a few comics from before the Kree-Skrull war, setting the scene on a galactic scale. We are introduced to a number of different races, such as the Celestials, a race of… really big people.

Above: He’s just standing there, and I can see right up his…

The green guys are Skrulls. I like the fact that the tubby green Marlon Brando feels he can’t stand the site of this monster anymore. Okay, I might have been thinking “monster what?”, but that’s a little crude. And how do you think talking to the enormous city-high man goes?

Oh-fecking-really, Kylor – a giant green bloke comes and stands over your city, and there’s nothing you can do? You’re lucky you don’t have a week of ‘special yellow rain’ forecast, especially after you tried to nuke him. And – point of order here – didn’t you just try and nuke him right over your own city? Kylor, you’re an asshole.

This is also a good time to point out the fantastic colour process used in late 1980′s comics. I’m not an expert, but you are seeing a really restricted palette put to a great use here, with overlaying tones of less than sympathetic colours really popping out. I actually get quite excited by this sort of print quality. Also notice that the paper is all yellowed with age; I could have auto-corrected that in with the scanning process, but I feel that it adds a little to the reading of the media.

After Kylor and his Conservative-style mismanagement of local politics, there is a few other plotlines that are in these issues of the Silver Surfer. The big one is the Surfer’s “friendship” with Mantis, a green lady who flies through space wearing an improbable suit. Why would she hang out with a shiney silver man in space, who constantly talks about his ex-boss all the time, and how his ex-boss exiled him to Earth?

Oh, she likes him.

I have to admit, on reading that frame I was thinking “my God, somebody even worse at dating than I am!” – after all, he’s got the hot green girl in the stripper outfit saying nice things to him, but he’s all “yeah, it’s been a long time, and I’ve only kissed that other girl three times…” He should probably be clear that he’s got a thing for Shalla Bal, but – hey – who knows how long it’s been for our Surfer? It could be a long time. He doesn’t have a crotch.

He’s so emo.

Surfer, she’s practically putting it on a plate for you there. Plus, catch that little Saigon reference? You might think she’s subtly trying to tell the Silver Emo that he’s got Prospects, but then she drops that next line quite casually. Well, she is dressed like a stripper, mind.

Later on in this issue, the Surfer’s courtin’ is interupted by this lunk-headed dick. His backstory is that he’s immortal because he’s the last one of his race (apparently, the universe preserves the last one of a sentient race in the world of Marvel), but he used a cheat code – he slaughtered the rest of his species.

Nice.

Rather than judge his actions, the Silver Surfer uses the mighty Cosmic Power imbued in him to remove the weapons lunk-head (I can’t find his name, and I can’t be bothered to look it up) had implanted in his body. So after five billion years of killing people, he didn’t ever take some time out and grab a hobby? It was just kill kill kill? Whatever.

This is still a Marvel comic, so after having a fight they declare the issue over and move onto issue 6. This starts with a great one-page drawing of space – termed a splash page in print terminology. Here:

The thing about these splash pages is that you tend to find them at the start of the comic book. I suspect this is both for dramatic input and for the fact that they would have time to draw this stuff at the start of the monthly schedule for the comic book. But forget all that – lasers! Pew pew pew! Burning things! Explosions! Wow!

Oddly enough, for an issue titled “War”, that’s not what the Surfer gets up to in this installment. But before we find our Space Emo sitting outside Boots with his Space Goth Girlfriend, there is a slight bit of backstory to get through:

In todays world of comics, the above would be a quick dash through the plug-ins section of Photoshop, but the illustrative team of Rogers and Rubenstein have really pulled out the stops with this splash page. There’s stippling and all sorts – man, that must have taken them ages! But it’s so cool I wouldn’t really mind if the last page was just a picture of some stick men saying “we’ll be back next week”.

I’m telling you, this is the sort of stuff you don’t find in today’s comics. The combination of old-school graft and limited printing techniques means that some real special knowledge went into this image. Appreciate it, because in our realm of pixel-perfect Blue-Ray DVDs, we often lose sight of how hard it is to craft something beautiful.

Surfer also finds it hard to recognise when something beautiful is infront of him. Seriously, he has got to be the worst date ever – “But I’m pledged to somebody else!” Thankfully, our girl Mantis is a little bit more forward. Plus, to be honest, I think Surfer might be her lift home – she’s got the power of plants or something, which isn’t that nifty in the infinite void of space.

So, after the romantic kiss, what next? Why, what else but SPACE NOOKIE!

So, one things puzzling me here: are they just going off for an extended hug in the asteroid belt, because the Surfer doesn’t have any bits. He does have a Cosmic Power (or possibly a Power Cosmic) which might come in useful here. But we don’t see that – this isn’t something from the pages of Heavy Metal. It’s straight to the afterglow for us readers.

I don’t quite understand what he’s saying that’s so romantic she wants to kiss him – “hey, if you weren’t around, I’d still be pining for that girl who only kissed me three times”. Hmm. Well, maybe she has a thing for surfers.

But wait, what’s that? Does that last panel depict the sound of a cosmic voice-mail being delivered?

Oooh, mean! Mantis, he’s going to leave you with some plants and then get back to his other honey. That’s low, and don’t be making all lovey-dovey eyes behind his back – it’s quite clear that the Surfer got his oats and then just pissed off. But, y’know, he’s just so darned noble about the whole thing. “Hey babe, I’ll call you after saving all of reality. Missing you already, ciao.”

I hope this brief breeze through some of the Surfer’s classic period in the 1980′s has been interesting for you. I don’t think this period is collected anywhere, but the good news is that these comics only cost me 50p each. You could totally clean up before all the other cool kids get in on this.

Disclaimer: It’s quite obvious that I’m not claiming ownership of any of the artwork or characters above, and that I’m using them for review purposes.

Leave a comment

July 17, 2009

Infinite Summer Post #3: This Book Sucks

I’m reading Infinite Jest as part of the Infinite Summer project, and I’ve got some reservations.

Infinite Jest is a big book, but I’ve read bigger, and I’ve certainly read better. I think my flatmate summed it up best: when I pointed out the size of IJ, and how I wasn’t really enjoying it, he said that it was the short books that leave you wanting more.

I don’t think Infinite Jest is a well written book. I believe that it has traces of greatness; some of the parts that I’ve read have really stuck in my mind. But I’m up to the mid-six hundreds now – it should have got round to being gripping at this point. The fact that it isn’t says a lot, mainly that the book coasts on those few points of excellence and the dry black vein of humour it’s written in.

Earlier on I said that perhaps the reason that American’s like it is because it’s such a big book. I think I’m going to have to stick with this theory; it’s like the way that Harry Potter is lauded for being good writing. Actually, the Potter books are pretty workmanlike; it’s the fact that they got sold as an event that launched J.K Rowling into her celebrity and subsequent success. I think a similar thing has happened for this book. After all, it’s not like there aren’t other books out there which are as multi-layered and referential. Perditio Street Station, for instance, is similarly tome-like and has a fucking storyline that pumps relentlessly.

I’m reading this book in order to get a better grounding in books that don’t have spaceships on the cover. But I do find that once I step out of the SF getto, there is a lot of muddying about what actually makes a good book – and this time, I got suckered.

2 comments

July 10, 2009

Infinite Jest Interim Report (Palimpsest Review)

My reading of Infinite Jest is part of Infinite Summer, an online reading group of the novel by David Wallace Foster

Infinite Jest: is it really that great a novel, or is it merely called a great novel owing to its size? After all, American’s like big things: Buicks, skyscrapers, Texas. And Infinite Jest is a big book, at 1079 pages in total.

Although currently on track with the reading schedule as laid out on the Infinite Summer website, I’ve been holding myself back. I’ve got a really high reading speed, and I’ve been reading other books at the same time, as I’m not finding Wallace’s writing style that interesting. Yes, it has some good points, and some amusing funny parts, but it’s sheer length finds it unfocused, the narrative is all over the place (despite being a few hundred pages in), and the over-reliance on footnotes is a distracting affectation.

(For instance, in this paragraph I’m writing in the main body of the text to tell you that the footnotes are considered one of the novels main strengths by IJ’s aficionados, pointing to the fragmentary nature of reading via the internet as an excuse for this strange writing quirk. But by writing in the main body of the text you keep the narrative flow but still impart information like I’m doing here. I think authors refer to this as ‘writing skills’.)

Infinite Jest is, no doubt, an interesting book. But whilst reading it I’ve been reminded of all those short novels that you are heartbroken to leave behind once finished. One such book that I’ve been using as ballast for my reading speed is Catherynne M. Valente’s Palimpsest, a story about searching for a way to a magical realm. I’d heard it was a good book via the underground sci-fi grapevine, but not paid too much attention to the plot. I probably should have done, because the mcguffin that gets you into the magical realm of Palimpest is having sex.

Valente’s book has a lot more sex in it than the ordinary fantasy books I come across – er, I mean read. But it is sensitively handled, and belies the underlying theme of the book – that of seduction. Those who wish to travel to Palimpsest are seduced by the city, and it’s promise of a different life, but Valente makes it clear that sometimes those promises are lies.

While Palimpsest was in no way the novel I was expecting, it’s concise effort to tell four interleaved tales served as an ideal counterpoint to Wallace’s rambling style. Valente knows how to write the sort of punchy prose that made me keep reading, her style reminiscent of a sexier, gothic-ier Neil Gaiman. Having finished Palimpest I only wish that there was a sequel I could pick up – I doubt I will be left with a similar yearning once Infinite Jest is finished.

2 comments

July 3, 2009

Review: Torchwood’s BBC Radio 4 Play, “The Dead Line”

I have a deep antipathy for Torchwood. You see, Doctor Who was my introduction to Science Fiction. I mean the old-school Target book series, which were novelisations of the broadcast episodes, unrestrained by budgetary considerations. A deep space station can only be written in a way that it appears in deep space, whereas careful financial planning might make a televisual space station appear a bit like a collection of washing up bottles painted grey. And let’s not even start on the aliens, huh?

Use a tissue next time, okay buddy?

When the TV show finished the books continued the story of the Doctor’s travels in space and time. Except that the authors didn’t need to worry about budget constraints, leading to a fantastic series of stories from authors such as Lance Parkin, who recreated the Time Lords was a species locked in a perpetual war across time, using regeneration to create creatures bred for war. Parkin, and other authors working in this period, used the long attention spans needed to read a book to create an amazing back-story.

When Doctor Who returned to TV, it was assumed that the attention span of anyone watching it was tiny, and the majority of the back-story was scribbled out. Each episode was as self-contained as possible, with only the existence of the Doctor character linking the events happening within the story to a larger, scifi-tinged universe. Torchwood removes the need for that link, and instead gives us lowest-common-denominator storytelling.

This radio play, “The Dead Line”, uses the idea of a malicious phone signal that makes people’s brain stop working – like a computer virus for brains. Thankfully, after forty-five minutes of pissing around, the Torchwood posse decided that the computer virus metaphor meant that they could just zap the brains of the affected with electromagnetic waves and reset everybody.

(Thanks, Roy. Your Torchwood invite pack is in the post.)

Of course, no concern was given that this freaky brain-wipe via telephone behaviour came from a lightening storm that hit an office building, nor that there’s been a bunch of people incapacitated with the same symptoms since 1974 (or something) and nobody in super-elite Torchwood noticed. Mind you, they are a state department, and therefore need to uphold that level of efficiency that we expect from government workers. Don’t expect a work-related bonus this year, Jack.

The notion of phones being an attack vector for something is insidiously scary. Stephen King broached it in Cell, and there’s a film based around the same idea called The Signal, which I’ve not seen. This is because I’m a big wuss and don’t like watching horror movies, and the basic premise of the The Signal is that the ‘infected’ lose the niceties of civilisation and start acting crazy.

This is the sort of adult-themed entertainment that media representation of Torchwood would lead me to expect. However, I’m always disappointed by the Torchwood show. Yes, Ianto loves Jack, and they’re both men – so what? I really hope that the mention of a same-sex relationship isn’t the only passport to mature that Torchwood has, as that expired sometime around 1994 with the use of lesbians in Brookside.

We don’t get crazy zombie behaviour from this rogue noise in “Dead Line”, instead the victims fall into a coma. This is another missed opportunity for radio, as we could have a great monologue from any of the victims as to the scary nature of being locked into your own body, like in Metallica’s video for One. And, of course, there is the scary sound, which sounded a bit like a bucket with a mobile phone in it. Whatever happened to the Radiophonic workshop?

At a time when British SF is harder, leaner, and more popular than ever, I don’t understand why we get this sort of dumbed-down shit from the British Broadcasting Corporation. The public can cope with far more than this simple children’s tale, and although the voice acting from the principles was pretty good, unless they are given some real stories to tell, we’ll never see anything particularly good come from the Cardiff Torchwood team – as this radio play proved. The talent is there, just not the stories, and I don’t see commissioning editors changing their tactics anytime soon.

Leave a comment

June 29, 2009

Confederacy of Dunces: Book Review

Confederacy of Dunces is a book from the late 1960’s, set in New Orleans. I first heard of it from the writer/speaker/internet guy Merlin Mann, who uses a line from it as his Twitter ‘handle’, differentiating his presence on the mighty microblogging service from his more professional website, 43folders.com.

As I said in my last post, I’m trying to read my way out of the sci-fi genre. More accurately, I’m trying to expand my knowledge of literature, and as I consistently find Merlin Mann’s web writing approachable and interesting, I wanted to see what sort of book he find inspiring. I came across my copy by accident in Black Flame Books – after guiltily buying another SF book to add to my collection, I turned to the non-genre piles, grabbed the first book at random, and it happened to be Confederacy. Score!

Confederacy is a book that belongs wholly to a subsection of American literature, the humorous look at American society. Other authors working in that subsection might be Pynchon, Dave Eggers, and David Foster Wallace, all of whom have written books that use wry humour to reflect on contemporary American life. I have to say “might be” because I’m just not an expert, and I don’t have a lot of literary knowledge about American writers.

I was prepared to not enjoy this book. I’d brought it on a whim, and I have plenty of other books that I could have switched to if I had found it tedious. But much to my surprise, I enjoyed it and found myself reading it quicker than I thought I would. It’s main strength is the way the author, John Kennedy Toole, manages to create a wide range of interesting characters, and yet keeps them as separate individuals. There is no sense in this book of the individual characters merging into one, as can happen with some novels.

Not one of the incidental characters seems to drop in to serve a plot function, unlike, say Paul Coelho or other Magical Realism authors. By using New Orleans as a backdrop, perhaps Toole has a easier time of it – the city is famously strange – but instead of the shorthand “N’awlins” that you see in films such as Easy Rider, it is the strangeness of any small community. Everybody knows each other, and the interconnected actions of the characters drive the plot in an understandable manner that actually makes sense.

Despite the tone of the book, it does have a happy ending – not that I’m against sad or sorrowful books, I just don’t want to wade through a few hundred pages of misery to find that all the characters die in the end. In fact, the ending is almost setting the book up for a sequel, but one of the saddest things about this book is that it was published posthumously, eleven years after the death by suicide of the author.

The fact that the book is so good, is commonly regarded as so good, and yet the author never saw any acclaim for his work is very thought provoking. Like Infinite Jest, it’s a book that today’s leading internet writers and commentators are really keen on. Are these long-form texts the product of the same drive to making jokes that we see in the writing of Gruber and Mann? As extremely short-form texts start to dominate – shorter even than blogging – will we lose the future novelists who would make us laugh in a way that questions our short-termist society?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but reading Confederacy of Dunces made me want to both read and write more. That’s surely a sign of a good book, right? I’d advise you to pick it up if you were looking for something new to read, because in it’s dense text we see the sort of authorship that might be dying out now.

1 comment

June 6, 2009

Bag Cruft

I’ve just brought a new bag.

I should explain; I ‘m only really excited by the prospect of buying bags and notebooks. After all, anything could go into them. This means that I own a lot of notebooks (they’re cheap) and some really swanky bags. I tend to pay at least £40 for a bag and look for features like being waterproof, having lots of pockets, and making me look more manly.

My last bag had all those in spades; A North Face messenger bag. Made of the same kind of material that lorry tarpaulin is made from, it’s waterproof and pretty indestructable. I know this because KLM tried to destruct it on my trip to Finland earlier this year, but left it looking cooler by virtual of battlescars. Thanks KLM!

It is a messenger bag, which means that it’s great for bombing around town in, and I’ve mainly been using it around town. However, now that my knee and the weather are better I’ve picked up a new bag for long-distance cycling, so it’s time to see what cruft is knocking around in the bottom of my bag. That is:

•    One AAA battery, from when I was best man for Brian’s wedding. I had around £20 of batteries in my bag for other people’s digital cameras.
•    One Staedler blue pen, which truthfully belongs to an ex-girlfriend.
•    One wodge of pink post-it notes.
•    One uni-ball fineliner, which I brought before getting a space pen
•    My passport
•    One paperclip (not red)
•    A plastic bag from Micro Anvika (where?)
•    A leaflet from the Newcastle Philosophy Society
•    One discount voucher from KLM, who lost my bags in France
•    Two unused toothbrushes and packaging
•    Small crumpler bag which I use for carrying tools in, as I am a nerd and like tools
•    One softback notebook, brought whilst doing a residency in Liverpool with really nice people
•    A large hex nut and matching washer
•    A black nylon cord
•    Notes on green post-it notes about the Royal Society
•    Various receipts, averaging a value of £10.38
•    The bag for my sunglasses, which I thought I’d lost

I’d love to hear what others have in their bag – what tech does Alistair carry around in the bottom of his bag? What’s knocking around in trans-european Pippa’s bag? Does Yvette habitually have writing tools in hers, and does Brian have any electronics in his? Does David have some climbing equipment, or just a power bar? And is Oli carrying around some fancy cooking oil? Please post your cruft for other to see!

18 comments

May 13, 2009

Nerd Night: Reboot to Win, or how the Geek Genre took over the Blockbuster

This is a piece written for Kino Bambino, a local zine run by film fans in Newcastle. You’ll be able to pick up a copy from the Star and Shadow, amongst other places, from 14/05/2009 onwards.

Have you noticed a trend with summer blockbusters? I have. They like to take a well-known nerdy book, film, or TV show, and make a new, shiny version of it. Currently, we can see this happening to the Star Trek universe, which has been operating since the sixties as a sort of Rosetta Stone of sci-fi TV.

The earliest forms of Star Trek were glorious technicolor slices of cheese; later versions of the show have a sort of po-faced seriousness that scared off sane people from watching anything like it. In a sort of no-man’s land there were an increasingly cheap series of films that never got any better than Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, despite going all the way up to Star Trek X. I’ve seen all of them, and I can hardly remember what happens in Star Trek X (‘Data dies’ is all I can remember from that 90 minutes of my life.)

And this summer, we get what they are calling a ‘reboot’ of the franchise. Why? Well, Star Trek is just too big a money-spinner for Hollywood to ignore. The last TV version of Star Trek was so dull that nobody watched it, so a big-screen re-imagining lets the suits play merry hell with the existing universe of Trek – which is no bad thing.

Star Trek’s universe was reliant upon the idea of evil aliens being bastards to us poor benighted citizens of the universe. This is dumb, and ignores practically 90% of plot-lines. Where are the evil humans trying to take things over? As a race, we practically live for taking things over, and we’ve thrown up some of the most evil bastards ever. When you combine the two (Jeffery Archer, I’m looking at you here) you get great plotlines, which make for great movies.

The new Star Trek is about making the original series sexy again, the same way that Planet of the Apes got made over, the same way that GI Joe is getting a tummy-tuck and boob job later this summer, and the same way that Star Wars got botoxed to within an inch of it’s life in 2004. But the sad part is, it doesn’t make any difference.

Star Trek doesn’t need any new fans; people dress up like Klingons at the weekend anyway, so it’s a fair bet that they’ll spend a fortune on anything with the prefix ‘Star Trek’. The reason that the franchise got rebooted is so that your mum knows what’s on at the cinema, and that’s because the economics of modern Hollywood means crushing as many people into the stalls as possible. And everybody has a slight fondness for Trek, somewhere, even if it’s just Spock and his neck pinching.

But it’s not your mum that’s going to watch the film four times and then go home and Facebook his mates about how great it was; it’s your average nerd who’ll be proletising this new Star Trek. Anything with an inbuilt fan-base that loves it already is going to get picked up by Hollywood over the next half-decade, and then flogged to within an inch of it’s life as the moguls seek to earn some money.

So stand by for a flood of films that have your less sociable friends grabbing their coats and heading out: later this year, Maurice Sendak’s ten-sentence children’s book “Where the Wild Things Are” will make a splash. We’ll also see more Harry Potter and Transformers, and a sequel to horny-but-celibate vampire movie Twilight. As long as you’re not looking for something original, there’s plenty of geeking out that can be done at the cinema.

Leave a comment

May 6, 2009

Inquiry One: What is New Media?

This is part of my coursework, where I’m trying to define the area that hackerspaces are working in from an artistic perspective. This text is a fragment of writing that I couldn’t fit into the two larger pieces that I’m writing at the minute.

In his essay, “DIY: The Militant March of Technology”, Marcin Ramocki links the means of production in the information age to the classical Marxist model, and then goes on to posit that New Media art works are one way of countering the alienation of labour that Marx claimed as an effect of the industrial age. He writes:

“The work happening right now comes from the first generation born into a world with personal computers, video games and the internet and on-line media. Their first frame of reference is not the linear narrative of a film but an algorithmic one of a game or a website. There is no more reverence toward technology: there is a need to question and make sense of it.”

This new generation’s attitude toward computers, media, and technology is one that is seen in the willingness to deconstruct and reconstruct the tools of the information age for individual purposes. Sometimes, these purposes serve the community of makers and doers that enable modern interaction with technology, leading to Open-Source tools such as programming languages. Sometimes, these purposes are artistic, in which case they can be presented in a gallery (or other arts-related) setting.

In one sense, the willingness of artists to work with these tools was predicted by Nam June Paik, an early adopter of technology within the artistic milieu, when he said “ Some day artists will work with capacitors, resistors and semi-conductors as they work today with brushes, violins and junk”, although he could not have known from his vantage point in the sixties the importance of computers half a century later.

But those working today do; whether in art or any other field, the computer is a ubiquitous object, both at home and in the workplace. It is this ubiquitousness that makes them invisible (when they work) and therefore give no reason for the lay-person to investigate them further than as objects for work or leisure, depending on the location they encounter a computer.

Ramocki refers to hackers – by which I mean the people who do investigate computers, rather than in a criminal sense of the word – as “individuals who rise above the proletarian alienation of labor (sic) and fully embrace… the means of production, their hardware and software.” Political context of his language aside, his writing mirrors a growing trend in contemporary culture to return to the making of things, as opposed to the packaged product that consumer society provides.

Examples of this include the magazine Make, which exists to educate it’s audience about DIY technology projects, encouraging it’s readers to “void the warranty” in order to make something new, and a raft of new books encouraging creative actions such as cupcake making, textiles, and other activities.

If the computer, as a packaged object, becomes the modern-day locus of alienation, then it is not surprising that there is a backlash against that which comes pre-packaged. It is to be expected that there are those questioning the relevance of technology in their creative lives, and that as a flip-side, those reclaiming the technology by making it the site of their creativity.

Richard Colson’s introductory text to digital art lists six major themes of the field: history, using responses (which he also refers to as live art), data, coding, networking and digital hybrids. And yet even these deliberately wide-open themes still have trouble containing all of the varied approaches to art and technology happening in the contemporary artworld.

Leave a comment

March 26, 2009

The Engines of Our Ingenuity (book review)

I’m doing a lot of reading for the course at the moment. I’ve been reading a lot of different books that tie into my main project, and these academic books aren’t always a gripping read. Sometimes I find that they aren’t even that relevant to my subject, they just have all the correct buzzwords on the cover. In order to stop this from happening, I’ve taken to sitting in the library with a large pile of books, sampling and dipping into them, so as to decide which ones should be carried back to my house.

One of the books I’ve taken back from the library recently is a series of essays by an engineer, John Lienhard, originally broadcast as part of a radio show on American Public Radio (a bit like the BBC, but more American). This is a really well written book, which might be because it the material is supposed to be followed verbally, but Lienhard’s argument’s are easy to follow and well constructed.

The subject matter of the book is the effect that engineering has had on contemporary culture, and the reverse. From this starting point Lienhard is free to explain various technological tidbits that he must have picked up during his career as an engineer, always bringing back his audience to the point that technological marvels do not exist seperately of the culture they originate from.

While I found this book interesting, and worth spending time reading, it wasn’t actually that relevant to the subjects I need to be researching. His chapter on technology and literature is well-researched and immensly readable, but of course most people working in left-wing computer fields are familiar with the links between the Byron family and early computer programming. Lienhard’s point that it’s not possible to remove technological innovations from the culture they come from seems almost redundant here, but I’m willing to allow that – in this case – it might be due to the fact that I already have specialist knowledge.

This did not make his writing any less engaging though.

If you do have a chance to pick up this book, you might find it engaging enough to spend a few hours with. Lienhard’s storytelling and grasp of the field is comprehensive without being dry, and his essays are well balanced pieces of writing.

Leave a comment

Category: Review