Pete Hindle

I sat down few days ago and made a concerted effort to watch Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s a long, slightly flawed movie, but in the third act something interesting occurred to me. It wasn’t the fact that the alien spaceship was very cool, in that pre-CGI filmmaking way, nor anything else to do with the craft that Spielberg put into the film.

Instead, it was the fact that most of the new media artists I know would give their left tit to to make something that looked as kick-ass as the alien communication device. Which was made in 1976, but looks equal to Jenny Holzers latest.

In fact, the scene where they finally communicate with the alien spaceships has a lot in common with most new media gigs, shows and festivals I’ve been to. There is the epic lightshow with some minimal music (which isn’t really meant to be understood), there is a king-sized MIDI controller at the centre of the action, and everybody on stage is a man who is old enough to know better.

Also in common with most of these new media events is the crowd: it’s always a lot of men, standing around. Looking cool.

I was a bit concerned that the main character, Roy, decides to leave his family and run off to hang out with the aliens (it seemed unrealistic) but he had driven his wife and children away by building a large-scale model of a mountain in their front room. I actually thought the model was quite cool though, but perhaps the previous decade of living with artists has prepared me for living with batshit insane people. Hey, coming back to find a scale model of Devil’s Tower in the living room would be a pleasant surprise compared to some of the things I’ve seen flatmates drag back.

For anybody like me who made it to the end of this movie, I’ve created an iPhone ringtone of the five classic tones. Now you can use your iPhone to make peaceful contact with beings from another planet, show your appreciation for classic sci-fi that depicts a hopeful vision of humanity, or simply nerd out in an audible way.  Simply right-click close encounters ringtone and select your operating system’s version of “save to disk” in order to download it as a hand-crafted* m4r file.

* it really is a hand-crafted ringtone, by the way. I spent about five minutes in Garageband making it. I have no idea what other devices an m4r file works on, so anybody not using an iPhone is on their own if they want to use this.