The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (2002)

Director: Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain
Duration: 74 min
Language: English

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (a.k.a. Chavez: Inside the Coup) is a 2002 documentary about the April 2002 Venezuelan coup attempt which briefly deposed Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. A television crew from Ireland's Radio Telifís Éireann happened to be recording a documentary about Chávez during the events of April 11, 2002. Shifting focus, they followed the events as they occurred. During their filming, the crew recorded images of the events that they say contradict explanations given by Chávez's opposition, the private media, the US State Department, and then White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer. The documentary says that the coup was the result of a conspiracy between various old guard and anti-Chávez factions within Venezuela and the United States.

Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000)

Director: Agnès Varda
Duration: 82 min
Language: French

The film tracks a series of gleaners as they hunt for food, knicknacks, and personal connection. Varda travels French countryside and city to find and film not only field gleaners, but also urban gleaners and those connected to gleaners, including a wealthy restaurant owner whose ancestors were gleaners. The film spends time capturing the many aspects of gleaning and the many people who glean to survive. One such person is the teacher named Alain, an urban gleaner with a master's degree who teaches French to immigrants. Varda's other subjects include artists who incorporate recycled materials into their work, symbols she discovers during her filming (including a clock without hands and a heart-shaped potato), and the French law regarding gleaning. Varda also spends time with Louis Pons, who explains how junk is a "cluster of possibilities".

The Society of the Spectacle (1973)

Director: Guy Debord
Duration: 88 min
Language: French

This film by Guy E. Debord is based on his 1967 book of the same title both of which convey ideas about the consumer capitalism's mode of production and the effects on everyday life. Though both sources use a different means of communication they both powerfully convey the ideas of the situationists. I wont rant on about the ideas contain within this film which are quite profound and have influenced heavily on the Anti-Capitalist movement and post-structuralism through thinkers like Jean Baudrillard. The structure of the film itself is a series of shots from Hollywood films to soviet 'collective hero' film experiments to soft-core porn(nothing past topless) to archival footage of historical events(e.g. May 68 revolt in France) and representations of everyday life. The way in which the scenes are manipulated work well with the voice over commentary reinforcing the ideas while hitting emotional notes. The Music also contributes well to the emotional sentiment which the director wants to be associated with different ideas and issues. The technique used reminds me of Wagner, how he used the structure of music to convey hopelessness and the philosophy of Schopenhauer in "The Ring" covering over the once socialists allegory for the contradiction of modernity. Debord and the situationists used their music to convey of the feeling of hope and the spirit negation (the negation of capitalism and the creation of a new 'totality' of 'situations'). Debord during this film highlights the influences of the 'situationits' in the agitation for May 68 (the largest general strike in history). Henri Lefebvre criticized Debord on this point expressing the view that the situationists greatly exaggerate their influence on events. Other then the self-pampering which is small fraction of the film it is a well done piece of radical documentary both in form and content (style and ideas, though this dichotomy is to come degree false) which is quite interesting just for those uninterested or hostile towards Revolutionary Anti-Capitalism.

The Future Is Not What It Used to Be (2002)

Director: Mika Taanila
Duration: 52 min

Future is Not What It Used To Be is the latest documentary by Mika Taanila, the director of Futuro – A New Stance for Tomorrow (1998). It features never-before-seen archival material from the early years of electronic art, including excerpts from Kurenniemi’s unfinished experimental short films. The documentary entwines the past with the present, i.e. with the protagonist’s manic archival project, in which Kurenniemi records his thoughts, everyday observations, images and objects, constantly and obsessively. All this in an effort to combine man and machine – to reconstruct the soul of man.

Decasia (2002)

Director: Bill Morrison
Duration: 70 min
Language: English

"Bill Morrison's Decasia is that rare thing: a movie with avant-garde and universal appeal... The film is a fierce dance of destruction. Its flame-like, roiling black-and-white inspires trembling and gratitude." - J.Hoberman, Village Voice, 3/25/03

"I popped Morrison's video into my VCR and within a few further minutes, I found myself completely absorbed, transfixed, dumbstruck, a pillow of air lodged in my stilled open mouth, which I don't think I thereupon managed to close for the next seventy minutes." - Lawrence Weschler, New York Times Magazine, 12/22/02

"A pure poetry of deliquescence. The images are at once haunting, mysterious and incredibly beautiful. A definitive work of art. And a new kind of documentary. A documentary documenting the decay of itself." - Errol Morris, filmmaker

"This radical, experimental masterwork feels like the first film, and feels like the last film." - Andrew Lewis Conn, Time Out New York, 3/27/03

"Bill Morrison's extraordinarily mesmerizing 'Decasia' is a stunningly beautiful... ode to creation and decay." - Shari Frilot, catalog notes for the Sundance Film Festival

"A hallucinatory canvas of images... succeeds as a pure exercise in visual stimulus, its narcotic effect much amplified by Michael Gordon's thunderous, dissonant orchestral score." - Dennis Harvey, Variety

"Compelling and disturbing! Swimming symphonies of baroque beauty emerge from corrosive nitrate disintegration as rockets of annihilation demolish cathedrals of reality." - Kenneth Anger, filmmaker

"Unbearably beautiful. It's a work of suggestive genius." - Ed Gonzalez, Slant Magazine

"The majestic Decasia... stunning work... an ecstatic gesture." - Steven Seid, Pacific Film Archives curator, from the catalog notes for the 45th San Francisco International Film Festival

"A work of nihilistic energy and harsh, uncompromising beauty, capable of sustaining multiple readings and interpretations. It is, in short, a work of real art. There are precedents for this sort of thing but nothing remotely of this scale, much less power. The final coup is a genuinely transformative and unforgettable experience." - Shane Danielsen, 56th Edinburgh International Film Festival

Spectres of the Spectrum (1999)

Director: Craig Baldwin
Duration: 94 min
Language: English


Spectres of the Spectrum is a feature-length 16mm film utilizing old 'kinescopes' (filmed records of early TV broadcasts before the advent of videotape, mostly from the late Fifties' educational show called 'Science in Action') to create an eerie, haunted "media-archaeology" zone for a sci-fi time-travel tale, wherein live-action actors search for a hidden electromagnetic secret to save the planet from a futuristic war-machine, inspired by HAARP the High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program. (Though fictionalized for Baldwin's film, HAARP is, in fact, a very real phenomenon. On the surface, it is a data-gathering tool to explore the Aurora Borealis in detail. But in fact, HAARP doubles as one of the most sophisticated components of the Star Wars weapons arsenal, a particle beam device that can be accurately targeted on specific sites in the ionosphere.

Set in the year 2007 in the blighted desert outpost of Las Vegas, a young telepathic woman ("BooBoo") scavenges for survival on an old bombing range with her father ("Yogi") who is holed up in a cinder-block pirate-TV station, broadcasting rambling diatribes on the impending global electromagnetic 'Pulse'. A solar eclipse gives BooBoo a cosmic opportunity to save the world, through a superluminal voyage back into time to retrieve a secret message left on the airwaves by her scientist grandmother.

With their Airstream trailer converted into a spaceship, the amazed BooBoo is able to catch up with outwardly propagating Fifties' educational-TV broadcasts, affording an accelerated review of mid-century science and science-fiction cinema; and narrating a loose and collage-happy history of heroes and martyrs of the electromagnetic revolution. Commentary on Mesmer, Morse, Bell, Tesla, Farnsworth, and others comes from Yogi and his 'TV Tesla' correspondents, in a playfully speculative effort to trace the growth of corporate hegemony over the electromagnetic spectrum. Through an increasingly abstract montage of live-action, archival film, broadcast video, and 'exploded' interviews, the fantasy narrative warps into disjointed, abstracted, audio-visual phrases, suggesting the breakdown of personal ego/memory, historical representation, and, yes, of spacetime itself.

This science-fiction allegory about 'electromagnetic autonomy' in opposition to the hegemony of the culture-management industry, tracing a history of media technology from its early days to a 21st century "New Electromagnetic Order" that threatens to take total control of our lives.

The Yes Men (2003)

Directors: Dan Ollman, Sarah Price, etc
Duration: 83 min
Language: English

A comedic documentary which follows The Yes Men, a small group of prankster activists, as they gain world-wide notoriety for impersonating the World Trade Organization on television and at business conferences around the world. The film begins when two members of The Yes Men, Andy and Mike, set up a website that mimics the World Trade Organization's--and it's mistaken for the real thing. They play along with the ruse and soon find themselves invited to important functions as WTO representatives. Delighted to represent the organization they politically oppose, Andy and Mike don thrift-store suits and set out to shock unwitting audiences with darkly comic satire that highlights the worst aspects of global free trade.

The Corporation (2003)

Director: Mark Achbar
Duration: 145 min
Language: English

The Corporation is a 2003 Canadian documentary film critical of the modern-day corporation, considering it as a class of person and evaluating its behaviour towards society and the world at large as a psychologist might evaluate an ordinary person. This is explored through specific examples.

Manufacturing Consent (1992)

Noam Chomsky and the Media
Directors: Mark Achbar, Peter Wintonick
Duration: 167 min
Language: English


Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992) is a multi award-winning documentary film that explores the political life and ideas of Noam Chomsky, a linguist, intellectual, and political activist. Created by two Canadian independent filmmakers, Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick, it expands on the ideas of Chomsky's earlier book, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, which he co-wrote with Edward S. Herman.

The film presents and illustrates Chomsky's and Herman's propaganda model, the thesis that corporate media, as profit-driven institutions, tend to serve and further the agendas of the interests of dominant, elite groups in the society. A centerpiece of the film is a long examination into the history of The New York Times' coverage of Indonesia's invasion and occupation of East Timor, which Chomsky claims exemplifies the media's unwillingness to criticize an ally.

Spin (1995)

The Absolute Truth
Director: James Keach
Duration: 120 min
Language: English

Spin is a 1995 documentary film by Brian Springer composed of raw satellite feeds exposing politicians' pre-appearance planning. It covers, not only the United States presidential primaries, 1992 and presidential election, but also the LA riots as well as the Operation Rescue abortion protests.

Using the 1992 presidential election as his springboard, Springer captures the behind-the-scenes maneuverings of politicians and newscasters in the early 1990s. Pat Robertson banters about "homos," Al Gore learns how to avoid abortion questions, George Bush talks to Larry King about halcyon -- all presuming they're off camera. Composed of 100% unauthorized satellite footage, Spin is a surreal expose of media-constructed reality.[1]

Film Before Film (1986)

What Really Happened Between the Images?
Director: Werner Nekes
Duration: 83 min
Language: German

An exhilarating and amusing encyclopedic look at the "prehistory" of cinema. Werner Nekes charts the fascination with moving pictures which led to the birth of film, covering shadow plays, peep shows, flip books, flicks, magic lanterns, lithopanes, panoramic, scrolls, colorful forms of early animation, and numerous other historical artiffices.

Working with these formats, early "producers" created melodramas, comedies, -- as well as lots of pornography -- anticipating most of the forms known today. Nekes probes these colorful toys and inventions in a rich and rewarding optical experience. Film Before Film is a bewildering assault of exotic (and sometimes erotic) images and illusions.

"These primitive special effects retain the power to evoke a childlike wonder." -- J. Hoberman, Village Voice

"An astonishing array...The images are abundantly beautiful." -- Russell Merritt, Film Quarterly

The net (2003)

The Unabomber, LSD and the internet
Director: Lutz Dammbeck
Duration: 121 min
Language: German

Ultimately stunning in its revelations, Lutz Dammbeck’s THE NET explores the incredibly complex backstory of Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber. This exquisitely crafted inquiry into the rationale of this mythic figure situates him within a late 20th Century web of technology – a system that he grew to oppose. A marvelously subversive approach to the history of the Internet, this insightful documentary combines speculative travelogue and investigative journalism to trace contrasting countercultural responses to the cybernetic revolution.

For those who resist these intrusive systems of technological control, the Unabomber has come to symbolize an ultimate figure of Refusal. For those that embrace it, as did and do the early champions of media art like Marshall McLuhan, Nam June Paik, and Stewart Brand, the promises of worldwide networking and instantaneous communication outweighed the perils. Dammbeck’s conceptual quest links these multiple nodes of cultural and political thought like the Internet itself. Circling through themes of utopianism, anarchism, terrorism, CIA, LSD, Tim Leary, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, THE NET exposes a hidden matrix of revolutionary advances, coincidences, and conspiracies.

"Dammbeck not only uncovers hidden background stories but also links the unlinked" - Der Tagespiegel

"The right film at the right time" - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

"Dammbeck regards systems of art as systems of power; and systems of power as systems of art" - Die Tageszeitung

If you're going to try, go all the way

Otherwise don't even start.
This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs.
And maybe your mind.
It could mean not eating for three or four days.
It could mean freezing on a park bench.
It could mean jail. It could mean derision.
It could mean mockery, isolation.
Isolation is the gift.
All the others are a test of your endurance.
Of how much you really want to do it.
And you'll do it, despite rejection in the worst odds.
And it will be better than anything else you can imagine.
If you're going to try, go all the way.
There is no other feeling like that.
You will be alone with the gods.
And the nights will flame with fire.
You will ride life straight to perfect laughter.
It's the only good fight there is.

Charles Bukowski

Efter brylluppet (2006) - after wedding

20h30, 5 May 2008
20h30, 5 May 2008

If there is no struggle there is no progress

"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation…want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters…. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
Frederick Douglass, 1857

William S. Burrough's last words

Thinking is not enough.
Nothing is. There is no final enough of wisdom, experience -- any fucking thing. No Holy Grail, no Final Satori, no final solution. Just conflict.
Only thing can resolve conflict is love, like I felt for Fletch and Ruski, Spooner and Calico. Pure love.
What I feel for my cats present and past.
Love? What is It?
Most natural painkiller what there is.
LOVE.

The chauvinism of science

The separation between state and church must therefore be complemented by the separation between state and science.

This separation of science and state may be our only chance to overcome the hectic barbarism of our scientific-technical age and to achieve a humanity we are capable of, but have never fully realised.

But while a democracy makes some effort to explain the process so that everyone can understand it, scientists either conceal it, or bend it, to make it fit their sectarian interests.

It is time to cut them down in size, and to give them a more modest position in society.

Combining this observation with the insight that science has no special method, we arrive at the result that the separation of science and non-science is not only artificial but also detrimental to the advancement of knowledge. If we want to understand nature, if we want to master our physical surroundings, then we must use all ideas, all methods, and not 'just a small selection of them.

At all times man approached his surroundings w' h wide open senses and a fertile intelligence, at all times he made incredible discoveries, at all times we can learn from his ideas.

Modern science, on the other hand, is not at all as difficult and as perfect as scientific propaganda wants us to believe.

It is up to us, it is up to the citizens of a free society to either accept the chauvinism of science without contradiction or to overcome it by the counterforce of public action.

A science that insists on possessing the only correct method and the only acceptable results is ideology and must be separated from the state, and especially from the process of education.

Paul Feyerabend, in Against Method , (Humanities Press, 1975), p.

Anything goes.

Science is an essentially anarchistic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives.

The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes.

Paul Feyerabend, in Against Method , (Humanities Press, 1975), p.

To be human.

António Damásio is a renowned neurologist that researches emotions and their influence in the cognitive process. Contrary to popular notions, he argues that emotions do not get in the way of rational thinking; emotions are essential to rationality.

"For instance, people with damage to the ventro-medial part of the pre-frontal cortex (VMPFC) may be able to perform to a high level on most language and intelligence tests, but they display gross defects of planning, judgement and social appropriateness. Damásio’s group have shown that these defects in patients with VMPFC damage are caused by their inability to respond emotionally to the content of their thoughts."

The root of consciousness is a inner-directed attention." Damásio argues that consciousness is based upon an awareness of the ‘somatic’ milieu, and that awareness of inner states evolved because this enables us to use somatic states (ie. emotions) to ‘mark’, and thereby ‘evaluate’, external perceptual information."

"It seems that Damásio’s work stands at the very heart of our attempts to understand what it is to be distinctively human, and to be a human among other humans."

Progress in art

"The great trouble with art in this country [America] at present, and apparently in France also, is that there is no spirit of revolt—no new ideas appearing among the younger artists. They are following along the paths beaten out by their predecessors, trying to do better what their predecessors have already done. In art there is no such thing as perfection."

"Art is produced by a succession of individuals expressing themselves; it is not a question of progress."

Marcel Duchamp, "The great trouble with art in this country," in The writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peerson (Da Capo Press, 1989), p. 123.

Esta é a Cidade

Esta é a Cidade, e é bela.
Pela ocular da janela
foco o sémen da rua.
Um formigueiro se agita,
se esgueira, freme, crepita,
ziguezagueia e flutua.

Freme como a sede bebe
numa avidez de garganta,
como um cavalo se espanta
ou como um ventre concebe.

Treme e freme, freme e treme,
friorento voo de libélula
sobre o charco imundo e estreme.
Barco de incógnito leme
cada homem, cada célula.
É como um tecido orgânico
que não seca nem coagula,
que a si mesmo se estimula
e vai, num medido pânico.

Aperfeiçoo a focagem.
Olho imagem por imagem
numa comoção crescente.
Enchem-se-me os olhos de água.
Tanto sonho! Tanta mágoa!
Tanta coisa! Tanta gente!
São automóveis, lambretas,
motos, vespas, bicicletas,
carros, carrinhos, carretas,
e gente, sempre mais gente,
gente, gente, gente, gente,
num tumulto permanente
que não cansa nem descança,
um rio que no mar se lança
em caudalosa corrente.

Tanto sonho! Tanta esperança!
Tanta mágoa! Tanta gente!

                  António Gedeão

Fucking Åmål (1998)

20h30, 25 February 2008

Songs from the Second Floor (2000)

20h30, 18 February 2008

no more science and art

We will have to reformulate many (maybe all) of the categories we have use until now. An example: we will have to replace the category of "subject-object" with the category of "intersubjectivity," which will invalidate the distinction between science and art: science will emerge as an intersubjective fiction, art as an intersubjective discipline in the search for knowledge; thus science will become a form of art and art a variant of the sciences.

Vilém Flusser, "Memories," in Ars Electronica, ed. Timothy Druckrey (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), p. 206.

The seventh seal (1957)

20h30, 11 February 2008

The word as a virus

"My basis theory is that the written word was literally a virus that made spoken word possible. The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host..."

in William S. Burroughs: Electronic revolution. Pag. 5. ubu classics, 2005

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring (2003)

Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005)

20h30, 04 February 2008

A scanner darkly (2006)

20h30, 28 January 2008

Secret sunshine (2007)

20h30, 21 January 2008

Community and society

"Community" should be understood to be the communal living of people on the basis of a common religion, or a shared idea. Consequently, community is based on mutual agreement. Society, however, is primarily about mutual oppositions and their articulation. Divided societies crave the restoration of their old close-knit communities. Something similar applies to culture and civilization. "Culture" is on the level of "community" and "civilization" on that of "society".


Antisocial scenarios by Eric Bolle.
http://framework.v2.nl/archive/archive/node/text/.xslt/nodenr-69991

after all love is the answer

"People today seem unable to understand love as a political concept, but a concept of love is just what we need to grasp the constituent power of the multitude. The modern concept of love is almost exclusively limited to the bourgeois couple and the claustrophobic confines of the nuclear family. Love has become a strictly private affair. We need a more generous and more unrestrained concept of love."

in Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Pag. 351. Hamish Hamilton Ltd, 2005

Ex Drummer 2007

20h30, 7 January 2008

network topologies and control

In the introduction of his book, Galloway makes an analogy between historical periods, machines and network topologies. Galloway distinguish three computer network topologies:

"A centralized network consists of a single central power point (a host), from which are attached radial nodes. The central point is connected to all of the satellite nodes, which are themselves connected only to the central host. A decentralized network, on the other hand, has multiple central hosts, each with its own set of satellite nodes. A satellite node may have connectivity with one or more hosts, but not with other nodes. Communication generally travels unidirectionally within both centralized and decentralized networks: from the central trunks to radial leaves."
In distributed networks "Each point [...] is neither a central hub nor a satellite node - there are neither trunks nor leaves. "The network contains nothing but "intelligent end-point systems that are self-determinitic, allowing each end-point system to communicate with any host it chooses.""

Citing Deleuze, the author compares these topologies to types of machines and forms of control used by sovereign, disciplinary and control societies. "The old sovereign societies worked with simple machines, levers, pulleys, clock; but recent disciplinary societies were equipped with thermodynamic machines...; control societies function with a third generation of machines, with information technology and computers."

Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Pag. 11, The MIT Press, 2004

Oasis (2002)

20h30, 7 January 2008