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Doug is always invited to a friendly flame war, even if he was too busy
working or cleaning his ditch to start it. A good flame war with Doug
is often followed by lots of beers to put the flames out. Recycled
beer. But I think what we have here is more (and less?) than that. And following Nick's self-description and Lee's fitting into the same, I stand firmly with my feet planted on both sides of the "cultural divide" (separating Old F***s from the rest of the world?). Like Lee, I have a very questionable internet connection so even 2:30 of video like this is an investment. Tory is an old friend so I make the effort when she sends things. This one was definitely very "clever" on several levels. As an old hand at CGI, Visualization and VR, I am naturally fascinated at the facility with which the producers managed to mix their synthesized and real video. I can think of dozens of ways to approach it, but none of them are easy and the results of this particular exercise are (nearly) flawless. It gets high marks technically. I also came into my adult years as the classic video games referenced were all the rage, Pac Man, BreakOut, Tetris, Space Invaders, Mario Bros. I remember the feeling of these mini-worlds the video games created had some kind of reality of their own... so to see their reality invading ours resonated. The notion of the pixelated (voxelated?) invaders pixelating the world as they encountered it is actually "semiotically" relevant to Lee's (and maybe Nick's) objections. Lee harps eloquently on "Moving Pictures" and "Push Media" and I believe that "pixelated attack-creatures" are a good signifier for all that is bad/risky/dangerous/questionable about the "new media" that has arisen in the time period roughly marked by the inception of video pong (where was Pong and Asteroids and BattleZone in this clip?) The cautionary tale in this clip is that our own digital media (e.g. Pushed Moving Pictures) is in the process of eating our world. In the spirit of McLuhan's "Medium is the Message", we are *becoming* digital creatures ourselves, if not as abruptly and literally as the animation clip we just saw would suggest, simply by consuming it in the quantities that many of us do (especially our children/grandchildren for the old F***s among us). I think this stuff is rotting our brains... but most of it is rotgut and I really appreciate the occasional draught of the well-crafted stuff. Lee's other point, about "everything" advertising itself is very interesting as well. Obviously this movie clip is an advertisement for the skills and cleverness of the producers, encouraging others to hire them to do something similar for their own product. We do a lot of contemplation/discussion on this list about "life itself" and the recurring themes are phrases like "gradient descent" and "self-organization" and "natural selection". This "self-advertising" theme seems to be the natural result of "sexual reproduction". "Look at Me!" seems to be a counter-productive strategy (predator-prey) until you mix in sexual reproduction. Just ask any of the Peacock's in Doug's backyard... - Steve I'm not sure it's fair to be having a flame war without having invited me... |
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