the kino-eye (an early soviet film collective) believed that the camera could supplement and augment the vision (and thus perception) of the human being. i found this to never be true in watching film, but in producing it, it does seem present. in reviewing my clips, i found my perception augmented and expanded. why? because captured in a reviewable format, the moment was given many lives and almost a certain immortality. barthes of course talks about this through camera lucida, but he did not stop to consider how much moving pictures complicate the capturing of time. siegfried kracaeur did. an his theory moves from the film as a photograph made several in tracing the cinema’s unique ability to vivify what is only promised as living in static photographs.

anyway, with these things swirling about, i captured a few days of video of newport life, then cut it all together. included is the newport bermuda race, a nice bonus!

newport, a summer day from Zachary McCune on Vimeo.

0-0

f that.

1-0 Eng

we have learned nothing. england is supposed to win. they get it done. but there is nothing that says May Day for Team USA. a totally acceptable result.

1-1

american soccer ain’t nothing to mess with. prepare to see the british press start panicking. capello will call it a hiccup, and the english will crush the next game, but the us will be looking into the round of 16.

2-1 ENG

the most likely result. the three lions will have some confidence but the us will feel vindicated. nothing is in disarray for the americans. now they just need to win the next two.

2-1 US

totally possible. and it would be so glorious. the brits would start re-thinking their defense. maybe a goalkeeping change will be in order. and the pressure would build on the english. the americans meanwhile will have something to hang their hat on.

2-2

damn that would be a good game. i’d love it to be a 1-0, 1-1, 2-1, 2-2 progression. everyone (fans, players, coaches, pundits) would be content.

3-2 ENG

mmmmmm good. and acceptable for everyone. scoring won’t be the problem. the americans will be thinking about defense and endurance. so will team england.

3-2 US

capello will be flipping out. america will have some new offensive hero (even if it’s donovan/dempsey again). ratings for the rest of the american world cup games will be out of control.

ENG victory by 2 or more

ummm, ok, maybe england is a legit contender. everyone in the uk’s gonna be getting STOKED on that kinda result. buy your rooney jerseyz now.

US victory by 2 or more

england in roo-ins. the british press corps are about to go CRAZY. america will never let the british live this down. f*** bp. REVENGE OF THE GULF! t-shirts. tattoos. monuments. ESPN will be calling it an instant classic. i will call it SARATOGA 2 or SARATOGA IN SOUTH AFRICA.

3-3

well boys, that’s what we call soccer (unless ur british in which case that’s what you call football).

a recent art projec by Schuyler Maclay, Al Urim and others foregrounds the impending crisis of augmented reality. in the project Maclay and a fellow artist build a 10 by 10 by 10 foot cube, open at the top that seals them in along with a host of raw (de)construction materials. two webcams survey the cube’s interior, streaming the artists live to the web.

theopencube.net

the cube was placed on Brown University’s Main Green on May 1st, 2010. it was a part of a broad curation of outdoor art pieces comprising a second student project called “Green Screen.” the cube was one of the most successful pieces on the green, because it was big, loud, and literally/figuratively opaque. when visitors drew near the cube, they often walked completely around it, looking for something to see. instead, they were directed to a computer monitor, forcing them uncomfortably to mediate their immediate physical experience of the cube. in their desire to see inside the cube, and understand the project, visitors were forced to look away from it, into an entire different object. theoretically, this was to keep access to the cube as an artistic site consistent across experiences (online and in person) as the project was offered for the two communities of physical and virtual reality.

in practice however, these tactic forced viewers to confront the growing mediation of physical events. it suggested the capitulation of society to mediation (what guy debord would have called his “society of the spectacle”) and forced visitors to live in the world they are creating- where direct access has become impossible because of our fascination with it being “everywhere” rather than “somewhere.” the global aspiration of local events like the cube erases and ignores their position as a locality at all. the artists in the open cube are neighbors you cannot speak to, or knock on the door and say hi.

because there is no door, and they won’t speak to you.

responding only to messages and instructirons posted live on their website, the open cube artists were compelled to not make a home of their cube, but to raucously destroy it. like a gamer who shoots up his environment, shooting friends to see if they will die, and throwing a grenade at his own feet to see if he can kill himself, the avatared-artists of the open cube were forced to rip up pillows, cut a couch in half, and graffiti the walls.

then some one (pretty sure it was me) told them to cut a whole in the wall so the spectators outside could see in. this proved a terrible mistake. for once the walls were rendered porous, attention shifted away from the problematic experience/foregrounding of mediation and instead became artists-as-zoo-animals. in the future, disallowing commands for interior views other than from the webcam should be added to the project’s instructions.

it’s been a few days since i was on the main green, typing commands to my friends in the cube. but the project is still working its way through my thoughts. i think its a wonderful project to have travel, for it seems to fight travel and local specificity by aspiring to just being somewhere in the non-space of the internet, but it is somewhere, and the people that comment on it will surely change depending on its location.

who knows, maybe some people won’t want the artists to destroy themselves or the interior space. maybe they’ll ask the artists to write poetry, or take a nap, or become home-makers. and that would be quite interesting.

Stop cheaping out on the young ambitious people of the world by offering only “unpaid internships.” It’s class warfare anyway you cut it, and unless you are quite literally a mom and pop establishment, I think you can afford to shell out $3,000 for a summer of exploitative work.

Don’t even try to defend yourselves. You are the Museum of Modern Art. The cost of an intern doesn’t even equal the cost of mounting a single painting. What do you expect me to do? Live in New York City for a summer without even my housing costs covered? Perhaps in your cushy life as a curator you’ve forgotten how expensive your fair island is. Imagine trying to live here, eat here, all in o

rder to simply work here. I will be that reminder: its f***ing expensive.

And we’re just talking about costs. We’re not talking about students who need to make enough money to cover tuition, or school housing, or books. No, we’re just talking about being able to make an internship in New York City, or Boston, or San Francisco, or Chicago a reality.

The unpaid internship is everywhere. It’s become a common facet of the student workplace. And I can see the attraction to employers. A whole summer/fall/winter/spring or even a year of work provided at no cost? All you need to offer is a place for someone to work? Perhaps a letter of recommendation somewhere after the fact?

What a deal indeed. From an employer perspective it’s a steal.

Yes, truly it is theft. It steals opportunities from all students or workers and gives it only to the students who can afford it. Students or workers from secure financial backgrounds. Students or workers with private wealth. Which means that the unpaid internship always acts a social filter, reinforcing the idea that jobs in the arts, in print, in museums, in broadcasting are continually reserved for those in the middle class who can afford them. And students from other backgrounds are kept from even considering these positions.

Employers of the world, stop being socially thrifty. Stop confusing saving money with preserving the class-orientation of higher employment.

It may be true that merit is considered among an applicant pool for unpaid internships. No doubt, the most qualified applicant is selected for the job. But what can be said for the applicants who are not present because they cannot afford to even consider such a position? Their merits have not even been considered. Their perspectives, talents, and qualifications have been erased by a financial bottom line. Your financial bottom line.

So what can you do? It’s quite simple: fund your internships. Here’s the minimum equation: find the average cost of housing in your immediate (10 mile) vicinity for a summer. Add $100 for food a week for the duration of the internship. Then add the cost of a monthly pass for local public transportation. You know have a working idea of how much an internship should promise in terms of funding. It’s probably around $3,000.

If you are charitable soul, consider adding money for tuition/books. It may be a small thing for you, but it will mean the world to your intern. S/he will work harder, and think higher of you.

As will we all.

Such a moment in the history of the video game offers a wonderful opportunity: why not begin an initiative to get people to think critically about games. By critical, I mean think about games as society expects us to think about films or books: to ask questions about how they are made, why they are successful (or fail), and what the reflect about us as players and society as a whole.

This “critical gaming” is hardly new, or even novel. Fantastic scholars exist in the United States (such as Ian Bogost at Georgia Tech, or Nick Montfort at MIT) and from around the world (McKenzie Wark and Jesper Juul) who have pushed the academic world to accept the vitality of games as spaces for study. But I am really trying to advocate for a more broad consideration of criticality in games. I am hopeful that gamers around the world could consider becoming “critical gamers” by committing themselves to thinking about games as exciting social texts.

What should a critical gamer do? Well, s/he should enjoy video games, and enjoy thinking about what they have to say and how they say it. The critical gamer should not be afraid to “think” about games, they should not fear “academizing” the activity of game play for fear of losing some sense of innocence, escapism and distraction. To the contrary, the “critical gamer” will love the conversation of games and the analysis of game texts. Which does not mean they have to write papers or read theory or have degrees in video games (though that might be nice) but rather that they communicate in language comfortable for him/her.

The Critical Gamer wants to play and think about play.

This midnight idea wants to change how people think about games, and how gamers think about themselves. I’ve chosen to call this a “critical gamer initiative” because it is about people not institutions, its founded on gamers not colleges or consoles or even countries. It is an international idea for individuals to be united under a common commitment to play games critically. So if you fancy yourself a critical gamer, link to this article, and/or send me an email, and let’s see what we can build together.

Anyone finished Mass Effect 2 yet? Thoughts?

Terry Gilliam is the last surrealist. His latest film, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, confirms such an assertion with its dazzling and disorienting visual effects. In “the imaginarium” Dr. Parnassus brings visitors into a world of the dreams, an inversion of those intimate possessions as they are made an entire, external world. These spaces are disproportionately “surrealistic” in that they askew proportions and employ color schemes right out of a Dali. Though supposedly the dreams of the individual, all of Dr. Parnassus’-assisted-dream-spaces bend toward the surrealistic, complimenting the aesthetic and narrative predilections of Parnassus who is really just a proxy for the vision and desires of Terry Gilliam.

This landscape, from the work of Rene Magritte, is clearly emulated by Gilliam's scenograpy.

Terry Gilliam has a long history of perpetuating the surrealist paradigm. As a foundational member of Monty Python (and the author of its iconic animations) Gilliam participated in the invention and popularization of surrealist humor. He complimented the zany antics of Python humor with bleak, dystopian, unexpected, and often Jungian dream animations where the unexpected was always the protagonist and a sort of Victorian stiff-upper life was brought down to mere bathroom humor.

From Python, Gilliam became an independent director with film adaptations of Jabberwocky, and Baron von Munchausen, works of literature some bizarre and fantastic, so cryptic and unnerving that they suited his surrealist proclivities perfectly. Later work, like Time Bandits, 12 Monkeys, and his Criterion Collection edition of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas simply perpetuated a certain aesthetic status quo. To say nothing of his immortal Brazil, which is firmly Orwell made surrealist, all of Gilliam work plays out like a dream you didn’t want to have, but can’t look away from. His penchant for the absurd, the grotesque, and the weird lends itself to new hybrid genres of narrative entirely his own: medieval surreal (jabberwocky) victorian surreal (Dr. Parnassus, Munchausen, Monty Python) and retrofuture surreal (12 monkeys, Brazil).

It’s not a great film this Dr. Parnassus, but it is proof that Terry Gilliam truly is an auteur, and one keeping lit a century old flame of surrealist art. In his veins pumps an aesthetic style conceived of by Dadaists and discontents, Dali and the French school, and made cinematic by Gilliam’s unique vision.

Parnassus tells a story of stories- claiming that if stories are no longer told, the world ceases to exist. And that may be the secret mantra of Terry Gilliam’s own production. For if he stops telling his stories, surrealism with its signature aesthetics, proclivities towards mirrors (how Freudian), and narratives that lack syntagmatic sense, will fade into a thing of the past, killing a whole approach to life and its creative subversion.

If Avatar has changed anything about then movies, then it has changed everything. Let’s begin by considering what depth means to cinema. Historically, depth has only existed as a perspective, the idea taken from painting and camera optics that all viewed reality merges at a ‘vanishing point’ somewhere behind the picture plane. The whole notion of a picture plane is something that has been foundational in Western art and visual regimes for nearly 500 years. But the idea of “depth” has only existed as a sign- a trick that suggests but does not manifest. Spectators, aware of the contradiction (how can depth be translated in a plane?), have willing participated in this signifying of depth, imagining some things “further back” than others even as they were represented on a single plane. Film scholars like Sigfried Kracauer have joyfully praised the idea of depth in films as something that makes narrative more complex. With “deep focus” techniques, two or more “levels” of narrative can share a single shot, thus relating two scenes that previously required montage. Deep focus has been a major part of cinema, and suggested that depth of vision complicated and improved the cinema’s ability to represent nature, and tell stories whose events might occur simultaneously.

Avatar changes the history of depth in Western visuality because it problematicizes the assumption that depth can occur in two dimensions. With the single hovering water droplet above our protagonist at the very opening of Avatar, we know that we can no longer believe in the technique of depth in two dimensional images. We can no longer let depth occur where it has not been earned by this new high technique, where our eyes are truly employed (as a biscopic mechanism) to preceive depth. It’s not that this technique is not also a trick, for indeed it is, but rather that it progresses a long stultified evolution of perspective that begins in the West with relief drawing and moves into a whole science of vanishing points. The depth of James Cameron’s Avatar changes our way of seeing, in that it creates new ways for the cinema to be seen, and thus re-informs our expectations of what is possible. This technological urge, to pursue new possibilities in the age of the digital, is something that the 21st century has been thoroughly caught up in, and now we have a film to mythologize our transition to digital culture. For Avatar’s plot is simple and its meaning translucent- in a world of new images and new technologies we are all the closer to identifying with images- the avatar of Second Life and other digital domains has entered cinema, where the out-of-body experience has long been present and is now re-invented.

Three dimensions also means that Avatar’s cinematography provides texture to the spectator in ways never before conceived. In one scene, Jakesully and his attractive love interest, swim beneath a neon brook, and we know they are swimming because the water is dimensional, with so much depth detail, that it feels real. It is some form of kineaesthesia or a visual tactility.  We know it’s water because it looks like water, not because it is a imagic sign of water. Depth changes the image, because depth escapes the picture plane, exploding its limitations however superficially.

Watching Avatar, I came to the conclusion that when 3D filmmaking becomes cheap enough for the avante-garde to try it, we will have some truly incredible objects of cinema. What would Godard do with 3D filmmaking? How best to unravel its techniques? How best to subvert the spectator in a world of depth?

Whatever the avante-garde does with 3D, the history of the image is changed, the expectations of the cinema spectator challenged, and the nature of cultural production complicated. For as powerful as 3D will be in producing new immersive worlds, even the 2D world changes now as it may take on a patina of authenticity and simplicity that black & white film continues to exert in a color world.

At a recent Philadelphia Flyers game, in which I saw no less then eight goals (and no more than four fights) I came to the conclusion that not all sports are created equal. In some, scoring is something routine and expected, something that defines the pace of the game. In others scoring is something extraordinary, inspiring, and eventful, something which provides landmarks for the story told by athletes in each game. In these sports, the scoring moment becomes a moment of salvation or damnation, a critical juncture through which the passion of the athlete is bound to that of the spectator.

This why I will always be fan of soccer and hockey over sports like basketball. Basketball suffers from the plight of long distance racing, the only thing that really matters is the end, and on the professional level, teams are rarely out of winning distance by the fourth quarter when the spectator really starts to care. At any instance during the rest of the game, one can get up, hit the bathroom, pick up some popcorn or make a phone call, confident that no single action (save a catastrophic injury or ejection) will alter the course of the game. Instead, baskets will be exchanged, runs will be made, and feats of expertise demonstrated.

But there will be no goals.

The goal is the greatest concept in sports. It is because of the goal, that any minute of a soccer game or a hockey game becomes pregnant with potential to alter the course of the game. Any fan of soccer knows that a game may finish with no goals, so it is a great gift (or horrible calamity) when a goal occurs. It is history, and it always feels like it. A single goal may be all that occurs. And that goal may occur at any moment, creating a sense of time in hockey and soccer that is unique- a sense of time in which virtually all time is equal in the possibility of achieving or witnessing the scoring miracle.

This has always been the attraction of soccer, and conversely what makes it impossible for the American sports fan to understand about the sport. In the US, sports must serve always serve entertainment and leisure over devotion, which means that American sports must create space within the game for concessions to be purchased, reflections to be made, bathroom facilities to be visited. Baseball has nine innings, with breaks between every half inning for the small things that Americans like to do at sporting events. At soccer games, people only leave during the half. At hockey games, people only leave during intermissions. At least every pitch in baseball (for it is the pitch that defines the pace of baseball, and thus the amount of time between pitches is policed by baseball leagues) comes with the promise of a hit, a play, an out, a home run. In basketball, by contrast, no event can take place in any one possession that ensures a victory. In basketball, there is only time and the score to play against.

It has been said that in soccer, the goal is an orgasm. The goal is a climax of exchanges and progressions, and true soccer fans “feel” the game in a way that betrays a certain sensuality. Because the only way to win is to score, teams become unified organs pulsing with passes and possessions leading toward that overwhelming conclusion.

Hockey proves more fascinating than soccer percisely because it complicates the idea of perfectly equal scoring time with strategic advantages and disadvantages- the power play. With an extra man adding advanatage to a team, hockey creates a time schema not unlike that catholic christianity, which divides the year into ordinary time (in which any team may score with equal potential) and extraordinary time (wherein a goal becomes even more likely). And yet goals are still ever present in hockey, and because of the sport’s speed, we are always just seconds away from the next one.

And then there’s the goalie. Between the goal and the play, he is the mediation between one man’s jubilation and another’s defeat. He’s not quite the anti-hero but he’s close. Because he makes “saves” and “saves” are actions of heroic proportions precisely because they are anti-goals. The goalie is the foil for the goal-scorer, who is always the hero. Except when he’s the villain.

I’ve decided that sports with goals are better. Because you can’t walk away from them, because they don’t have situations like two men on with no outs, or first and goal. Because they are always too dynamic to fall into situational rhetoric where one can distinguish between the importances of moments in a game. Some sports build towards a moment where you know something has got to give, it’s either a field goal for the win or a miss for the loss. That’s cinematic bullshit. Real sports are as organic and unpredictable as life itself. And that’s the way I like them.

In 1993, Cyan published a game called Myst marooning the nascent gaming world onto a mysterious island whose parts interacted like some sinister engine waiting to re-stoked after countless years un-used. The cover featured a perspectival overview of the island, with a shadowy man falling down towards it. The island was the game, the player the shadow- a suggestive paradigm for the adventure genre of gaming in which the world of the game was something to fall into and become immersed in. Other games had immersed players in fantasy worlds before (since at least Zork! ) but none had used the state of the art 3d renderings that the Miller Brothers used for Myst. Today’s Avatar world owes some of its lush, fluorescent environment to Myst because Myst established the ideas that futuristic virtual worlds should be colorful and immersive.

Still from Avatar

Still from Myst (Compare with Avatar)

But none of this is what haunts me about Myst. Instead, I am suddenly awakening to Myst’s importance on a cultural semiotic level, where Myst becomes a sign for a series of changes in computer programming paradigms and societal ideas about the power of video games to be

1. literary
2. challenging, and enigmatic
3. a space of reflection on the very fabric of video games and computing that were essential for its construction

narrative decodes media structure

Like the cahiers du cinema’s belief that certain films had tropes which deconstructed the fabric (and thus ficitious engines) of cinema, I believe that Myst contained a focus on a trope- the trope of linking or hyperlinking- which in review reveals the very fabric of Myst’s player experience. In Myst, the player is allegedly transported by a link in a book to the world of Myst. Later we discover that this is part of a secret art- an art of writing books that build portals to new worlds whose attributes are controlled by the books author. The tension in Myst, is between two family members who have each abused this skill to isolate themselves from the other, attempting to gain control of the other by mis-linking their kin into an inescapable world. With intertextuality thus made a central theme, the player is invited to navigate the puzzles and “ages” of Myst as thought he were a reader, moving through lines of signs (textual and ludic) in this game space.

hypercards & hyperlinks

Reading Myst as a story of links brings us to the very construction of the game itself. At the time it was developed, Myst employed a cutting edge technology called HyperCard which essentially used still images of Myst landscapes in related progressions or stacks. Clicking one area of a two path fork for instance would bring the player into a new child stack of the fork image, creating a ludic structure not unlike Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths (and the critical reading of this short story for hypermedia by Waldrip-Fruin & Monfort). In short, the game was a series of images (which could be read as signs) which were really just links to other images- hyperlinks more specifically, which were gaining great importance to the computer world in e-literature and in data browsing (soon also in web browsing).

links as computer tactic made ludic

Thus a game about linking and making worlds within links and through links was also a game comprised entirely of links. We must wonder if Myst has any value without the inherent schema and structure provided both narratively and conceptually by linking. What, if any value should be assigned to the individual signs (images) which are only valuable as a progression from or to something else. In this reading, a classic conclusion of semiotics surfaces- that the meaning of any individual sign is co-produced by contextual signs (previous and future signs) which are all part of the signs that this image is not. The world of Myst cannot be represented by a screenshot, for it is always movement through the screenshots that gives the game its purpose and signature experiential mise en scene.