Author: Walter

Poster Reason – Interview
Disney’s cartoon rodent speaks out on the Eldred decision. By Jesse Walker. Mickey manages to answer some questions just before “three Disney bounty hunters entered the bar and seized Mickey.”

I was taken by the moment in Peter Wollen’s Film Friendship’s Death, where the visitor, a robot speaks about being a machine. Yes the image below is the robot, superbly played by Tilda Swinton. It seems the 2002 Teknolust film continues a theme that began in 1987 – 15 years earlier – with this movie. We have had other moments of machines talking about what it is like to be a machine, this one must rank with Hal in 2001. I snapped the image off my TV and transcribed the dialogue from the video.

“What will happen when your machines have intelligence? When they become autonomous, when they have private thoughts?

“You humans look down on your machines because they are manmade, they are a product of your skills and labour. They were not even tamed or domesticated like animals were. You see them simply as extensions of yourself, of your own will. I can’t accept that!

“I cant accept sub-human status simply because I am a machine based on silicon rather than carbon, electronic rather than biological.”

While looking for images to put in my next post I found this… I’d like to see the movie, written and directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson (Not in Alice’s).

SIFF 2002– reel review: Review by Jennifer Albert:

Tilda Swinton stars in TEKNOLUST as Dr. Rosetta Stone, a biogeneticist who has lost her entire family to a mysterious disease and copes with her lonely life by infusing her DNA into her computer.

slant // magazine.com: Teknolust Review by Ed Gonzalez:

Hershman’s all-neon-like cyber-philosophy is not only muddled but it also sounds as if it was penned by Bj?rk herself (Ruby tells Rosetta via the cyber-geek’s microwave: “Feel my luminous halo. Think of me as part of your cyborgian spine.”).

Review for Teknolust (2002) by Harvey Karten (this is the a sympathetic and thorough review):

“Teknolust” is itself the creation of Lynn Hershman-Lesson, whose “Conceiving Ada” four years ago is a more complex fantasy contrasting the lives of a modern computer geek named Emmy with that of Lord Byron’s daughter, Ada the 19th century woman who developed the forerunning of today’s computer. Ada was played by the remarkable Tilda Swinton, a good choice not only for that pic but for computer-lover Lesson’s current project, in that along with her beauty comes the vague feeling that she is herself an alien.

Later:

There is more and more to explore about this movie:

Dan Epstein interviews Lynn Hershman-Leeson
www.teknolustthemovie.com
Palm Ruby
Conceiving Ada (1997): Tilda Swinton, Francesca Faridany, Karen Black, Lynn Hershmann-Leeson

Some thorough but easy to read entries, for example: Harriet Taylor Mill, I hope they keep up the work and complete what is started there.

This was the biggest march I have seen in Christchurch for a long time. The sense of unity and purpose was strong. There must have been 2000 people at any one time in the three hours I was involved, with people all ages. The clear message was NO WAR, and for NZ to be out of the Gulf. It was great to see such a broad range of participation – churches etc. and also Labour Party. The Labour Party had a speaker and he was applauded for his anti-war statements but the otherwise polite gathering had no time at all for his idea that the UN could sanction this war.

I found Green Party Keith Locke’s speech clear, forceful and uplifting. I had a sense that this war could be stopped.

TV ONE News

Silicon Valley – Dan Gillmor’s eJournal

Dan Gillmor reports well on the sad loss of our heritage.

TCS: Tech

The image of content as sewer is unpleasant but in a way, not too bad. Alchemically prima materia, base matter, lead or shit has to be worked with to get the gold. But Arnold Kling is muddling a few categories here. The nature of the ownership of the copyright and the licences for its re-distribution have nothing much to do with the filtering work needed to get the stuff you want. I don’t really care if an item I read is owned by the Times or by the author, the important thing is that it is credible to me and is about something of interest to me.

Categories involved:

• Ownership – copyright
• Licence & terms of use.
• Relevance to my interests
• Credibility relative to my values & beliefs

When it cost a lot to publish selection was needed to get it out there and there was value added in the selection of what to produce. Sometimes the way of paying for that function was for the producers to take ownership od the content. That function, on the net and for music is gone. Dead. Laws maintaining that system must die. Getting stuff out there and distributing it is free.

The essentials of the filtering process are already here – 1. Word of mouth which is constantly enhanced by all sorts of software. 2. Search engines.

How did I get Arnold Kling’s item in the first place? Daypop. That is automated word of mouth. And Kling acknowledges it. What on earth has his copyright note to do with anything? What is still to come is the killer collaborative filtering ap. which will filter everthing for me, not on features but on the basis of sociometry.

Configuring Mail Clients to Send Plain ASCII Text

ZNet

An article by Harold Pinter – puts well the dreadful plight the world is in… I go on as if life is much the same, but there is a beast that is becoming ever more dangerous and it has our own NZ politics under its influence in an alarming way.

There will be a rally here in Christchurch:

SAT, 18 January – ‘People are dying in Iraq – no more war!’, anti-war march – speak out to ensure NZ supports peace, not war, against Iraq; leaves 1-30pm from the Museum. For more info contact email ach66@student.canterbury.ac.nz.

From Techne & Psyche – Dolores Brien – on 13 Dec 2002 – a review of David Lodge’s novel, Thinks. Here is a quote, hilighting the themes of consciousness, soul and self and the loss of soul:

To demonstrate her point, she gives a dazzling interpretation of some verses from Andrew Marvell’s poem “The Garden” which, to her, affirm the inseparability of consciousness with soul, that is, with the self, the center of personal identity. This self, unfortunately, is under attack today, not only by scientists, but by humanists. Helen is of course speaking for Lodge and the conclusions he has come to in his own research into the consciousness controversy. Better yet, Thinks. . . is in itself Lodge’s wonderfully successful “thought experiment.”

Also by David Lodge: Consciousness & the Novel: Connected Essays