billion dollar brain

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Title screen of the movie "Billion Dollar Brain" (Russell 1967)
“↑Billion Dollar Brain” (Russell 1967) is a cold war spy thriller movie based on the ↑novel of the same name by British writer ↑Len Deighton (1966). Said novel is one of a series starring an unnamed secret agent, working for British intelligence, as the central protagonist. During the 1960s three movies were made, based on three novels of the series. In the movies the protagonist has a name, ↑Harry Palmer, and is played by ↑Michael Caine.
    Both, the novels and the movies, somewhat counter ↑Ian Fleming‘s urbane character ↑James Bond and his glitzy high society universe. Deighton renders the spook trade far more down-to-earth and Palmer is an anti-hero, plagued by e.g. his service’s bureaucracy. Apart from the lead character two novels (and movies) of the series have cyberpunkish issues at their respective cores. In “The IPCRESS File” (↑Deighton 1962, ↑Furie 1965) it’s brainwashing, and in “Billion Dollar Brain” it’s a supercomputer.
    Leo Newbigen (↑Karl Malden), an old friend of Harry’s, works for an elusive organization which our hero’s superiors deem to be a thread. So Harry gets himself recruited in order to infiltrate the organization undercover.
    Newbigen brings Palmer to a chateau outside Helsinki and leads him up into the attic. There a computer terminal is located, built into a writing desk. As the two reach the last steps, and Palmer gets sight of the terminal, Newbigen says: “Harry, meet the boss!” and continues:
 
Michael Caine and Karl Malden in "Billion Dollar Brain" (Russell 1967)

“Someone has to be here every day at this time, for instructions.”
    “What does it do, tell fortunes?” Harry asks in reply.
“It makes fortunes,” Leo goes on, “Ours.”
    After a little reflection he continues his explanation:
    “Just a little toy, but it puts the MI5 and the CIA back into the stone age. We feed it information, it passes the information on to its big brother and back come our orders.
    Cuts out thinking.”

Karl Malden in "Billion Dollar Brain" (Russell 1967)
Later in the movie Harry gets to see the terminal’s big brother, located in the US, and is invited to a tour by “General” Midwinter (Ed Begley) himself, head of the evil organization and proprietor of the billion dollar brain. During that tour the self-styled “General” barks a golden cold war plus cyberpunk sentence:
 
Michael Caine and Ed Begley in "Billion Dollar Brain" (1967)

DEIGHTON, LEN. 1962. The IPCRESS file. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
DEIGHTON, LEN. 1966. Billion dollar brain. London: Jonathan Cape.
FURIE, SIDNEY J. 1965. The IPCRESS file [motion picture]. London: The Rank Group.
RUSSELL, KEN. 1967. Billion dollar brain [motion picture]. Los Angeles: United Artists.
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ethnographic times

xirdalium Posted on by

Workers leaving the Lumière factory
With ↑this year’s EthnoFilmFest in Munich close (16 through 20 November 2011) I remembered some old associations.
    The above screenshot is taken from the 46 seconds short film “↑Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory,” the first of a series of ten short films presented at the ↑very first commercial screening of movies—on 28th December 1895 in Paris, at the Salon Indien du Grand Café. The short piece is a documentary film, or an ethnographic film—if you take ethnographic in the strict sense of the term.
    41 years later Chaplin brought “Modern Times” (1936) on the silver screen, ↵which is downright cyberpunk. The opening title card reads:

“Modern Times.” A story of industry, of individual enterprise—humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness.

When the title card fades we are confronted with exactly the same sujet the ↑Lumière brothers had chosen:
 
The opening shot of Chaplin's "Modern Times" (1936)

CHAPLIN, Sir CHARLES SPENCER. 1936. Modern times [motion picture]. Century City: United Artists.
LUMIÈRE, AUGUSTE MARIE LOUIS. 1895. La sortie des usines Lumière à Lyon [documentary short film]. Lyon: Lumière.
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wireless

xirdalium Posted on by

Doctor Wernher (Larry Johns) on a wireless phone in Richard Talmadge's 1953 movie "Project Moon Base"
These days the telephone turns 150 … if, without any reservations whatsoever, you accept ↑Johann Philipp Reis (1834-1874) as its inventor. German media during the last weeks were inclined to accept it that way, naturally. Alas, a short glimpse on the ↑timeline of the telephone teaches us that we can not anymore write histories of technology by constructing absolute origins and godlike inventor personalities. Nevertheless does it seem above dispute that Reis coined the term “telephone.”
    Be all that as it may, I take the ample opportunity to have a look on how the future of the telephone was envisioned nearly 60 years ago [that is, I want to show off a screenshot I recently took].
    The above is a screengrab taken from the movie “Project Moon Base” (Talmadge 1953). We see Dr. Wernher (Larry Johns) on the wireless phone, talking to the brass responsible for a rocket expedition—first to a space station orbiting the Earth, and then on, around the Moon. The General on the other end tells Dr. Wernher that an official car will pick him up from his hotel and shuttle him to the launching facilities, where Wernher will board the spaceship.
    Ain’t that wonderful? They just took an off-the-shelf telephone of the period, ripped out the cord connecting the receiver with the base station, and substituted it with mock antennas.
    But the fine gadgetry doesn’t help the good doctor a bit, as immediately after the phone conversation he is abducted by the agents of an opposing nation, and substituted with a lookalike operative. From then on the drama unfolds. Wikipedia knows on “↑Project Moon Base [that’s the way it is spelled in the opening titles]:”

The film is unusual for its time in both attempting to portray space-travel in a “realistic” manner, and for depicting a future in which women hold positions of authority and responsibility equal to men; in the script the president of the United States is a woman.

The screenplay is by legendary sci-fi author ↑Robert Heinlein. The female president of the United States is not only in the script, but to be seen towards the end of the movie. The other woman in a responsible position is Colonel Briteis (Donna Martell), spaceship pilot and commander.

TALMADGE, RICHARD. 1953. Project moon base [motion picture]. Los Angeles: Lippert Pictures.
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who is it?

xirdalium Posted on by

zeph’s pop culture quiz #1
A shadow entering
With all that popular culture material residing on my hard drives, and with all the hodgepodge of “knowledge” and trivia about it residing in my head, I thought it to be a good idea to launch a quiz series in here.
    To ease your start into the new week, every Monday I will post a screenshot from a movie or television series and ask some more or less clever question. One week later the post will be updated with the solution—which normally will be a screenshot, too, with explanation of course, plus some trivia and associations. Presumably it will mostly be science fiction, horror, and superheroes, but not exclusively.
    And here we go: Who casts his shadow upon that frosted glass inset of the door he opens? It’s the lead of a 1970s hit television series. And no, he didn’t yet appear on xirdalium or ↑ye ole xirdalium—which is astounding, as he is an all-time childhood hero of mine.
    Just leave a comment with your educated guess—you can ask for additional hints, too. [Leaving a comment is easy; just click the ‘Leave a comment’ at the end of the post and fill in the form. If it’s the first time you post a comment, it will be held for moderation. But I am constantly checking, and once I’ve approved a comment, your next ones won’t be held, but published immediately by the system.]
    Sorry no prices, it’s just for the fun ;-)
 
UPDATE and solution (31st October 2011):
Lt. Theo Kojak, Manhattan South
It is Lieutenant ↑Theo Kojak (↑Telly Savalas)! That was a fast one. The quiz was only eight hours and 53 minutes old, when ↵Alexander Rabitsch hit it. Before that (when the quiz was only one hour old) ↵klandestino suggested a clever, but nevertheless wrong solution—which ↵I had anticipated :-) All in all the riddle seems to have been far too easy. I’ll cook up a tougher one for next Monday, I promise.
    The screenshots I took from season 4 (1976-1977), episode 22
“↑Kiss it All Goodbye,” which originally aired on 22nd February 1977. The episode is remarkable for several reasons: Kojak’s number one sidekick detective Bobby Crocker (↑Kevin Dobson) deeply falls in love, the episode was directed by Telly Savalas himself, and the bad guy Ben Wiley is played by a youthful ↑Christopher Walken.
    Mr Walken had had his debut on the big screen six years earlier in “↑The Anderson Tapes” (Lumet 1971), starring ↑Sean Connery. This heist-movie is remarkable as well. It is not exactly cyberpunk, but the first movie to broach the issue of pervasive surveillance by technological means (which is depicted on a grand scale and in a haunting way) and its mis/use by private agencies and public institutions.

LUMET, SIDNEY. 1971. The Anderson tapes [motion picture]. Culver City: Columbia Pictures.
SAVALAS, ARISTOTELIS “TELLY”. 1977. Kiss it all goodbye [tv-series episode]. Kojak 4(22). New York: CBS.

Can’t resist … here’s a follow-up for you wiseguys: As you probably know Kojak always is clad in immaculate suits, a real dandy. Who tailored and furnished Mr Savalas’ wardrobe? ;-)

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paleofuture

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paleofuture
Since January 2007 Matt Novak runs the weblog ↑paleofuture, collecting and presenting past visions of futures that never were. Drawing on his “physical archive of materials related to retro-futurism” his project is of such quality that it meanwhile has ↑moved to the Smithsonian. Above that Matt edits an ↑according magazine and produces ↑paleofuture.tv. On the latter’s first episode:

The ↑shiny happy futurism of the 1950s gave way to much darker predictions for humanity in the 1970s. With ↑energy crises, fears of terrorism and skyrocketing unemployment, it’s really no wonder that Americans of the 1970s were often pessimistic about the future.
    Out of this dread, the apocsploitation film was born.
    Movies like ↑Future Shock and ↑The Late Great Planet Earth served up apocalyptic visions of the American future, both secular and religious.

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this is anthropology

xirdalium Posted on by

This is Anthropology
During a radio interview on ↑The Marc Bernier Show on 10 October 2011 Rick Scott, the governor of Florida (his ↑daughter has a degree in anthropology—and ↑doesn’t like her father’s stance), voiced the following:

We don’t need a lot more anthropologists in the state. It’s a great degree if people want to get it, but we don’t need them here. I want to spend our dollars giving people science, technology, engineering, and math degrees. That’s what our kids need to focus all their time and attention on, those types of degrees, so when they get out of school, they can get a job.

The American Anthropological Association (AAA) swiftly responded with a ↓short letter, Rex Golub at Savage Minds ↑revokes the spirit of Thomas Jefferson, and there’s a general uprise. To get it all, have a look at ↑Daniel Lende’s huge post with tons of links and updates. In his ↑reaction John Hawks says:

It’s very difficult to come up with a rapid and effective reply from an organization or department, so I understand these aren’t as punchy as they might be. Still, it seems to me a vastly more effective response would describe the economic impact of anthropologists in Florida, the dollar amounts of federal and private grants they bring to Florida universities, their role as custodians of natural and cultural history, and their history of engagement with indigenous and immigrant peoples in the state.

The response along this line of argument came from students. A ↑short and pointed piece by Diana Harrelson of ↑Cyber Anthropology and ↑then antropologi.info
hinted me towards the slideshow ↑This is Anthropology made by students at the University of Florida.

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real time source

xirdalium Posted on by

Detail of the poster of the movie 'In Time'
One of the arguments I try to make in epic breadth in ‘↑Cyberanthropology‘ is that the cyberpunk discourse gathers ever more momentum. In the book my exemplary strategy for a proof is looking at the movie production. The point is that more and more of the high-end productions [high-end in terms of budget, star-speckled cast, prominent director, or all three of those criteria] fall into the cyberpunk genre. The trend is unbroken: This year we already had ‘↑Source Code‘ (Jones 2011), starring Jake Gyllenhaal, ‘↑Real Steel‘ (Levy 2011 | ↑review), starring Hugh Jackman, and today ‘↑In Time‘ (Niccol 2011), starring Justin Timberlake and, far more importantly: Cillian Murphy, comes to the cinemas—despite ↑Harlan Ellison having ↑filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against it. [Have you noticed how masterfully I refrained from having the cheap pun ‘just in time’ for a headline?]

JONES, DUNCAN. 2011. Source code [motion picture]. Universal City, London: Summit Entertainment.
LEVY, SHAWN. 2011. Real steel [motion picture]. Burbank: Touchstone Pictures.
NICCOL, ANDREW. 2011. In time [motion picture]. Century City: 20th Century Fox.
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gods and robots

xirdalium Posted on by

Somehow this one has escaped my attention till today—unfortunately some paywall, moving wall, system bug, or whatyouhave bars my access to it, although my university has subscribed to that publication and pays for the access. Anyhow, it goes together well with ↵the new gods. Here’s the abstract of Vidal’s article:

Since the 1980s, a new area of research entitled HRI (Human-Robot Interaction) has been emerging in the field of robotic studies. It focuses on the empirical study of the relationship between robots and human beings. This article aims to contrast the findings of roboticists concerning the interaction between humans and robots with anthropological studies which focus on the ritual interaction between gods and humans in specific religious contexts. This idea may seem provocative, but it is argued here that such a comparison can yield valuable insights both at a theoretical level and at an empirical one. This will be demonstrated with reference to ritual interactions between humans and gods in the Western Himalayas.

VIDAL, DENIS. 2007. Anthropomorphism or sub-antropomorphism? An anthropological approach to gods and robots. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13(4): 917-933.
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paris calling

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The ↑12th EASA Biennial Conference will take place in Nanterre, France (near Paris) from 10th through 13th July 2012. The overall theme is “↑Uncertainty and disquiet.” The ↑list of workshops is set and the ↑call for papers open—the latter will be closed on 28th November 2011. You can only give one presentation, so you have to skim through the vast list and make up your mind to which workshop you want to submit a paper. If this one submission is rejected, you save a lot of money, ’cause it’s of no use to journey to a conference without presenting something there. Here are the workshops which caught my eye, and, from the top of my head, notes on what I might submit:
    ↑Standards and the quest for technocratic certainty—as the talk is about organization/s and bureaucracies something on the out-of-the shadows prevalence of the discourse cybernetics might be (bene)fitting.
    ↑Certainties and uncertainties of the armed fighter—dunno, just struck my fancy.
    ↑Contemporary hybrids in visual anthropology—machinima in particular and computer generated imagery in general anyone? Computer games set in ‘classic’ fields of anthropology, e.g. ↵Far Cry 2 (much uncertainty and disquiet in that story). Computer games produced in the ‘classic’ fields of anthropology.
    ↑Thinking with Latour—one of my top favorites at the moment (the workshop, not Latour ;-). Might be a chance to rant about how Latour’s concepts and “tools” are subject to the heritage of cybernetics.
    ↑Trickster anthropology: theorizing ontological ambiguity, transgression and transformation—ahhh, Trickster, ↓my old specialty.
    ↑The visual in times of uncertainty: experience lived/experience recorded—listed here more out of interest. But then again the members of ‘my online tribes’ are particularly fond of the history of their own communities. This history is stored and redistributed by a plethora of digital means, visual ones naturally, too. This already begins with screenshots of shared gaming experiences, and so on, and so on.
    ↑Theorising media and social change—my pal ↑John Postill‘s workshop who in the end brought me to EASA. I got several vague ideas, but have to think further first, as the questions raised in the workshop’s abstract are quite deep-probing—see e.g. ↑John’s latest on this.
    ↑Strategies of resistance? The role of alternative urban and virtual markets in neoliberal economies—shadow economies stemming from online games turned business models.
    ↑The anthropology of security—cyberpunk galore. Security I take to be great topic for anthropology, especially after I heard ↑Thomas Kirsch ↑talk on the semiotics employed by the private security industry in South Africa.
    ↑Signifying blood: illness, technologies, and interpretations—body-invasive technologies, cyberpunk, cybernetic notions fusing with rituals and symbols.

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mari0

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↑Mari0 is a ↑Super Mario Bros. plus ↑Portal mashup by ↑Stabyourself.net, which in turn “is a two-man studio formed in early 2011 aiming to create enjoyable experiences for anyone to easily get into and enjoy.” The two men are Maurice Guégan and Sašo Smolej, who already have published ↓Not Tetris 2.
    Mari0 is not a gamemod in the strict sense of the term, as the whole game consists of original code from the base up:

Two genre defining games from completely different eras: Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. and Valve’s Portal. These two games managed to give Platformers and First-Person Puzzle Games a solid place in the video game world. But what if Nintendo teamed up with Valve and recreated the famous Mario game with Portal gun mechanics?
    A complete from scratch recreation of Super Mario Bros. with a focus on perfectly imitating the feel the 1985 classic gave us. Then give Mario a portal gun, add puzzle game mechanics from Portal and there you go. And if that wasn’t crazy enough, play simultaneously with as many friends as you can connect joypads to your PC, with everyone having their own Portal gun!

It ain’t released yet, but at ↑Maurice’s YouTube channel there’s a ton more of the above, and at ↑Stabyourself.net there are regular updates with screenshots, many of them animazed gifs of the newest achievements.
    All this reminds me a bit of “Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement” (1990), the legendary proof of concept by Carmack and Romero. I sincerely hope that Nintendo will be a good sport and see Mari0 as a parody, and not as a case for the copyright-lawyers.
    Just to round it up, here’s stabyourself’s text commenting their contact section: “Are you amazed at how awesome we are? Are you angry one of our games set your computer on fire? Are you Nintendo and want to send us a cease and desist letter?”
 
Mari0

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