Rain fell since yesterday. When you painstakingly shave your head, and if you afterwards take an extensive shower, the world looks decidedly different. This noon it brightened up and the sun again started to warm all things.
Last monday, 27 March 2006, world renowned science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem died at age 84 in Krakow, his home city. When I was a teenager, every day right after school I stalked the book joint at the station just before catching the train home. Either I bought a science fiction paperback, when I had money, or I eagerly leafed through them as long as time would permit. Strange thing to me was that apparently nobody grown-up I knew thought about science fiction in positive terms, quite to the contrary. The teachers in school, who, among other things, were there to bring us kids close to contemporary literature, not even spat on science fiction—most of the time it simply was ignored. Same with virtually everything I read about literature, be it in the according sections of the newspapers or else. Till I found Stanislaw Lem. With Lem it was different, he was held in high esteem, all of a sudden the ‘fiction’ in ‘science fiction’ was set in upper case, all of a sudden they were talking literature, no more pulp. And all of a sudden my reading habits didn’t stigmatize me as an outcast anymore. Thanks for that. Via Lem I found Tarkovsky, saw “Stalker” and “Solaris”, and for the first time ‘arty movies’—the kind of flics intellectuals watch and discuss—meant something within my pop-culture drenched mind. Thanks for that as well.
screencap from Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Solaris”, 1972
… the dead will walk the earth
Do you know this experience when, after a certain period of wallowing in escapism by swallowing heaps of fiction and movies, let’s say e.g. cyberpunk material …, the consciousness-contents induced by digesting fiction suddenly backlash into what you take for granted reality, real life—however you’d prefer to call that illusion? You do not know this kind of experience? Ok. Anyway.
Some nights ago I left my office at half past midnight. Head full of story-snippets [Bryant: I need you, Deck—I need the old Blade Runner—I need your magic … a goddamn one man slaughterhouse], pictures, moods, and ambiences, I strolled along the completely deserted, perfectly calm streets. Neither did I know if I had missed the last tramway, nor did I care for it. I needed the walk, to walk alone, as sometimes oxygen helps.
Usually I walk along the tramway-tracks. That’s not exactly the shortest way home, but leads through nice neighbourhoods, filled with 19th century architecture. What Harris the Slaughterer has left thereof. And when I am fed up with walking, I always can take a rest at the next tramway station, waiting, hoping for one more train being on service.
At the next tramway station I wasn’t alone anymore. There was a man sitting on the waiting bench. Mid-aged. Glasses, no hat or cap, jacket wide open, only a shirt beneath. Head slightly tilted back, mouth gaping, eyes closed. “Man, the bartender has done a good job on him,” I thought as I passed by. Thoughts trailing on: “Drunk as he is, he won’t wake up before hell freezes over … Hell! It’s four degrees centigrade below zero tonight!”
So I turned around 180 degrees and walked back to the lonesome sitting figure. I bowed down and spoke to him: “Sir! Sir! Are you all right, Sir?” I repeated that, or similar sentences a couple of times. Each time louder. No reaction. So I laid my hand on his breast. Nothing. Can’t be! Hand on other spot on the breast. Nothing. So I grasped him at the shoulder and shook him, while shouting some Sirs into his face. No reaction. So I let go his shoulder, and he slowly slid to the side, coming to a halt in a perfect theatrical pose. I took a step back and said aloud, believe me or not: “Fuck me sideways!”
My mind already ran along the storyline that would unfold. Spending the night with the cops, answering questions like: “If you don’t know the man, then why did you kill him?” Paranoia? Well, just for suspense’s sake allow me to insert another little tramway story of mine, which happened a bunch of years ago.
I was at my city-sector’s main post office, had done my business there, and intended to go back by tram. The tramstop there is like an island between busy lanes, cars rushing to and fro all the time. Nobody coming out of the post office cares to go the long way round to the pedestrians’ crosswalk. It’s just uncomfortably far off. So everybody walks the street, using the gaps between the cars. Elderly people do so, too. That’s ok by me—why should they take the detour? Well, maybe because sometimes crossing a busy street can be quite a task.
Some meters in front of me an elderly lady just undertook that very expedition, and she was fully preoccupied with it. Safely she reached the tramway’s island, a train was just arriving, still in motion. She already had crossed the street, but obviously still was preoccupied with the task, looked into the wrong direction, and stumbled on.
She ran right into the flank of the incoming train, bounced back and started her descent to the cobblestones. My head instantaneously filled with pictures of her head cracked open, of blood seeping into the grooves between the cobblestones. Meanwhile, when she was right in midair, I was close enough and caught her. The cobblestones beneath hissing and cursing, because I had taken away their bloodright.
When she fell into my arms she already was unconscious. Cautiously I laid her down, held her head with the left hand, simultaneously unknotting the pullover around my waist one-handedly, folding it, and comforting her head upon it. A cluster of people had gathered around us, silently staring. I spoke to her, patted her cheek, and after some moments the eylids started to flutter, the eyes slowly opened. She looked right into mine and in a weak, accusing, but already kind of forgiving voice—perfect impertinence—she said, head slightly shaking, tears starting to fill her eyes: “Why, oh why only did you throw me against the tramway?” Immediately the bystanders’ hostile stares burned my face and neck. “Me?!” I cried out, maybe a few decibels too loud, judging by the even more hostile stares that now hit me. If I only hadn’t interfered with the cobblestones’ right to crack her head open. Asphyxiating her now with my pullover wouldn’t have done any good. Well, maybe a little good.
Can you now feel some empathy with my picturing me with the cops while I stood in front of a dead man? No? Hell, don’t you see what would have happened? The cops would have arrived, complete with CSI unit and all. Some forensic doctor would have examined the man and finally would have stated that he was dead. In that very moment the dead man’s eyes would have cracked open, he would have stared at me, would have raised his dead cold hand—the one from which you can pry Charlton Heston’s Winchester ’73—would have pointed straight at me, and would have said in his hoarse voice from beyond the grave: “That’s the bartender who intoxicated me so badly!” For sure.
Anyway.
Oh, it’s way past midnight. I guess I’ll take the stroll along the tracks.
Bail me out, please. Will you?
This one’s exclusively for you, ↑endo—yep, it’s mine.
The word cyberia, oftentimes used synonymously to cyberspace, might have been coined by writer ↑Douglas Rushkoff, see his book “Cyberia: Life in the trenches of hyperspace” (↵Rushkoff 1994). Alas, the term popped up at least three times more in the very same year: On 12 January 1994 Interplay released Xatric Entertainment Inc.’s action-adventure ↑computergame Cyberia for the DOS-platform. Additionally, according to Jonathan Duffy’s BBC-News article ↑Will internet cafés survive 10 more years? on 02 September 1994 “what is widely believed to be the UK’s first internet café, Cyberia, opened in a back street in London’s West End.” And just to make the confusion complete: ↑Arturo Escobar‘s article “Welcome to Cyberia. Notes on the anthropology of cyberculture” (↵Escobar 1994), very influential within ↵sociocultural anthropology, and seminal to ↵cyberanthropology, was published in the June 1994 issue of ↑Current Anthropology.
The slight apparition of a smile is irritating. Deckard whips out his lightsaber from its holster concealed beyond the left shoulder. In the very fraction of a moment when the thumb strives for the blade’s ignition switch, when the fingers loose their opponent, when the primate’s hand’s unique ability to form a circle and grasp the things in their entirety is nullified, the other one strikes his wrist.
Despite of black mirrorshades their eyes are locked, never unlock, not even when their hands briefly connect. Connect incredibly fast. Vagaries of perception. Had their indeed been a shadow of a smile? Merlin’s smile? The old sage sometimes sported this incomprehensible smile, because he already knew what would happen next. Or so they say. A smile expressing amusement over a joke yet untold, yet unthought of. A joke.
No laserblade spawns, the weapon’s dead handle clatters over rain soaked concrete and settles in the slope of an avalanche of kipple, once emerged from an overflowing dumpster unemptied for decades, now frozen in time. Out of human reach.
Genuinely baffled Deckard states:
“You are Nexus.”
Then, briefly overwhelmed by his frustration and upcoming hatred, now quenching the syllables through his tightly closed teeth, he adds:
“Mr Anderson!”
Perfectly calm, untouched, not even cold, but completely unaffected, the other one replies:
“I am Neo.”
The manner of the reply so much resembles his own usual, internalized professional attitude. Looked upon analytically Anderson’s statement clearly is as pathetic as a sentence spoken in this circumstances can be. But it’s not open to analysis, not even to interpretation. It just floats there in the empty. They are both awake to vacuity. Regretting his moment of anger and wrath, Deckard says:
“I’d really like to run the Voight-Kampff test on you.”
In fact he’d really love to, but just in time substituted ‘like’ for ‘love’.
Again he harvests a perfectly restrained answer:
“You’d better run yourself. Run for your existence.”
But then, starting to loose his emotional control himself, Anderson amends in a respectless, even mocking tone, matching the arrogance emanated by his preacherman’s frock:
” … Blade Runner.”
” … time to retire.”
High above them Tally Isham’s perfectly beautiful, larger than life, more human than human Zeiss-Ikon stare on the blimp’s screen, urging them to get off world.
Turner looked at her. She was twenty, four years his junior, and earned roughly nine times his annual salary in a given week. She was blonde, her hair cropped short for the series role, deeply tanned, and looked as if she was illuminated from within by sunlamps. The blue eyes were inhumanly perfect optical instruments, grown in vats in Japan. She was both actress and camera, her eyes worth several
million New Yen, and in the hierarchy of Sense/Net stars, she barely rated.
—William Gibson, Count Zero (↵Gibson 1986)
Apparently in her willowy early thirties, her only obvious augments were a pair of pale blue Zeiss implants. A young French fashion reporter had once referred to these as »modishly outdated«; the reporter, Net legend said, had never worked again.
—William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive (↵Gibson 1988)
“Don’t know… I… I..don’t know such stuff,” Chew answers, “I just do eyes, jus.. jus.. Jus… just eyes… genetic design, just eyes.” Gazing up at the silent replicant, Chew then says… “You Nexus, huh? I design you’ eyes.”
—Hampton Fancher & David Peoples, Blade Runner [see ↑Blade Runner Scripts]
During the last nights, in the hours when I couldn’t find sleep—and believe me, I can’t find sleep—I read Do androids dream of electric sheep? (↑Dick 2005[1968]) in order to really get into the cyberpunk-mood. And I succeeded. When I got up this morning I was in the mood and went out to buy the Blade Runner DVD. Headed straight for the biggest store in town. No luck, hardly could believe it. I mean, it’s a classic. Anyway, went on hunting and haunted several joints, till I found an expert clerk who told me that the DVD was no more available. They had released a special edition, in a huge, shiny black box or so he said, several years ago. But then they took it off the market, he couldn’t even order it for me. Hell, I want that movie. I do not just want to watch it—I already have seen it several times, how else—I want to own it. All the time I have to read and hear about Hollywood complaining and whining because of so-called movie-piracy. Now I am standing here, a willing customer, who already roamed all over the city to buy, and I emphasize: to buy! something from you. And you are not able to keep a tremendously influential classic of contemporary culture on the shelves?
All right, what choice do I have? What choice have you left me? Heading over to the “darknet”, right? That’s exactly what I did, and I got a shitty DivX-version with annoying subtitles and a soundtrack out of sync. Watched it for 1hr 14min and 24secs till I couldn’t stand it anymore. Back into the net, hunting. Finally I found the right thing … the torrent client says to me: 26 days to go. k bai tnx. Wait, no, if that’s the way it is, so be it. And I am positive that the torrent soon will evolve into a mælstrom. For sure.
Funny thing is, that I still want to purchase an original DVD. Complete with box, bonus-material, leaflet, and whatyouhave. T-shirt definitely is not necessary. Ah yes, I hear you saying to your screen: “Head over to eBay or amazon, and you sure get what you’re searching for, n00b.” To hell with it, I want to watch the director’s cut tonight, when again I can’t find sleep, just to stay in the mood. And then I will order a boxed DVD, even a second hand one is ok by me. Btw, meanwhile the torrent is a mælstrom.
Friend just phoned me. I’ll go out and have a couple of gin tonics with him, then I’ll return here. When all pieces have arrived till then, I’ll roast the thing and head home. Can’t sleep anyway.
On 16 March 2006 episode 10 of ↑Pure Pwnage, called ↑teh best day ever [.avi | 203.7MB] has been released on the Internet—’nough said.
And the things are intertwined. All things. Just one or two weeks ago I bought a DVD-set containing the three Matrix-movies (see according ↑essay at ↑cyberpunkreview.com), The Animatrix, and a heap of so-called bonus-material. I carried the whole box to a friend—who happens to work for Oracle [sic!]—and during the last days, or nights, I found time to finally watch Reloaded and Revolutions in full, and five of the nine Animatrix-short-movies. Before I only had had a look upon the modding-relevant scenes of the sequels … have a look at theHunted’s fabulous rendition of ↵The Chateau. In respect to movies with me it’s quite analogous to what HairlessWookie once said about computergames: “I hardly play those games—I immediately start to mod them.”
Well, now last night I watched some bonus material of Revolutions and this morning I received an e-mail newsletter, telling me that the ↑CGSociety currently features an artist profile of ↑Andy Lomas. The profile by Barbara Robertson is called ↑Once a mathematician, always an artist—this indeed does justice to Mr. Lomas’ activities and career. Lomas was a ↵CGI supervisor for The Matrix Revolutions and worked on color and lighting for The Matrix Reloaded. For Revolutions he particularly worked on the rain system: “A system like that has to produce complexity. We had to create humongous amounts of rain using millions of particles. It’s a part of the craft that applies to the art I do.” The art he does was inspired by work done for Reloaded: “For The Matrix Reloaded, Jay Reynolds used a simple 2D version of the diffusion limited algorithm to produce an extra organic level for the black goop that swarmed over peoples’ faces when Agent Smith punched them. I created a variant on that aggregation.” The results meanwhile have made it to eight gallery exhibitions within one year, moving and still images of them can be seen at his homepage ↑andylomas.com.
“Although he can’t predict the results, he has honed his intuition. “You never know exactly what the structure will look like because the process of accumulation is random,” he says, “but you get intuitions and explore in various directions.”” Which again reminds me of ↵Edward Gordon Craig’s perfect actors and of a bunch of Orks leaving the combat theatre. I am speaking of New Line Cinema’s ↑LOTR movie trilogy: To create epic battle scenes on the fields of Mordor and Helms Deep, vast amounts of AI-controlled Orks were computer-generated. As I understand the matter, AI was necessary to get realistically looking mass-combat, and scripting each bot separately just was impossible. To the sheer astonishment of the people at the keyboards during one of the test-runs a bunch of Orks suddenly flocked together and headed straight away from where the action was. Perfect actors.
via e-mail newsletter of the CGSociety