From its very beginning, cinema has been obsessed with itself. Search ‘films about films’ on the internet, and you’ll be greeted with a host of the usual suspects: 8 1/2, perhaps the most famous film about filmmaking, pops up on every list written about films exploring the agony that goes into making a movie. Singin’ in the Rain and Sunset Boulevard offer a glimpse into the industry’s perception of its silent early days from the vantage point of the 1950s, a decades where American cinema was defined by the bright melodrama of the Hollywood musical and the chiaroscuro tones of the noir. And in silent cinema, we had films that explored the mechanics behind this new, solipsistic art form, such as Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman.
A man wakes up one morning to find himself slowly transforming into a living hybrid of meat and scrap metal; he dreams of being sodomised by a woman with a snakelike, strap-on phallus. Clandestine experiments of sensory depravation and mental torture unleash psychic powers in test subjects, prompting them to explode into showers of black pus or tear the flesh off each other s bodies in a sexual frenzy. Meanwhile, a hysterical cyborg sex-slave runs amok through busy streets whilst electrically charged demi-gods battle for supremacy on the rooftops above. This is cyberpunk, Japanese style: a brief filmmaking movement that erupted from the Japanese underground to garner international attention in the late 1980s.
Tishan Hsu’s Prescient Yet Apolitical View of Technology
At SculptureCenter, a recent survey takes a narrow look at the artist’s career, focusing on his tech-inspired works from the 1980s and ’90s
The medium looks like it could use a good massage in Tishan Hsu’s painted wooden panels. With their rounded corners and painted backs that cast a screen-like glow onto the walls, they suggest our now-ubiquitous smartphones and tablets. Their surfaces are built up with acrylic and enamel to mimic a machine’s casing and frame
trompe-l’œil, shadowed displays that make literal the computing metaphor of a ‘skin’. In
The Summary news - Exit: A Biodelic Adventure Posted by Neurosaur on Exit: A Biodelic Adventure is a biopunk game, it s a classic point n click set in the world of living technologies, a world in which computers can be fed and cured, where DNA-passwords open gene-locks, and insect hormones revitalize memory. A world with biofactories that give birth to household utensils, where genetically-modified molds can generate virtual realities, and worst of all where an epidemic is ravaging the human race, infecting people s neuronet implants and enslaving them to the mysterious Worm. Who are you: a fighter of the infection, or a hunter of new prey?