Can machines tell stories? I’ll be discussing AI’s movie-making ambitions with Dara O’Briain this Friday at 2.45pm. It’s a panel event, part of New Scientist Live, which runs from 22 to 25 September at ExCel.
Tag Archives: film
How two dead power stations fuel the art of catastrophe
Borrowed Time, Jerwood Space, London, for New Scientist, 16 March 2016.
THE current crop of young artists showing in London look pretty incorruptible. Handed £20,000 each to make films about economic unease and ecological anxiety, Alice May Williams (fresh-ish out of Goldsmiths, University of London) and Karen Kramer (who cut her artistic teeth at the Parsons School of Design, New York City) have made video installations that deliver on this minatory brief. And they have done so with the sort of bloodless precision that leaves a visitor to Borrowed Time unsure whether to admire their high seriousness or worry at their apparent lack of character.
Be patient: both pieces reward closer attention. There are, ultimately, two very strong, staggeringly incompatible visions at work here.
Through its fictional narrator-protagonist, Kramer’s The Eye That Articulates Belongs on Land gives viewers the opportunity to wander the deserted, out-of-bounds byways neighbouring Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant while growing increasingly upset.
Actor Togo Igawa’s choked voice-over suggests a wronged salaryman driving back and forth over his pet shih-tzu. Pictures of urban dereliction lovingly reference the 2011 release of radioactive material from the plant (worldwide casualties to date: nil) while providing not much more than a passing reference to the tsunami (Tohoku district casualties: just shy of 16,000) that triggered the plant’s meltdowns.
The power plant offered us “a false promise of dominion” apparently – a formulation I’m sure to recall next time I turn on a kettle for a cuppa – before Nature Wrought Her Terrible Judgement.
Actually, Kramer might not be going this far – it’s hard to tell. But she is dangerously close, achieving with the line “They let loose a reaction here that belongs on the surface of the sun!” an impressive hat-trick: at once morally irrelevant, intellectually vacuous and factually incorrect. The piece then degenerates into a paranoid animation involving shards of uranium glass and a mummified fox.
Meanwhile, in Dream City – More, Better, Sooner, Alice May Williams invites us to stare at her toes, and, beyond, at the towers of the long-since decommissioned Battersea power station, a crumbling Art Deco masterpiece. This gem is currently aswarm with builders, surveyors, architects and their ilk as that swampy, vital, smelly, industrious corner of London gets a landscaped corporate makeover after 30 years of dithering.
Williams is taking deep, centring breaths, following the advice of a meditation teacher. She is learning to let go of past errors and future plans, and to embrace the now. In other words, Williams’s well-being involves letting go of the very forces, prejudices and habits that make her city tick. Can you imagine the mess we would be in if our utilities “embraced the now”? The disjunct between personal time and civic time is built steadily, with humour and poetry and a tremendous sense of mounting threat. “SHOP STAY EAT LIVE WORK and PLAY”, a hoarding screams. A promise or a threat?
“Sometimes we are right inside the drawings,” Williams sighs, interleaving the view from her window with corporate videos, blueprints and historical footage to capture the inevitable bind of city living. That bind has us living inside other people’s visions, hardly able to distinguish between big-business blather and the untethered voices of our own suicidal ideations.
Both films play to our fears, but only Williams understands what’s worth fearing. Disasters are not and never were the point. They are like rain and eclipses: inevitable. The reason we have complex societies is to handle disasters. A famine here, a flood there, a cave-in at the mine. The rest is window dressing, and none of it comes out the way it is meant to.
All over London, the kettles are boiling merrily as the old power station is turned into a retail-residential park “with community built in”. We can embrace the now all we want, but the city has no such luxury. That is what makes it such a terrifying friend.
“I love what I do and I’m really good at it”
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No matter how far he runs, Matt Damon cannot escape the attentions of New Scientist
Towards the end of Ridley Scott’s The Martian, marooned NASA astronaut Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon) says goodbye to the habitat that has kept him alive for more than 500 days. As he enters the airlock to leave, he pauses, turns – and there, on a table, is his space helmet. Sourly, he snatches it up: he has nearly gone and killed himself again.
Set about 30 years in the future, The Martian tells the story of how Watney survives at the very cusp of death, at which every trivial error, every moment of forgetfulness, will kill him in about 35 seconds. Jeopardy is the stuff of adventure movies. What makes all this different is its remarkable lack of interest in what jeopardy feels like “inside”, and its loving depiction of how people should deal with it.
The film is based on a story by Andy Weir, a software engineer and self-confessed geek who ignored traditional publishers in favour of a blog through which he could work out technical solutions to Watney’s problems. Watney has been left for dead on Mars without enough food and water to survive until the next mission – due in four years’ time. But there is much more to it than that.
Before he shot his last scene at the Korda Filmpark, outside Budapest in Hungary, CultureLab caught up with Damon, who was tasked with conveying what it would be like to survive for 18 months only on potatoes grown in your own faeces. He explained: “Ridley and I agreed The Martian is not one of those existential survival movies. Neither is it just a popcorn kind of whizz-bang, he’s-never-really-in-danger type of experience. The key is to have the audience feel the enormity without it seeming ponderous. And it has to be funny, because Watney and his colleagues are capable of doing really dangerous things and having a good sense of humour about them.”
No wonder NASA got behind the film: its tale of the administration’s daring, unsanctioned bid to rescue one of their own gives every department a hero. But where The Martian gets interesting is in its refusal to take heroism at face value. Watney survives because he is smart and knowledgeable, can get by without company and likes the sound of his own voice; and because coming up with a strong, snarky one-liner can make his whole day. He survives because, as he says in a message meant for his parents, “I love what I do and I’m really good at it.”
This distillation of NASA’s philosophy is endorsed by Ellen Ochoa, director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, who praised Weir’s book for encapsulating aspects of mission training. “It is a very realistic scenario of what we go through when we train crew members and flight controllers, who must quickly analyse a situation and prioritise tasks,” she said. She added that resilience is “probably the single most important characteristic to have as an explorer, and Watney proves to be extraordinarily resilient”.
The film’s whole approach favours accuracy over visual bombast. Less spectacular than Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (2013), and a lot less silly than Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), The Martian has exploited NASA’s enthusiasm well, conjuring up habitats, spacesuits, spacecraft and launch vehicles that carry its stamp of approval.
Is The Martian a nerd thriller? For sure: you can’t have Damon declaring he will “have to science the shit out of this” and not find yourself moving your biros to your shirt pocket. But it’s more than a love letter to science. It is an entertaining depiction of a way of behaving that keeps people alive in extreme circumstances: love your job; embrace the little you can do and do it; like it or not, death is always coming, so to hell with it. This, more than any amount of Mars-mission razz, is the real heart of The Martian, the source of its optimism, and a quality deserving of praise.
New Scientist and SCI FI LONDON present…
THE SCIENCE FICTION FUTURE
With a keynote by multi-award winning science-fiction writer ALASTAIR REYNOLDS, this packed afternoon of short films and discussions explores how science fiction is guiding us towards an uncertain tomorrow.
Saturday May 30
12.30–6pm
Blue Room, mezzanine level
BFI Southbank, Belvedere Road
London SE1 8XT
A free drop-in event
(Help us keep track of numbers by registering at Eventbrite)
12.30 Screenings
Building and testing a Paul-III drawing robot
Patrick Tresset, 2014 (1’ 30)
Patrick Tresset is a French artist who uses robotics to create cybernetic representations of the artist. His robots incorporate research findings from computer vision, artificial intelligence and cognitive computing. @patricktresset
The Willful Marionette
Lilla LoCurto & Bill Outcault, 2014 (2’ 46)
Created during a residency with the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, the marionette is 3D-printed from the scanned image of a human figure and responds in real time to spontaneous human gestures. Their intention was not to create a perfectly functioning robot, but to imbue an obviously mechanical marionette with the ability to solicit a physical and emotional dialogue.
Strandbeest (compilation)
Theo Jansen, 2014 (3’ 55)
In 1990 the Dutch artist Theo Jansen began building large self-actuating mechanisms out of PVC. He strives to equip his creations with their own artificial intelligence so they can avoid obstacles, such as the sea itself, by changing course. @StrandBeests
The Afronauts
Cristina De Middel, 2013 (4’ 30)
In 1964, still living the dream of their recently gained independence, Zambia started a space program that would put the first African on the moon. The project was founded and led by Edward Makuka, a school teacher. The United Nations declined their support. Photojournalist Cristina De Middel assembled surviving documents from the project and integrated them with her own imagery. @lademiddel
The Moon (Luna, excerpt)
Pavel Klushantsev, 1965 (2’ 00)
Concluding scenes from a visionary documentary describing how the moon will be developed, from the first lunar mission to the construction of lunar cities and laboratories.
Reactvertising™ R&D
John St., 2014 (0’ 56)
John Street is a Canadian creative agency. @thetweetsofjohn
13:00 Introduction
Simon Ings
13:10 Keynote: “On the Steel Breeze”
Alastair Reynolds
Marrying human concerns to monstrously scaled backdrops, Alastair Reynolds is one of our finest writers of science fiction. He spent twelve years within the European Space Agency, designing and building the S-Cam, the world’s most advanced optical camera, before returning to his native Wales in 2008. His most recent novel, appearing in September 2013, is On the Steel Breeze, a sequel to Blue Remembered Earth.
13.30 Screenings
The Centrifuge Brain Project
Till Nowak, 2012 (6’ 35) Many thanks to ShortFilmAgency Hamburg,
A portrait of the science behind seven experimental fun park rides. Humans are constantly looking for bigger, better, faster solutions to satisfy their desires, but they never arrive at a limit – it’s an endless search. @TillNowak
SEFT–1 Abandoned Railways Exploration Probe
Ivan Puig and Andrés Padilla Domene, 2014 (3’ 05)
Puig and Domene (Los Ferronautas) built their striking silver road-rail vehicle to explore the abandoned passenger railways of Mexico and Ecuador, an iconic infrastructure now lying in ruins, much of it abandoned due to the privatisation of the railway system in 1995, when many passenger trains were withdrawn, lines cut off and communities isolated. The artists’ journeys, captured in videos, photographs and collected objects, establish a notion of modern ruins.
Growth Assembly
Daisy Ginsberg & Sacha Pohflepp, 2009 (3’ 33)
A collection, illustrated by Sion Ap Tomos, of seven plants that have been genetically engineered to grow objects. Once assembled, parts from the seven plants form a herbicide sprayer – an essential commodity used to protect these delicate, engineered horticultural machines from an older, more established nature. @alexandradaisy | @plugimi
Hair Highway
Juriaan Booij, 2014 (4’ 28)
A contemporary take on the ancient Silk Road. As the world’s population continues to increase, human hair has been re-imagined as an abundant and renewable material, with China its biggest exporter. Studio Swine explores how the booming production of hair extensions can be expanded beyond the beauty industry to make desirable, Shanghai-deco style products. @StudioSwine
Magnetic Movie
Semiconductor, 2007 (4’ 47)
Artists Ruth Jarman & Joe Gerhardt (Semiconductor) reveal the secret lives of magnetic fields around NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratories, UC Berkeley, to recordings of space scientists describing their discoveries. Are we observing a series of scientific experiments, or a documentary of a fictional world? @Semiconducting
14:00 Panel: “Unreliable evidence”
Museums and galleries are using mocked-up objects, films and documents to entertain, baffle and provoke us — but what happens when we can no longer tell the difference between them and the real thing?
Alec Steadman, formerly of The Hut Project, joined the arts-science hub The Arts Catalyst as Curator in April 2015.
A curator, producer and artists’ agent, Robert Devcic uses objects to challenge, inform and deepen our ideas of the real world. Through his gallery GV Art, he pioneers work that erases the boundary between art and science, fact and fiction.
Cher Potter is a senior editor at the fashion forecasting company WGSN. She analyses social, political and cultural trends and their potential impact on the fashion industry. She is part of the curatorial team for a forthcoming exhibition at the V&A Museum titled The Future: A History.
Deputy keeper of technologies and engineering at the Science Museum, Doug Millard has just completed work on a major exhibition of Russian space exploration to be staged at the Science Museum in September 2015.
Lost in Fathoms
Anaïs Tondeur & Jean-Marc Chomaz, 2014 (3′ 27)
14:45 screenings
Big Dog Overview
Boston Dynamics, 2010 (3’ 24)
BigDog is a rough-terrain robot that walks, runs, climbs and carries heavy loads. BigDog’s four legs are articulated like an animal’s, with compliant elements to absorb shock and recycle energy from one step to the next. @BostonDynamics
Farmer’s Pet
Joshua Allen Harris, 2008 (2’ 17)
US street artist Joshua Allen Harris uses ordinary black garbage and shopping bags to make his pieces, tying them down to subway grates with tape in the hope the strong gusts from the trains will be strong enough to inflate his characters and animate them. @tweetsbyjosh
Shrink (performance at Brucknerhaus, Linz, Austria)
Lawrence Malstaf, 2009 (4’ 25)
Belgian artist Lawrence Malstaf develops installation and performance art dealing with space and orientation. His projects frequently involve advanced technology and the participation of visitors.
Big Dog Beta: – early Big Dog quadruped robot testing (excerpt)
Seedwell, 2011 (0’ 48)
The somewhat flawed predecessor to Boston Dynamics’ Big Dog robot. Camera by Dana Kruse. @seedwell
First on the Moon (excerpt)
Aleksei Fedorchenko, 2005 (1’ 30)
Soviet scientists and military authorities managed to launch the first spacecraft 23 years prior to Yuri Gagarin’s flight. Fedorchenko’s first feature tells about everyday life, heroic deeds and tragedy of the first group of the Soviet cosmonauts.
15:00 Panel: “We’re making this up as we go along”
Can we ever ready ourselves for the unexpected? And might the games we play now lead us into making the wrong choices in the future?
Funny and uneasy by turns, Pat Kane’s annual FutureFest festival for the innovation charity NESTA reflected his belief in the importance of play. A musician, writer and political activist, Kane (appearing via Skype) was also one of the founding editors of the Sunday Herald newspaper.
Rob Morgan develops VR titles, including shooters, thrillers and action/comedies, for major game studios, charities, publishers and indies. He was a contributor to the award-winning browser game Samsara and the ARG Unreal City, collaborated with J K Rowling on Pottermore, and has just finished writing the script for the upcoming The Assembly for Morpheus & Oculus Rift.
Andy Franzkowiak has flooded Edinburgh with zombies, sent Siemens’ urban museum The Crystal to 2050, and built the solar system in Deptford. He has previously worked with Punchdrunk, the Southbank Centre and the BBC. Mary Jane Edwards, who develops projects focused on cultural regeneration, social policy and social finance, is his new partner in crime in attempts to blur the distinction between art, education and science.
@theplayethic | @AboutThisLater | @shrinking_space
Afrogalactica: a short history of the future
(performance excerpt)
Kapwani Kiwanga, 2011 (4′ 50)
15:45 screenings
Corner Convenience: “Hoodie”
Near Future Laboratory, 2012, (1’ 40)
Near Future Laboratory’s design-fiction workshop used print and film to explore the future as a place we will, inevitably, take for granted. Its ruling assumption was that the trajectory of all great innovations is to trend towards the counter of your corner convenience store, grocer, 7–11 or petrol station. @nearfuturelab
Reactvertising™
John St., 2014 (3’ 12)
New Mumbai
Tobias Revell, 2012 (9’ 17)
During the Indian Civil War the Dharavi slums of Mumbai were flooded with refugees. Sometime later a cache of biological samples appeared through the criminal networks of Mumbai. Revell explains how a refugee community managed to turn these genetically-engineered narcotics into a new type of infrastructure. @tobias_revell
Tender – it’s how people meat
Marcello Gómez Maureira, 2015 (0’ 52)
Tender is the easy way to connect with new and interesting meat around you. @dandymaro
Aurora, the Aura City (excerpt)
Urban IxD, 2013 (3’ 25)
A design fiction created during the Urban IxD summer school in Split, Croatia during August 2013, and led by Tobias Revell and Sara Bozanic. It is 2113. Cities have undergone profound change. A sharing economy holds sway, but the desire for efficiency and optimization has led to the development of highly sophisticated sharing systems that preclude social interaction. The streets have emptied… @tobias_revell | @me_transmedia
Corner Convenience: “Drunk”
Near Future Laboratory, 2012, (1’ 50)
16:00 presentations
Rachel Armstrong creates new materials that possess some of the properties of living systems, and can be manipulated to “grow” architecture. Through extensive collaboration, she builds and develops prototypes of sustainable and self-sustaining metabolic buildings.
Lydia Nicholas, is a researcher in collective intelligence at Nesta and founding member of the Future Anthropologies Network. She speaks at conferences about bodies and biology and numbers and making in various combinations. Her favourite bacteria is Paenibacillus vortex.
16:15 panel: “This is not a drill”
Rachel Armstrong and Lydia Nicholas join Georgina Voss, Paul Graham Raven and Regina Peldszus to explore how mock-ups, simulations and rehearsals are shaping the real world.
Georgina Voss co-wrote the “Better Made Up” report from NESTA examining the co-influence of science fiction and innovation, and is currently is a resident at Lighthouse Arts, using 3D print technology to promote women’s health in remote regions.
Paul Graham Raven is a postgraduate researcher in infrastructure futures and theory at the University of Sheffield. He is also a science fiction writer, literary critic and essayist.
Via Skype, Regina Peldszus explores how humans and technology interact. She was an Internal Research Fellow with the European Space Agency in Darmstadt, Germany. She is now at Leuphana University of Lüneburg, researching the ethics of simulation.
Forever Future
Sacha Pohflepp, 2010 (4′ 24)
17:00 Screening
Fugitive Futurist: A Q-riosity by “Q”
Gaston Quiribet, 1924 (12’ 00; silent)
An on-the-run inventor claims to have invented a camera which looks into the future, and reveals a grim destiny for London landmarks like Tower Bridge and Trafalgar Square.
17:15 Discussion and screenings
Public Tracks
Hubert Blanz, 2010 (1’ 25)
Excerpt from an audio/video installation. Over the last few years the importance of virtual social networks has greatly increased and has significantly changed the way we communicate.
Brilliant Noise
Semiconductor, 2006 (5’ 50)
After sifting through hundreds of thousands of computer files, made accessible via open access-archives, Semiconductor bring together some of the sun’s finest unseen moments. These images have been kept in their most raw form, revealing the activities of energetic particles. The soundtrack highlights the hidden forces at play upon the solar surface, by directly translating areas of intensity within the image brightness into layers of audio manipulation. @Semiconducting
Singular Occurrence of a Fall
Anaïs Tondeur & Jean-Marc Chomaz, 2014 (1’ 13)
Produced with PhD students during an art and science workshop at Cambridge University, this is one of a series of video pieces that reconstruct in the laboratory the effects of an earthquake on the lost island of Nuuk.
@newscientist
@CultureLabNS
#SFL15
On Saturday 30 May, fantasy takes over the future
There’s an official webpage coming, but in the meantime, here’s a bit of mischief I’m planning with New Scientist and SCI FI LONDON in a corner of the British Film Institute on the afternoon of Saturday 30 May.
We’ll Eventbrite all this to get an idea of numbers but it’s free — drop in, heckle, throw peanuts, and above all buy me beer afterwards..
The wildest and most outlandish stories are slipping through the screens, cabinets and wall-spaces of our most treasured institutions and into the streets and squares of the real world.
Kicked off with a keynote by multi-award winning science fiction writer Alastair Reynolds, this packed afternoon of short films and discussions explores how stories, games and falsehoods are guiding us towards an uncertain tomorrow.
Curators Robert Devcic and Doug Millard lead us through a bizarre world of unreal exhibits — objects and films and documents that purport to be from future times and unreal places. These mock-ups are meant to entertain, baffle and provoke us — but what happens when we can no longer tell the difference between them and the real thing?
In the company of Pat Kane, Meg Jayanth and Shrinking Space we explore the fun and games to be had in making up and playing the future. Can we ever ready ourselves for the unexpected? And might the games we play now lead us into making the wrong choices in the future?
And Georgina Voss, Paul Graham Raven and (via Skype) Regina Pedszus, will help us discover how mock-ups, simulations and rehearsals are bearing on the real world, and making science fiction real.
Interspersed with short films, video art and live readings, New Scientist‘s afternoon at Sci Fi London will take science fiction off the screen and jam it under your skin.
Dialling out
Bumper, Blackspot and Stateless. Three short films by the critical designer and futurist Tobias Revell, with cinematographer Joseph Popper.
Silent, Mostly unpeopled. Still. Lighthouse, Brighton’s digital agency, commissioned these films for House 2014, the town’s annual visual arts festival, which runs until 25 May.
A woman hunts out a digital shadow from where, unmolested, she can dial up vital personal information.
A man hunkers down on Dungenness beach to access domestic French web-servers in an attempt to evade trading restrictions.
A journalist wipes his personal identity and assembles a new one in minutes, to evade the forces of state security.
This is what these films are about. What they actually do is different. What they give you. Calm, and silence, and – oddly – a sense of there being nothing to see.
Roll film again: a woman walks through an industrial estate, studying her smart phone. A man crouches inside a fisherman’s tent, his back to the camera. Another man sits down in a library, then leaves.
The events, the implications, the politics of states and borders, are clear enough, and are what gives these films their pompous portmanteau title – The Monopoly of Legitimate Use, indeed – and their utility for a festival centred around ideas of “migration, refuge and territory”.
But these events, these transactions and transgressions, aren’t really taking place in the physical world at all. They are taking place on-line; on and in and behind glass; at most, in the reflections of tears.
They are not cold films, but they do locate their human action in the digital elsewhere, leaving their actors largely inexpressive, their turmoils and triumphs implied through the plot. Told, not shown.
The result is strangely hopeful. Revell’s is world of borders and restrictions, by-laws and embargoes. But his people, through the cumulative effect of countless subtle transgressions, have already evaded it. They are not escaping, they have already escaped, to the Other Side.
Stand me a vodka at this year’s Scifiweekender and I will sing to you of the steppe…
I’m off to north Wales on St David’s Day to take part in this year’s Scifiweekender. It’s being held at the Hafan y Mor Holiday Park near Pwllheli and will probably look something like this
though given the weather it could end up looking like this
and will add a chilly authenticity to Simon’s exploration of Soviet cinema, space exploration, and all things Klushantsev.
Saturday’s RAILWAY TO THE STARS is, a celebration of Russia’s spirit of exploration through Russian film. I’ll also bring along some off-prints of Arc to give people a flavour of what we’re up to.
The 2013 Scifiweekender runs from 1 to 3 March. Call the ticket hotline on 08700 110034.
Electric Shadows
From 12-14 October 2012, the Kontraste Festival – curated by Sonic Acts – reverberates across Krems, a pretty town on the Danube famous for its art galleries, staggeringly good white wine, and one of the world’s best preserved panopticon prisons. On Saturday I’ll be discussing how, adapted as we are to a rich visual world, we will have to learn to tolerate the limited colour palette and visual monotony of the rest of the universe. This is one of the more left-field contributions; for the most part the weekend is filled with a wild assortment of scientifically literate sound artists Playing with Our Brains. This sort of thing:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYuahvxS2KM&w=640&h=480]
There’s also a film programme, like this:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnzvjaXbLIc&w=640&h=480]
with a touch of this:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrvbHEov3L8&w=853&h=480]
If you can’t make it up the Danube, there’s always the book.
Strangeness in Chelsea
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sM8yjJYM8w?wmode=transparent]
While Bloomsbury were publishing The Eye, filmmaker Nichola Bruce was completing The Strangeness of Seeing, an avant-garde alphabet of vision made in collaboration with the artist Rebecca Marshall. All 26 films are being screened at the Chelsea Arts Club on Monday, 24 October at 6.30pm, and Nichola’s asked me to join her for the Q&A afterwards. We’re allowed fifteen guests between us, so if you’d like to come along, drop me a line.Recalling Metropolis at Clapham Picturehouse
Thanks to the splendid Pod Delusion, here’s a recording of my conversation with Simon Frantz at CineSci6.