Framed as a found footage film with a documentary prologue, it focuses on a Halloween night 1977 talk show episode in which the host, the ambitious Jack Delroy, invites a purportedly possessed girl onto the program in an attempt to boost ratings. (wiki)
This horror movie’s filmmakers ”The Cairnes Brothers” – Colin Cairnes and Cameron Cairnes– have said of this picture in an official statement: “In the ’70s and ’80s there was something slightly dangerous about late-night TV. Talk shows in particular were a window into some strange adult world. We thought combining that charged, live-to-air atmosphere with the supernatural could make for a uniquely frightening film experience.”
I appreciate all the examples of outsider artists (Darger, Adolf Wölfli or the efforts of Jean Dubuffet and others to highlight works by psychiatric patients) and independent directors, animators and young cinematographers going against all odds, against the aesthetic canon or against financial (sometimes from their former colonial masters) or formal limitations, or trying to not succumb to general precarious and exploitative conditions of cultural workers. At the same time what is completely lacking in this video is a sort of collective understanding of creativity or open culture and how exactly AIs or algos get trained on such bountiful public supplies put out by millions if not billions of us (not just artists) together.
A lot of the avant-garde abstract and intellectually challenging art or deemed non-commercial actually became not less monetized but more so with artworks, especially Western artworks that like coins tended towards greater and greater realms of abstraction. Instead of eschewing or making a virtue out of impoverishment or abstinence maybe there should have been some room for highlighting works that exemplify the economics of the art market in the 20th century .
I understand that such capitalist appropriation cannot be fought outside of the very copyright regime and IP rights it supposedly protects, but it somehow misses the point of such class or collective action lawsuits. Today there is more and more clear that artificial intelligence is grown fat on a privatizing large chunk of the general intellect, and the result is often neither artificial (being trained by human, or on human-derived materials), fair nor intelligent (because without humans supervision it is liable to make gross mistakes and reinforce systemic racism and red-lining). Even the works from the public domain are being used to train AIs.
Such edgelord exclusive focus on the outsider status or on the few that made it into the art canon (including heavies like Van Gogh) risks misunderstanding both old and new currents and ends up junking all the no-name fluctuations, crazy metamorphoses, and fan-economy phenomena. Everyone tends to lump all platforms together (Meta=FB=Tiktok), but since not only users, celebs and fans start to make distinctions and migrate from one to the other – but also geostrategic interests are involved, it is useless to just point at some vague faceless surveillance capitalism. We see this for example on banning Chinese ownership of the Tik Tok in the US and the intense bad press it got lately in correlation with its very success and popularity boost (not to mention other Chinese platforms that are somehow completely ignored by mainstay social platform analysis). How can you avail yourself of old financing structures while at the same time enthusiastically promoting new ones like crowd-funding or bitcoin (let us create monetization schemes based on fans – yeah, but how original is that I ask)?
Sorry for the rant, but this completely avoids the elephant in the room, what is happening with pop culture at this very moment – and how such paean to authenticity basically trash pop culture two times in a row: 1) by denying differences, attractions (even predatorial ones) or characteristics of the existing video platforms 2) by actually homogenizing, ignoring or pasting over and executing the very mechanisms of cultural homogenization it seeks to combat.
spacetime coordinates: AD 895 island of Hrafnsey / AD 914 land of the Rus,Iceland(during the early settlement of Iceland, also known as the “landnámsöld” (literally “age of land-taking”), before the establishment of the Althing.)
The Northman is a 2022 American epic historical fiction film directed by Robert Eggers, who co-wrote the screenplay with Sjón.
The plot follows Amleth, a Viking prince who sets out on a quest to avenge the murder of his father. (wiki)
It’s no great insult to suggest that The Northman, for all its impeccable craft and diligent verisimilitude, possesses an intrinsically adolescent appeal. This is teenager cinema par excellence, an opera of old-world mayhem fit for Beavis and Butthead. Eggers is drawing on The Icelandic Sagas, milestones of ancient Scandinavian storytelling, but in doing so, he’s also evoking a whole library of violent pulp entertainment distantly indebted to them: Comic books of barbarian combat, baroque fantasy novels of magic and murder, hack and slash dark-age video games. Certainly, few filmmakers have ever come closer to approximating the horns-up sensibility of heavy metal; were someone to adapt both the album art and lyrics of Swedish Viking-metal titans Amon Amarth for the screen, the results would surely resemble Eggers’ epic. (The Northman review: Viking mayhem for adolescents of all ages By A.A. Dowd)
Grotto is a mystical, narrative-focused experience. You are the Soothsayer. The one capable of talking with the stars and unveiling their messages. In a time of turmoil, the tribe of the valley turn to your powers of divination and come to you for guidance. (steam)
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS (MINIMUM):Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system / OS: Windows 7 or later / Processor: i3 or better / Graphics: NVIDIA GT 630 / 650m, AMD Radeon HD6570 or equivalent /Sound Card: N/A
TimeSpace Warps 