time machine // database // travel guide
timespace coordinates: 2010’s Denmark
The Guilty (Danish: Den skyldige) is a 2018 Danish thriller film co-written and directed by Gustav Möller. The film stars Jakob Cedergren, Jessica Dinnage, Omar Shargawi and Johan Olsen.
“Sleek, well-acted, and intelligently crafted, The Guilty is a high-concept thriller that wrings maximum impact out of a handful of basic – and effective – ingredients.” Rotten Tomatoes
timespace coordinates: England July 1984
Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is a 2018 interactive film in the science fiction anthology series Black Mirror. It was written by series creator Charlie Brooker and directed by David Slade. Netflix released it on 28 December 2018 as a standalone film. In Bandersnatch, viewers make decisions for the main character, the young programmer Stefan Butler (Fionn Whitehead) who adapts a fantasy novel into a video game in 1984. Other characters include Mohan Thakur (Asim Chaudhry) and Colin Ritman (Will Poulter), both of whom work at a video game company, Butler’s father, Peter (Craig Parkinson) and Butler’s therapist, Dr. Haynes (Alice Lowe). The film is based on a planned Imagine Software video game of the same name which went unreleased after the company filed for bankruptcy. It also alludes to Lewis Carroll‘s own works that feature the bandersnatch creature. A piece of science fiction and horror, Bandersnatch incorporates meta-commentary and rumination on free will.
Presentation – Bandersnatch is presented as an interactive film. A brief tutorial, specific to the device being streamed on, explains to the viewer how to make choices. They have ten seconds to make choices, or a default decision is made. Once a playthrough ends, the viewer is given an option of going back and making a different choice. The average viewing is 90 minutes, though the quickest path ends after 40 minutes, and at least one path results in a 2.5 hour viewing experience. There are 150 minutes of unique footage divided into 250 segments. IGN reports that according to Netflix, there are five “main” endings, with variants within each ending; such endings may be intercut with credits, similar to other Black Mirror episodes. Producer Russell McLean said there are between ten and twelve endings, some of which are more vague as endings compared to others, and according to director David Slade, there are a few “golden eggs” endings that may take a long time before viewers figure out how to achieve them. No ending is considered “prescribed” over any other, according to executive producers Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones, particularly as they felt some endings were not truly endings in the traditional sense. In most cases, when the viewer reaches an ending, the interactive film gives the player the option to redo a last critical choice as to be able to explore these endings, or they can alternatively view the film’s credits. In some cases, the same segment is reachable in multiple different ways, but will present the viewer with different choices based on the way they reached the segment. In other cases, certain loops guide viewers to a specific narrative regardless of the choices they make. Some endings may become impossible to reach based on choices made by the viewer, unless they opt to restart the film. This action will erase all stored information about which options they had selected while watching the episode on that device.
Analysis – The term “bandersnatch” originates from a fictional creature created by Lewis Carroll, which appear in his 1870s poems “Jabberwocky” and “The Hunting of the Snark“. The film makes several allusions to Carroll’s works. Part of Butler’s motivation is to find his stuffed rabbit toy which leads him to discover deeper secrets, comparable to Alice‘s quest to find the White Rabbit in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Ritman and his girlfriend Kitty lead Butler into a psychedelic experience in their flat, correlating to the Mad Hatter‘s tea party from the same story, with Kitty’s appearance even similar to that of the Hatter. At one point, Butler travels through a mirror, or literally following the action suggested by the title of Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. The design of the Pax is similar to Carroll’s own drawing of the Bandersnatch.
The “bandersnatch” term also relates to Bandersnatch, a planned video game by Imagine Software. One of several expensive “megagames” which Imagine Software worked on, Bandersnatch was never released as the company went bankrupt in 1984. Imagine’s closure was widely publicised as the events leading to it occurred at the time the BBC were featuring the company in its 1984 “Commercial Breaks” documentary series, and had cascading effects on the video game development industry in the United Kingdom. As an allusion, the film opens on 9 July 1984, the day Imagine was closed, and the cover of Crash with this news is featured in the film. The video game was mentioned in an Easter egg in series three episode “Playtest“, on the front cover of a magazine which is briefly shown onscreen.
Additionally, the story shares elements of the works of Philip K. Dick, who frequently wrote on alternate realities and timelines. The Davies character is an allusion to Dick, who had frequently used recreational drugs throughout his life, and at one point attempted to kill his wife. Dick’s work Ubik is visually referenced in the film. Brooker also compares the story to the 1993 comedy fantasy Groundhog Day, about a character who re-lives the same day repeatedly. Some of the themes of lack of free will, monitoring, and control, as well as the 1984 setting, led to comparisons to George Orwell‘s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Bandersnatch has elements of comedy, horror, pathos, science fiction and a 1980s period piece. David Griffin of IGN compares it to the adventure video game series The Walking Dead, whose first instalment was released in 2012, and the 2018 adventure game Detroit: Become Human. At one point, Thakur mentions that Butler’s game has no need to type in “get lamp”, which is the first necessary command that the player must use in the first text adventure game, Colossal Cave Adventure, and the title of a documentary about the onset of interactive fiction. (wiki)
imdb / https://tuckersoft.net/ / nohzdyve/
timespace coordinates: late 8th century at the border of Helheim
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is a dark fantasy action-adventure game developed and published by the British video game development studio Ninja Theory. Self-described as an “independent AAA game“, it was created by a team of approximately twenty developers led by writer and director Tameem Antoniades.
Inspired by Norse mythology and Celtic culture, Hellblade follows Senua, a Pict warrior who must make her way to Helheim by defeating otherworldly entities and facing their challenges, in order to rescue the soul of her dead lover from the goddess Hela. In parallel, the game acts as a metaphor for the character’s struggle with psychosis, as Senua, who suffers from the condition but believes it to be a curse, is haunted by an entity known as the “Darkness”, voices in her head known as “Furies”, and memories from her past. To properly represent psychosis, developers worked closely with neuroscientists, mental health specialists, and people suffering from the condition.
The game blends several genres, including hack and slash, puzzle solving, and psychological horror. Voice acting is an integral part of the game, while its cutscenes combine motion capture by Melina Juergens, and live action performances by other actors. (wiki)
“The Minds of Men” is a 3+ year investigation into the experimentation, art, and practice of social engineering and mind control during the Cold War – a mind-bending journey into the past that gives startling insight into the world we are living in today.
(Directors: Aaron & Melissa Dykes Runtime: 3h 43min) imdb
timespace coordinates: city of Rapture 1968
BioShock 2 is a first-person shooter video game developed by 2K Marin and published by 2K Games. A part of the Bioshock series, it is the sequel to the 2007 video game BioShock and was released worldwide for Microsoft Windows, the PlayStation 3, and the Xbox 360 on February 9, 2010. Feral Interactive released an OS X version of the game on March 30, 2012. A remastered version of the game was released on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on September 13, 2016, as part of BioShock: The Collection.
Set in the fictional underwater dystopian city of Rapture, the game’s story takes place eight years after BioShock. Assuming control of Subject Delta, a hulking Big Daddy, players are tasked with fighting through “splicers”, the psychotic human population of the city, using weapons and an array of genetic modifications. The game also introduces a story-driven multiplayer mode called Fall of Rapture, which takes place during Rapture’s 1959 civil war, before the events of the first game.
(Themes) In contrast to the first BioShock‘s focus on libertarianism and Ayn Rand’s philosophies, BioShock 2 focuses on collectivist ideals. Lamb’s philosophy of altruism is based on that of Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill. “Her motto is ‘Make the world your family’ meaning force your mind into becoming loyal to the world in a way usually reserved for your child, and that’s intellectually daunting,” said Thomas. In comparison to the first game’s questions of free will and destiny, Thomas said that the player character is “almost the ultimate individual” whom Lamb goads to fulfill her goals.
Professor Ryan Lizardi draws parallels between BioShock 2‘s themes of community versus the individual and the issues of McCarthyism and the hippie movement that occurred around the time period of the game’s setting. “As this sequel is an extension of the first game’s storylines and characters, there are direct contrasts between the extreme politics of Andrew Ryan’s objectivism and the extreme religion/politics of Lamb’s collectivism,” he writes. “Bioshock 2 specifically asks players to question all sides of debates when extreme stances are taken, and asks players to weigh their decisions in an alternate and complex history. ” (wiki)
steam // www.bioshock2game.com
Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system/ OS: Windows 7 Service Pack 1 64-bit. Platform Update for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1/ Processor: Intel E6750 Core 2 Duo 2.66 GHz / AMD Athlon X2 2.7 GHZ / Memory: 4 GB RAM / Graphics: 2GB AMD Radeon HD 7770 / 2GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 / DirectX: Version 11 / Storage: 25 GB available space / Sound Card: DirectX Compatible Sound Device
timespace coordinates: rural northern England in the late Seventies and early Eighties
“Combining bittersweet comedy with mental illness can’t be easy but Jo Brand, making her feature-film debut as a writer and drawing on her years as a psychiatric nurse, does an impressive job with The More You Ignore Me.” Matthew Bond Director: Keith English
As the world around us increases in technological complexity, our understanding of it diminishes. Underlying this trend is a single idea: the belief that our existence is understandable through computation, and more data is enough to help us build a better world.
In reality, we are lost in a sea of information, increasingly divided by fundamentalism, simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics. Meanwhile, those in power use our lack of understanding to further their own interests. Despite the apparent accessibility of information, we’re living in a new Dark Age.
From rogue financial systems to shopping algorithms, from artificial intelligence to state secrecy, we no longer understand how our world is governed or presented to us. The media is filled with unverifiable speculation, much of it generated by anonymous software, while companies dominate their employees through surveillance and the threat of automation.
In his brilliant new work, leading artist and writer James Bridle surveys the history of art, technology, and information systems, and reveals the dark clouds that gather over our dreams of the digital sublime. (VERSO)
man always makes it clear to himself: “You are using things which have the intention of not being penetrable.” 1180
TimeSpace Warps 