Posted in Uncategorized, tagged AC/DC, animated gifs, Back to the Future, Big Brother, Big Other, Byron the Bulb, Caravaggio, Cardassians, christmas, Continental Philosophy, David Bowie, David Warner, Donald Barthelme, Gravity's Rainbow, Jean-Luc Picard, John Madera, Nick Lowe, Nirvana, Saint Paul, Star Trek, The Borg, The Flash, The Goonies, Thomas Pynchon, Tiny Toons, Twitter, werewolves on October 23, 2012 | 5 Comments »
What’s happening in this image?
The leftmost light bulb is exploding.
Why would it do that?
Perhaps it wanted to? It’s the suicidal counterpart to Gravity’s Rainbow‘s Byron?
No.
Well then it simply overheated?
No. Please note that it hasn’t blinked out.
True, true.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged animated gifs on March 28, 2011 | 5 Comments »
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged AKJAK, animated gifs, animutations, Bill Viola, camera obscuras, cinema, commercials, Cremaster, experimental film, Flash animation, flipbooks, Fred Camper, Guns N' Roses, Gus Van Sant, installation art, Kanye West, Lumière Brothers, magic lanterns, Matthew Barney, Neil Cicierega, Procol Harum, Ridley Scott, Roger Ebert, Stan Brakhage, Taco the Wonder Dog, Thomas Edison, TV, Vader Sessions, video art, Video Games on January 24, 2011 | 9 Comments »
“The Serpentine Dance,” the Lumière Brothers (c. 1899) (still).
[Update 30 Jan 11: I've since written a follow-up to this post: "Why Do You Need So Many Cinemas?"]
“The movies” used to mean one thing—or we acted like they did. “I’m going to the movies.” “I saw a great movie the other night.” “You really ought to watch this movie.” But even though we often talk about “the movies,” or “films,” or “cinema,” or “the cinema” as a single, homogeneous thing, there is not just one thing, and never has been—a fact that grows increasingly apparent every year.
When most people say “the movies,” they mean “feature-length films.” These have existed since the early 1910s, and can be considered cinema’s most successful form—they’re the stereotype of motion pictures. They run somewhere between 90 minutes and 2 hours, perhaps a bit longer, and they debut (most of the time) in movie theaters. Then they become available on DVD; later they broadcast on TV, with commercial interruptions. That said, even this familiar model is changing; the length of time between theatrical run and DVD release has been shrinking, and we can see how DVDs themselves are doomed, the way that CDs have long been doomed: you don’t need little plastic discs when you can stream a feature directly to your computer or your TV, via Netflix or Hulu.
