HUPOMNEMATA

HK Video recently started releasing (in France) dvd’s of Seijun Suzuki movies starring Joe Shishido.

“Shishido made his screen debut in the February 1955 release Keisatsu-ki (Police Report). Shishido initially played the role of a lover with a skinny face, but decided to puff up his cheeks by plastic surgery in an attempt to emerge as an impudent bad guy. This bold decision paid off when he won a major role in the 1958 Moeru Nikutai (Burning Flesh)”

This is the result of the surgery, one of the strangest face in film history. You can find a lot more info on this beautiful website. (including a before/after photograph and images from his cooking television show!)

Plenty of wild wired promises are already being made for all the infant media. What we need is a somber, thoughtful, thorough, hype-free, even lugubrious book that honors the dead and resuscitates the spiritual ancestors of today’s mediated frenzy. A book to give its readership a deeper, paleontological perspective right in the dizzy midst of the digital revolution. We need a book about the failures of media, the collapses of media, the supercessions of media, the strangulations of media, a book detailing all the freakish and hideous media mistakes that we should know enough now not to repeat, a book about media that have died on the barbed wire of technological advance, media that didn’t make it, martyred media, dead media. THE HANDBOOK OF DEAD MEDIA. A naturalist’s field guide for the communications paleontologist.
Bruce Sterling

see the dead media project

suggested by michel cleempoel

“Ever since computers began to make the physical presence of workers less necessary, many ideas have been put forward, all trying to answer one of the most popular questions asked by businessmen: How to save money and take advantage of new technology?

A few years ago Roger H. Buck, computer scientist and president of Remote Labor Systems, had the invented a concept which he would name “Cybracero.”

“Cybracero is a program that uses robotic technology to replace the bracero, who has to travel from other countries to work in the fields of this country. Through Cybracero, robots take care of the agricultural tasks like planting seeds, and harvesting, by being remote-controlled by workers who stay in their country of origin,” explained a spokesman for Remote Labor Systems, in an interview with La Opinión.”

read on: cybracero

“A modern day woman is given a task by God–what if she refuses?”

There is a new short story (The book of Martha) by Octavia Butler on SciFiction this week.

At least in the United States.

Wong Kin Yuen writes (in Science Fiction Studies) about why cyberpunk stories always end up happening in Hong Kong

“Science fiction has not fared well in Hong Kong (either in terms of production or consumption), nor is there a cyberpunk culture among Hong Kong’s young computer users. So the question arises: what elements in Hong Kong provided inspiration for this cinematic representation of a near-future city characterized by decadence, anarchy, and fantasy on the one hand, and a mistrusted, high-tech hyper-reality on the other? Taking up this question, I will first suggest a reading of a shopping complex in Hong Kong that emphasizes its fragmentation, disjunctiveness, and ephemerality. Like Blade Runner’s “Ridleyville,” this Hong Kong shopping complex intertwines past and future, memory and desire. Finally, I will analyze the setting of Ghost in the Shell, especially the parts that are clearly modeled on Hong Kong street scenes and architecture. I hope to validate Anthony King’s argument that colonial cities have the best chance of establishing a cityscape of the future that embraces racial and cultural differences.”

Full text there

So let’s go back to where we were, I mean the words, Neo and Trinity: death (of the woman) linked to sexual pleasure linked to knowledge linked to a choice. When Neo passes through the door full of light, well he comes to the ‘father’ (sigh), called here the Architect, who announces him that he is as much written, programmed as anyone else in the Matrix. That he is the six one of the One if i may say so. The One chosen to reprensent a kind of controle by giving hope, belief to make the system works. Gosh I think I am telling the end… So or Neo accepts to be deconstructed, meaning his ‘code si spread’, but first he can choose people of the mankind to go on believing, reboot the machine and the system works, the game goes on. Or he wants to save Trinity and by the same way himself, himself as this peculiar agency of experiences and feelings, but in both cases, Zion will be destroyed.
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Let’s take this image, maybe it will lighten the dark side of what I quoted yesterday. I mean a part of it. The first scene of the movie, is quite a beautiful fight with Trinity and her helmet against guards (remember you something?) Yes you have the impression to enter the same way you were in the first episode. Then a cut, and you see her throwing herself through her window to escape an agent, the agent follows her and they shoot each other falling. She is hitten by a bullet and falls. Neo wakes up, it was a dream, she is sleeping along side him.
If you don’t want to know what follows don’t go on reading.
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A very documented archive of the interconnection of electromagnetism, matter, energy and information.
If you only have just one minute, these samples will give you an idea of the general imagery:

• sample 1
• sample 2

but if you have more time, just d i v e into it.

Here it is , I saw The Matrix Reloaded. So as I should, I am going to write about it. But as some of you haven’t seen it yet, I will go by steps.
Let’s begin with this choice “Freedom or death”. If everything is written like a program is written, if we are part , or within a system, with its loops in time, its bugs, its failures. Let me tell you what I was reading the day before I saw the movie and how weirdly enough it was a key of reading the movie. I don’t think that the directors have found any inspiration in Lacan or Hegel, I am just talking about coincidences…but is there coincidence?
If you don’t want to know, don’t go on reading , it is your own choice.
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