HUPOMNEMATA

by Muriel Andrin

Before anything else, it is pleasure in its barest expression. Pure fun
watching Lara’s new tricks and adrenaline-driven scenes. Punching the shark,
riding on the Chinese Wall, free diving in Chinese skies, kicking the
villain’s ass… The confrontation with the shark is not innocent or
arbitrary. Just like one of Jan De Bont’s previous film, « Speed », « Tomb
Raider II – The Cradle of Life » works as one: it’s got to keep on moving –
threatening to die at the shortest suspension of movement, contrary to one
of the film’s key moments when Shadow-Guardians hunt & kill moving bodies
and absorb them into the stones. Movement is then the first key word; boats,
cars, trucks, bikes, planes, parachutes, walking, running, swimming or
fighting help finding the true pace of the film. In a nutshell: speed.
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Have you ever dreamed to be a super heroe with super powers? Your dreams might com true if you read Wired magazine, August 2003 issue. To be invisible, to fly, to have x-ray vision, to travel in time, regenerate body parts, is just a matter of time and science. As Wired says, ‘Forget about Science Fiction.Here’s Science’ Future is ours folks!

Stitch and Split

“And why not a fanzine?”

One of Tom’s work.

Selves and Territories in Science Fiction

“The split and contradictory self is the one who can interrogate positionings and be accountable, the one who can construct and join rational conversations and fantastic imaginings that change history. Splitting, not being, is the privileged image for feminist epistemologies of scientific knowledge. ‘Splitting’ in this context should be about heterogeneous multiplicities that are simultaneously necessary and incapable of being squashed into isomorphic slots or cumulative lists. This geometry pertains within and among subjects. The topography of subjectivity is multidimensional; so therefore is vision. The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly, and therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming be another.”
Donna Haraway, Situated Knowledges

A project by Constant vzw
For Fundació Tàpies
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Stitch and Split
I met Isabelle, the 19th of June, at le Ptit Yoyo at Brussels University, a dark place painted in red. We had expressos, and chatted about the project called ‘Stitch and Split’. Well maybe it is time that one of the first draft of this project should be on this blog, so next post will contain it. One of the thing Isabelle told me was: ‘Never destroy a text before you write a new (better?) version of it.’ She told me also that we should write a diary of this project, to document it. So these posts are part of that diary, and I guess most of this blog is part of that too, in a way. Again Isabelle: that may be this project, will be a way we could visit one another library, exchange experience of reading, exchange books, texts, characters. Have fan activities, as this diary could be like a fanzine. One of her questions, trails for this projects: ‘What is about science fiction which allows fans to enter it, and be creative with it, and use, develop their imagination? May be because there is the creation of precise world, with its rules, its geography, its ecology, and characters. And this framework allows imagination at work.’ And she told me about Marion Zimmer Bradley, who published fan stories in some of her books. Fans were welcome to create new characters in her world, but not allowed to take and write the characters she created first.
She talked to me also about David Brin, CJ Cherryh, Samuel Butler. If you want to follow this conversation, go on reading.
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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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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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Just a word on ‘Intacto’ a Spanish movie, not much seen, a pity because it is an interesting movie about a world when men believe that they have luck or not, and they can loose it by being touched, but they can also acquire more luck if they buy other’s luck through their bodies, their images. A world where women believe than luck, meaning fate can be modified just by taking the word when it is necessary, just by saying at the right time: ‘I don’t love you anymore’. But because endlessly it is a man’s world, guess who survives?
On the movie

Is this a blog dedicated to science-fiction? Just to reveal the discussions behind the curtains…is this a blog dedicated to science-fiction, then I can talk or should talk about what I experienced last week as spectator seeing ‘The 25th hour’ by Spike Lee. Just to make a link to my previous post: now I have also in my icones’closet: Edward Norton as Montgomery Brogan (his mother loved Montgomery Clift). Concerned as we are by a feminist-gendered approach, how did this ‘transfert’ of identity happen?
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