Contol It (Week 11)

Watching Waking Life is a disconcerting and exhilarating experience. It's relentless ontological pursuits are exciting in the way going beyond your comfort-level speed, down a hill, on a bike is. All this and it's just dialogue. It's hyper real quality, in both it's ambiguous portrayal of the character's journey (is he dead?) and the rotoscoped imagery, help undermine your sense of self-assurance in your own reality. It highlights certain issues of controlling powers be they, bio power or cultural forces, yet with the existentialist and the megaphone man offers a positive message that you should live your life aware the forces exist but not let them bring you down, live life like you have control.

Memento Mori (Week 10)

Susan Sontag said, and I'm not quoting her here, that mortality haunts a photograph, that they are a memento mori, that taking a photograph participates in our mortality and documents in the relentless march of time. Similarly though, in taking a photograph, you capture a moment, and subsequently time. So do you not capture that moment for eternity, or however long the photograph or negative of jpeg exists? The archivist of Photograph of the Day, he is dead, yet I felt that I was with him, at least in the capacity of a passive observer when I went through his photos. His body is gone, but he is not. His moments, his experiences, his ideas, the things he felt important are all contained in his archive. It is not an archive of a person's photographs but of a person. It is his story of life and death. It was a wise decision to refrain from adding contextual information, because it would have put a filter between the viewer and the man. The photographs do not passively represent the life either, they actively shaped his life as a daily event that had to happen come hell or high water, they were the structure to his life at some level, keel that kept him from drifting, something that he could look forward to each day.

Taylock (Week 9)

Archiving a childhood, good idea. What a way to learn about one's self and development also. I can remember playing a imagined game with my friend and his sister when I was probably about six or seven. I was some brave warrior going by my own name, my friend called himself Taylock, his name was really Taylor, and was the leader of a clan. His sister whose make believe name I can't recall, her name was Meredith, was his daughter and very passive. He was pleading with me, asking me not to kill his daughter, for what reason I wanted to kill her I don't know, because if I did, it would send her mother, who was already dead, into the seventh afterlife, and therefore spiritually irretrievable. Looking back, like the Jackson, we were exploring gender roles, or at least acting out what we learned at home: dominant men, passive women. Definitely more to glean from this example: issues of identity and perception of death, but I won't play that overly insightful intellectual authority the Jackson's love so much. Do archives garner a sense of authority, plainly because it is organized knowledge? Or do they have to be compiled by an authority? Or is the mere presence of an authoritative voice offering and introduction and synopsis do it?

UTAH BOUND (Week 8)

Peter Greenaway's Tulse Luper - 92 suitcase project is overwhelming. It is a universe. He has created a logic of knowing, where history and fiction are fused together and indistinguishable. It is counter intuitive to my own understanding of an archive, such as the Ryerson Archive, which is stale and dusty and operated by kind near-elderly women. With Tulse Luper it seems infinitely capable of growth and expansion, seeking to include more of whatever it can. Time in the Tulse Luper Archive is constant, all periods as accessible as the next, things that have happened are easily reachable or still happening and it is not yet finished, implying that there still need be things found to add, other than the suitcases themselves. It is such a creative, interactive, inclusive, didactic project. Each suit case contains and internal logic, a way of seeing the world. This is exemplified in the games themselves, as you enter the game in the suitcase, your supervisor suggests that "maybe you'll learn something." I think Greenaway wants his audience to see the different ways that each medium shapes, reminiscent of technological determinism, and alters ideas, by sharing the same or similar ideas over different mediums and seeing their variation. And, how brilliant is Tulse's adventure to UTAH to seek out the creative forces there, because of the Mormon's and their religious ideas. Drole.

Yellow and Bent (Week 7)

It was unfortunate that the "A Million Penguins" web page was unavailable, but oddly enough, reading its corresponding analytical paper was seemed like a story in itself. The way they categorized and described the behaviours of their more prolific contributors was as if they were describing characters in a story, a story about a people trying to write together. Pabruce the performer's attention seeking, often antagonistic behaviour, operating in the higher traffic pages, YellowBanana's obscure and poignant attacks of vandalism or serious contributions, and Sentinal68's pruning and nurturing edits, sowing the garden of the narrative, which was nonexistent. Because of a lack of organization and an poor grasp of wiki, which needs extensive and interwoven linking, the novel didn't pan out. But as the authors of the paper said, it was an assembly, a carnival, of contributors interacting and creating together, nothing in particular, writing at each other instead of with. I wish I could have participated, I'm not sure what role, if any I would have taken, the roles described in the paper all seem fun. I think I would have created different accounts for each function, with names reflecting their tactics. "The banana was yellow and bent."

Locative Steps (Week 6)

I enjoyed 21 Steps. It is not a locative narrative though. It does not make space into place. As the reader we are definitely in a particular space, high in the sky, a surveillance module for whoever is putting the main character through a test. But is not place. We are not immersed into the lived experience of a particular place, with its stories and kinks and dwellers. The deeper meaning of experiencing a locative narrative like Murmur, where the "reader" is told stories about a place by people who know it, while the "reader" is in it, is not achieved by following the movement of a line across a map. And, although 21 Steps is interactive, the interactivity does not bring you directly to the place as it does in Murmur.

I walked by a Murmur location the other it was at Church and Alexander. I would have called the number posted by my phone was dead, it was. I wonder how that place's meaning would have elaborated on what it already meant to me. I'll have to go back.

On His Own (Week 4)

He left with plenty of time to spare. He would have a coffee at the cafe across the street from the theater first. He'd worked them hard, late nights, vicious meticulousness, things had to be right, that's just the way they were. The horns sounded good in general, here and there they squeaked. He hailed a cab. "Take me to the Cotton Club." Rhythm's tight, but Max is hittin' the junk a lot these days, if he doesn't clean up I'm going to get rid of the fella.

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