Fahrenheit 451: passive consumption through audience participation
"When the 'Family' (the television with its 'cousin' announcers and actors) presents an interactive play in which Linda believes she has a role, an actor (Donald Pickering) wearing glasses with thick, black rectangular frames, turns to the camera as it zooms in on him and says, 'What do you think, Linda?'"
(Tom Whalen, Gale Student Resources In Context)
Whalen, Tom. "The Consequences of Passivity: Re-evaluating Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451," in Literature-Film Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 3, July, 2007, pp. 181(10).
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Animate Projects: Digitalis Commissions
"Animate Projects, with support from the Jerwood Charitable Foundation, invites UK-based artists and animators to submit proposals for films that - in a broad sense - explore, question, subvert or confound our expectations of art and the 'digital'.
To apply, read the guidelines and download the submission form from the Opportunities section. The deadline for proposals is 4pm, 24 August 2011.
The Digitalis Commissions are part of Digitalis, a strand of activities for 2011 that focus on the potential of the digital space as a site for artistic production."
(Animate Projects)
Fig.1 Teaser for "AnimateTV - 20 Years of Experimental Animation from the UK" (DVD features acclaimed works by key figures in British artists’ animation, including Phil Mulloy, Paul Bush, Sarah Cox, Tim Macmillan, Run Wrake, Petra Freeman, Ruth Lingford, Jonathan Hodgson, AL and AL, Keith Piper, Andrew Kötting, Semiconductor, Chris Shepherd, David Shrigley, Stephen Irwin and Simon Faithfull).
Fig.2 Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (2008). "I'm Sucking on a Tailpipe in Seoul"
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Island: Stephen Walter's London Series
"London is one of the great living palimpsests of our time. Its layers of history and its constant energy to re-invent itself fuels this vast grey magnet. I was spurd on by the great Map Makers of London's past - John Roque, Greenwood and Phyllis Pearsall (the originator of the A-Z). Informed by my own insights and knowledge, I combined further research on the Internet and through writers such as Peter Ackroyd and Ian Sinclair.
The resulting map, a spoof of the historical ones of old, would challenge the first impressions of its viewer; touching on the Capital's vastness, its secrets and its undercurrents. With this process in mind, I began to edit the information, keeping what I felt were historically important, interesting, relevant and amusing. These fantastical additions and epithets are purposefully innocent and acidic, trivial and serious. The Map is as much about the personality of its viewer than it is about of my own. In other words it acts as a mirror.
Britain is a collection of islands and it undoubtedly forms part of our identity. This provincialism; the centre of many industries and in particular the London Centric Art world and its rise again to a world city status add to its identity as an icon, separated from the rest of the country. I wanted to perceive London as another one of these 'islands', and so when mapping the coastline around its Borough edges I was happy to discover Carshalton Beaches coinciding with this border."
(Stephen Walter)
Fig.1&2 Stephen Walter, "The Island"
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Klaxons' 'Twin Flames' Orgy Mutates Flesh, Fantasy
"Art-pop band Klaxons' new video for 'Twin Flames' is a subversive CGI orgy of mutant sex and FX. The promo reel for the latest single from Surfing the Void shows band members and multiracial schoolgirls morphing into one another in an ecstatic phantasmagoria that might be the opposite of sexy, depending on which side of the sensual divide you reside."
(Scott Thill, 19 November 2010, Wired Magazine)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Iranian popular theatrical forms through the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of carnival
"[Mikhail] Bakhtin's concept of carnival as a subversive, disruptive world-upside-down event in which the repressive views, lies, and hypocrisy of the officially run and dominated everyday world are unmasked provides a powerful theoretical concept for any study of Iranian popular theatrical and related musical forms. Bakhtin was concerned with polyvocality and the fact that from the onset of the European Renaissance the voices of the common people were increasingly not heard. The Islamic Republic's ban on the performance of improvisational comic theater would seem to support this theoretical stance with empirical evidence of official reaction. In the European context analyzed by Bakhtin, a writer, exemplified by Rabelais, enacts an important role because he or she reflects the voices of the low, the peasant, the outcast. In Bakhtin's view, the healthy voice of the low, which questions the high-the church and the state-is an important check on oppressive officials in a healthy society.
A full-fledged carnival—such as those in Rio de Janeiro and New Orleans—does not exist in the Iranian culture sphere. By carnival I mean a massive demonstration of excessive eating, drinking, and sexual and bodily exposure, popularly associated with Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, that does not occur within an Islamic/Iranian context. Threads and themes of carnivalesque and grotesque subversion, however, can be found woven through the fabric of the Iranian world. Here the needle that pricks the official religious, social, and political powers most is the traditional comic theater in its many guises.
In many ways siyah-bazi and ru-howzi embody Bakhtin's notions of the grotesque and the carnivalesque. Gholam-siyah, the blackface clown, the 'low Other,' always wins over his master: the world upside down. Gholam-siyah's extravagant clothing, movements, speech, and lower-class language demonstrate Bakhtin's dictum, 'the grotesque...cannot be separated from folk humor and carnival spirit' (Stallybrass and White 1986, 43). Gholam's bright red costume and conical hat, for example, are probably the closest thing to carnival costume in the entire Middle East. William O. Beeman, a scholar of Iranian linguistics, discusses the blackface clown: 'The clown distorts normal physical movement by jumping, running, flailing his arms, and twisting his body into odd shapes' (1981, 515). This is, of course, part of his repertoire, for sight gags make up much of the comedy of traditional comic theater. This grotesque twisting of the body is also part of the dancing that occurs in the comic theater, especially by the male characters."
(Mass Mediations)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
