[iDC] IPF09 Conference thoughts
Kevin Hamilton
kham at uiuc.edu
Mon Dec 7 19:38:54 UTC 2009
Judith,
I know you asked Brian and not the rest of us, but I must say I quite
liked this image/example - American Grafitti is set up much like
Mutual of Omaha's "Wild Kingdom."
Each agent (or at least each male agent) roams or cruises around the
space of the city, their behavior explainable only through chance or
archetype. Wolfman Jack provides the common heartbeat, synching actors
without merging them or losing distinctiveness. (Lucas and sound
designer Murch even modeled this behavior in the sound design, roaming
around a studio lot with a microphone and a speaker to create the
sonic space.) It's a romantic predictability, the "boys will be boys"
doing their thing on the edge of chaos (Vietnam).
Maybe that awful franchise, Fast and the Furious is the cybernetic
sequel - automotive performance is simply a matter of hacking the
engine computer, and everything else about the car customization is
just a demographic signal, computed for maximum investment in the box-
office returns. Granular effects and stunts-per-second rule the day.
Neither are desirable, but the move (again, prompted by Orit's work)
is significant. Perhaps there are some scholars of cinema or the
automobile who will strike me down on this...
Kevin
On Dec 7, 2009, at 11:24 AM, Judith Rodenbeck wrote:
> Brian, can you unpack:
>
>> its classic forms, the cliches of American Grafitti: a society whose
>> epistemological base was still more behaviorist than cybernetic,
>> despite
>> the feedback loops that started coming into play in the 1950s through
>> the monitoring of consumer reception.
>
> This feels terminologically off somehow....
>
>
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