Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education

"You are a sensory archive": fine short film

"And I Refuse To Forget" is a brilliant very short film about memory and espionage.  It's barely 3 minutes long, and crammed with ideas, plots, satire, melancholy, fetish, and longing. 

(via MetaFilter)

High Tech Noon: Better than Firefly

"High Tech Noon" is a fun mix of High Noon (1952) with sf and gaming visual and audio effects.

Much better than Firefly.

(via MetaFilter)

Beware the Tokyo Gore Police

Tokyo Gore Police is an impending horror movie which has some kind of plot.  But it's this trailer - oh yes, so NSFW - that's worth watching, for sheer gonzo Asian Gothic who-knows-what? madness:

(via Warren Ellis)

It's a lifestyle choice. It's perfectly natural.

Science/culture satire for the day: gay scientists are isolating the Christianity gene.

Sweding The Shining

A new twist on fanfiction: The Shining, "Sweded":

Another fine hoax story: Alternative 3

Has anyone seen Alternative 3?  This was a British tv hoax from the 1970s, with an excellent conceit.  It was the final episode of a non-fiction, fact-based science show, Science Report, and broadcast by the reputable Anglia Television.

The show opens on a tone of somber journalism, reporting on a previous story which fizzled, concerning Britain's "brain drain."  That serious tone is maintained throughout, never wavering, as the reporter unfolds a tale of possible abduction, reticent scientists, disappearing witnesses, environmental disaster, secret video tapes (and video decoder cards!), a mad astronaut, and apocalyptic US-Soviet collaboration.  It's like an X-Files episode from an alternate history, but bleaker, on a far lower budget, and aimed by the end squarely at the fourth wall.  Only the final credits, and the labeled broadcast date (April 1), bring us back from the edge.

In its full range Alternative 3 feels proto-ARG-like, as BlackBeltJones notes.  See, some viewers and people who read about the story became convinced that there must have been a cover-up.  In a recursive way, Anglia TV's program is to the actual truth what Apollo was to the Mars colony.  Books are out there, apparently, and of course websites.  There's even a YouTube video called Alternative 3, but containing different content (also on Google Video).

Still more goodies:

• Brian Eno contributed music.
• It was supposed to be shown on April 1st, but hit the airwaves later.
• This has got to be an influence on Warren Ellis' Planetary, issue 6 (like this, too).
• Wikipedia agrees with me, that this feels a lot like that episode of Dimension X, "Man in the Moon," where postwar Nazis kidnap scientists to populate a lunar base.

(thanks to BlackBeltJones!)

"Whistle And I'll Come To You", movie of MR James story

The BBC TV adaptation of a classic M.R. James ghost story is on the web, Whistle and I'll Come To You.  It's from 1968, directed by Jonathan Miller, (Wikipedia), and keeps up the tale's basic idea (full title: "'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'").  Michael Hodern is excellent as the scholarly protagonist.

(via La Main Gauche)

Fearsome Google: StreetView in your home

"Beware Google's Surveillance Death-Ray" is a nifty short video exploring the fearmsome recursion of Google's StreetView.  It begins with a couple of guys checking out their own street through the service.  It should remind you of Cortazar or David Lynch.

(thanks to Brent Hiatt)

Message to Scientology: YouTube art

Declaration of war, manifesto of semiotic campaigning, net.art, or provocation to what? The  "Message to Scientology" YouTube clip reminds one of all of those, but glimpsed at 3 am on a rogue tv station.  A robotic voice chants out its warnings to the Scientologists, sketching out some plans before a cloud-scudded background:

Is there a rabbit hole opening up here?  Should we check for codes in the clouds or windows?

I filed this under "gaming and narrative" because that's precisely what the clip invites, playing games of identification, the multiplicity of which lead to stories.

Anonymous has therefore decided that your organization should be destroyed. For the good of your followers, for the good of mankind--for the laughs--we shall expel you from the Internet and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its present form.

(via Warren Ellis)

Creepy doll documentary from Channel Four, My Fake Baby

A documentary about "reborn" baby dolls and the people around them has been broadcast by Britain's Channel Four.  My Fake Baby can be watched on YouTube (parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5).  It addresses both the love some people feel for these dolls, as well as the creepiness others express in their presence.  There isn't much on the craft, nor on cultural resonances.

It's a spooky, sad, cruel show, following several people through their acquisition ("birthing") of new or first dolls ("reborns," "babies").  Ultimately it feels like a portrait of obsession, or part-time delusion, on the part of the owners ("parents").   Each case touches on psychological stress, from one woman obsessed with cleaning each pram's multiple sets of wheels, to the grandmother cheerily confronting her grandson with his infantile doppelganger.

Gendering is sharp and melancholy, with women the sole both producers and consumers, while men are either quietly polite or openly horrified (says one: "[the doll] looks like something on a mortuary slab").

There's a strong class dimension to the film as well.  We see one couple spending lavishly on props for their new and old dolls, and households well above working class.  The artisans, in contrast, are at far removed socio-economic levels.

I don't mean for My Fake Baby to sound unfunny, because it's very funny.  Flagged from the title, signalled by musical choices, satire oozes from some scenes, notably the bizarre one where one "mother" waits in a hotel room for (literally and discursively) delivery.  And the final YouTube slice has a great bit with one artisan's children goofing with doll body parts.  At one side the thing feels like American daytime tv, in its voyeurism and spectacular cruelty.

But it does offer a long trip through the uncanny valley.  There are chills throughout, from tables of doll bits to the uncanny accuracy of the dolls, baby components popped in a microwave to people recoiling in horror from a thing in the pram.

And yet the film's women express such joy and delight in the craft.  Their joy shines through satire and sarcasm.  One wonders about the intersections of gender or neurology and the uncanny valley.

The MetaFilter post from whence I learned about this video, has a long comments thread that covers a wide range of views.

We've discussed the reborn movement before, and I'd be delighted to hear commentators' reactions to this movie.  Those interested in dolls and the uncanny should follow that link to more discussion of other cases.