Archive for the ‘film’ Category
Faint Cinder
Halt and Catch and Fire was one of the greatest character dramas made and no one watched it. Maybe its name scared too many away thinking it would be a smart-assed comment on technology, or another meander into 80s and 90s nostalgia. In its funny and passing moments it functioned this way but pushed far […]
Filed under: art, fantasy, feminism, film, television, video games | Leave a Comment
Tags: computer history, gaming, halt and catch fire, technology
Cyborgian Gaia
Post-apocalyptic narratives crowd current fiction, television, film, and videogames. Horizon: Zero Dawn combines two versions of these narratives and actually makes an interesting, if slightly abstract, point about anthropogenic climate change. In the game you play a young woman named Eloy who is a hunter from a matriarchal tribe. The wilderness around you is rather […]
Filed under: art, feminism, film, gender, literature, nature, television | Leave a Comment
Tags: Borne, ecological politics, haraway, horizon zero down, jeff vandermeer
The Present Alone is Our Sadness
For a plot summary you may go here. For another take see here. Firewatch has been generally praised as a playable narrative and less as a game. As a narrative, however, its ending has been critiqued as has the various details of its story. The supposedly anti-climatic ending is central to the theme of the […]
Filed under: art, comic books/graphic novels, film, television, trauma, video games | 1 Comment
Tags: affect, Bioshock, Firewatch, fps, William James
The massiveness of the nuclear is ‘lightened’ only by a catastrophe. The Earth is geophilosophically and geopolitically frustrating because it’s an ongoing nuclear disaster (a great heat engine as James Hutton understood it) but one that is metastable while proving itself the ground of all production whether noetic or material. Whether the collecting of ferrite […]
Filed under: Deleuze, fantasy, film, history, Iain Hamilton Grant, literature, nature, ontology, politics, Schelling | 2 Comments
Tags: Akira, anthropocene, geophilosophy, geopolitics, Godzilla, kate paterson, nuclear disaster, nuclear waste, Pacific Rim, slow violence
One of the core concepts of the neo-rationalist (and more broadly pragmatist) camp is that of boot-strapping – that certain capacities or processes, are capable of self-augmentation. While less colloquially discussed in terms of recursion (invoking a functionalist or mathematical context) boot-strapping indexes the material consequence of such activity or, in a related fashion, that […]
Filed under: art, film, Hegel, history, Iain Hamilton Grant | 4 Comments
Tags: accelerationism, Edge of Tomorrow, Looper, mark wilson, peirce, pragmatism, Primer, recursion, reza negarestani, Schelling, self-augmentation, time travel
Post-Lisbon/PAF
Being back stateside I finally have some time to reflect on some recent events in Europe. I already reported on the Berlin Summer school here but, following that, I was in Lisbon for one week for a great event organized by Margarida Mendes. The week-long summer school focused on geo-philosophy and mattering which addressed issues […]
Filed under: art, Deleuze, film, gender, Hegel, Kant, nature, politics | Leave a Comment
Tags: agi, beauty, deleuze, foucalt, freedom, inhumanism, justice, Lucca Fraser, pete wolfendale, reza negarestani, spinzoa
Recent and Forthcoming Events
Things having calmed a bit I will try and do more regular postings here. The two lectures for the Congress of Pessimism seemed to well…I discussed reason as a kind of wandering insignificance – where the reasoner is a wayward figure stuck between the desert of reason and the ocean of nature. I hope to […]
Filed under: art, film, Iain Hamilton Grant, nature, ontology, Schelling, Speculative Realism | Leave a Comment
Tags: aesthetics, finitude, geophilosophy, geopolitics, nature, nick land, Philosophy, reza negarestani, science fiction
The post was partially inspired by Sarah Marshall‘s piece Beyond Clarice at the Hairpin. I’ve mentioned several times that I have the fantasy of retreating to a cabin somewhere, watching an egregious amount of horror films (though I wonder how many one has to watch as I’ve already seen around 200), and writing a book […]
Filed under: art, Copjec, fantasy, feminism, film, gender, politics, television, trauma | 1 Comment
Tags: Beyond the Black Rainbow, feminist horror, gore, halloween, horror films, horror movies, the descent, the love ones, valerie leon
When Facebook’s new Timeline look was announced a few months back a brilliantly funny video lampooned it by taking a clip from Mad Men where Don Draper is doing a presentation on Kodak’s new photograph slide show device. In the episode the Eastman-Kodak execs want to call the device the wheel harping on the fact […]
Filed under: art, Badiou, Deleuze, film, history, trauma | 1 Comment
Tags: 80s movies, don draper, drive, facebook, facebook timeline, mad men, memory-image, new media, nostalgia, time-image, timeline
Toy Story 3 ecology
There is a strong ecological current in Toy Story 3. At its most simplified form Toy Story 3 is 1 Corinthians 13:11 meets reduce, reuse, recycle. Childish things must be properly put away in order to move on not in a generic emotional sense but in an ecological sense. The leering threat of TS3 is […]
Filed under: fantasy, film, ontology | Leave a Comment
Tags: ecology, pixar, toy story 3
Naught Thought 