Techdad Discussion

[talkin2snakes]

any teens know much about the video game 'prey'?

[bels]

New one on the space station or the old one with the native American

[INNIT]

i get what you're saying but the problem is the very grammar of those final images embodies the humanist cliches of thinking/being in the world that she mimicked earlier on ('are you a good person'? etc). the way they're shot/framed; sunlight blue skies etc. it's a structural problem with film that any time you use a POV we will implicitly recognise that as being the character's internal 'cut-up'.
.

ah, ok, fair enough. when i watched the film i was thinking primarily in terms of butler's gender performatives working in tandem with mulvey's scopohilia in a joint effort to dupe both the nerds and the audience (who are also probably nerds) into projecting both gender and sexuality onto the AIs, allowing for the "surprising" ending in which we find ava is indifferent to nathan, and impossible to represent using human identity categories. the audience is duped into seeing ava as female captive using textbook fragmentation shots (especially when she dresses up for the first time); nathan is duped through a parodic version of gender performance (save me, feigned infatuation, i want to go on a date with you, watch me dress up), all of this to conceal an interior that we can't really describe using human signifiers (classic scifi dilemma; basically impossible to represent a nonhuman consciousness, which is why posthumans usually end up leaving/fleeing humanity). i see little evidence in the film that ava cares at all about humans, other than what you mentioned about POV representing a character's interior.

[talkin2snakes]

it really is just that final sequence that slips the net, which is why i think its important. i saw an interview where garland said he thought about finishing with ava in the lift but felt it would then become the story of the nerd guy, and he wanted it to be ava's narrative (which as you say is almost impossible to represent anyway).
is 'who goes there' worth reading? i'd never even heard of it but funnily enough i was thinking the other day i'd like to watch 'The Thing' again

[bels]

I just read it at work and no

[INNIT]

you know what is worth a read: "blindsight." totally forgot about this novel but it expands on cp's obsession with consciousness/subjectivity in very interesting ways. do not be dissuaded by the space vampires and such, it's pretty good readin. also it's free on the guy's website (peter watts i think)

[talkin2snakes]

tbh im working on sci fi film project with trans artist and of course butler/mulvey identity/performativity is central, perhaps too much so. i want to engage with/exploit true nerds, how do i find them? sci fi/gamer forums?

[talkin2snakes]

i want it to be a proper film, not just meditation on identity/transmission etc. judith butler/derrida stuff is my 'natural' (lol) context, like i said i know very little about sci fi, what i want is people who can help frame this within the medium/genre. essentially i want people who can tell me stuff i don't know about/wouldnt think about or visualize.
anyway as i think i said before, ridley scott used my friend's drawing in 'alien covenant' and paid only £200 for image rights (partly because i forgot to call back and negotiate), so its not like nerds dont rip us off too

[thephfactor]

i want it to be a proper film, not just meditation on identity/transmission etc. judith butler/derrida stuff is my 'natural' (lol) context, like i said i know very little about sci fi, what i want is people who can help frame this within the medium/genre. essentially i want people who can tell me stuff i don't know about/wouldnt think about or visualize.
anyway as i think i said before, ridley scott used my friend's drawing in 'alien covenant' and paid only £200 for image rights (partly because i forgot to call back and negotiate), so its not like nerds dont rip us off too

From an artistic standpoint, if you're truly interested in framing your project within the genre, I think the way to do this would be simply to watch and read more sci-fi and come to your own conclusions about it. It would definitely result in more wholesome work than if you attempted to merely lift an impression from some arbitrarily selected sample of nerds. Or, you can shoot from the hip: your current level of familiarity and comfort with sci-fi elements. Tarkovsky's work, particularly Stalker, was based directly on genre fare but deliberately dialed back most of the genre elements into nearly unrecognizable form, while still being very appealing.

I can tell you what I found appealing in sci-fi, my favorite films and books, what they meant to me as a youngster when the "nerd" identity was something that appealed to me. But wouldn't it be more interesting if your work was based on your own experiences of the genre, for better or for worse?

[bels]

scifi is at this point a nonsensically large genre, which was never much of a real genre anyway (I'm sure you know this) so you probably need to be a bit more specific rather than "nerds"

(Given basically everyone thinks Westworld and Game of Thrones are peak culture atm the amount of "nerds" out there is pretty incalculable)

Also how much do you want for bloody image rights.

[talkin2snakes]

@thephfactor this seems a rather regressive, humanist approach tho? feel u r not a true nerd.
if there's one thing we can learn from the machines (a la lee sedol/alphaGo) surely it's that one should always utilise the hive-mind?

there was actually a very good example here a while back: i was talking about gaming (god knows why, last game i played was house of the dead), some guy talked about how in a game he had accidentally/indifferently killed a character who meant him no harm, and after he realised his mistake went back and restarted, only to be accosted by a new character who accused him of being a murderer trying to cover his tracks. which is exactly the kind ofgranular knowledge im talking about (whilst also feeling like a queasy dostoevskian dream). Presumably a moment that stood out from many hundreds/thousands of hours of game-time that i will never put in.
edit: also, im really lazy, do you think people get into the art game to do in-depth research??

[CheerUpBrokeBoy]

[CheerUpBrokeBoy]

current-day chinese surveillance system, straight out of a neill blomkamp movie

[sen2]

Does anyone know what the bullets say?

[nope]

It's the brand list for everything they're wearing. Whole thing's a massive automated SUTO thread and if you get too many neg reps you go to prison.

[rjbman]

Hey so Blade Runner 2049 is coming out soon. Denis Villeneuve had some shorts made that sort of fill in some of the gaps between the original (set in 2019) and the new one (set in 2049).





(last one is done by Shinichiro Watanabe of Bebop / Champloo fame)

[CheerUpBrokeBoy]

now that blade runner 2049 is coming out it's annoying to see all these pop culture critics try to make woke takes about how morally questionable deckard was in the original, like that wasn't absolutely the point of his character

[talkin2snakes]

didnt know neil blomkamp's shorts were here, the one i watched (dakota) was pretty good, obviously inspired by 'the thing'

https://oatsstudios.com/

[Northwest]

Blade Runner 2049 is so many things I wanted it to be, and so many things I couldn't have seen coming. I highly recommend it for anyone on this website, certainly. The costume design does so many fascinating things within the world that it is built on and expands. The production design, especially of the spaces where people live, is phenomenal.

I can't think of a movie that's made more of its budget than this one has. If people are going to spend money on enormous feats of imagination, we are lucky the stars aligned for this one.

[bels]

Blade Runner 2049 is the final act completing the dadification of cyberpunk. From now on you aren't allowed to talk about cyberpunk unless you have a little bundle of joy in your life causing mischief. No more tech-wear fitpics unless your holding a tiny hand. Your 3a should contain moistened wipes and a blankie. Renaming the thread and setting the filter to replace "tech-wear" with "dadcore", "ninja" with "image conscious dad" and "teleports behind you" with "tries to provide a strict value system within a nurturing, caring environment"

[deadkitty]

v cool of blade runner 2 to construct a world that completely excludes poc!! v great to see a vision of the future (in 2017!) in which androids will only be made in the image of white people!! v good to see a very large eastern asian population that is hinted at but completely relegated to the very bottom of the world's power structures!!

a film thats literally about racialization!!

[rjbman]

Why don't dystopias know how to talk about race?

@deadkitty

[nope]

I haven't seen it so can't really comment but was interested to see just how ridiculous an exclusively white people LA would be in 2049. According to the extremely helpful California Department of Finance website LA is projected to be 38% white in 2050 (compared with 54% now).

[deadkitty]

@alby

not one to really call out negs but wondering what your angle is here. do you have an issue with calling out racism? or is there something i'm missing about the film?

[silvaeri]

@alby - explain why you think it's an absurd criticism of the film. because just saying that without any reasoning is pretty hollow. if you can't recognize that this is yet another example of racism within scifi, then idk dude. look hard at why this is problematic. and why your response to it being called out and brought to attention is problematic.


edit: keep coming with the negs. trying to prompt discussion on why representation in scifi is important and that deadkitty's critique of the film is 1) perfectly valid and 2) important. I want to see alby's reasoning that he thinks deadkitty's critique is 'absurd'.

[alby]

I think in this specific case the film is not trying to have any grandiose messages about race in my opinion. It just seems like such a strange connotation to attach a movie. Not one friend of mine has said a bad thing about the movie, and friends of color haven't even hinted at a possible racist intent from the movie. I honestly see no issue. In Sci-Fi as a whole, there might be a problem. Not sure. Movies like Ghost in the Shell (remake) have a very inherent problem that I think everyone can agree. I honestly could be way off base but I just don't see the issue. Please enlighten me if I am objectively wrong.

[silvaeri]

I think in this specific case the film is not trying to have any grandiose messages about race in my opinion. It just seems like such a strange connotation to attach a movie. Not one friend of mine has said a bad thing about the movie, and friends of color haven't even hinted at a possible racist intent from the movie. I honestly see no issue. In Sci-Fi as a whole, there might be a problem. Not sure. Movies like Ghost in the Shell (remake) have a very inherent problem that I think everyone can agree. I honestly could be way off base but I just don't see the issue. Please enlighten me if I am objectively wrong.

it doesn't matter if the film was trying to have grandiose messages about race. and it's not that the film was /trying/ to be racist. things can be racist without overt intent. the fact is that it has very little poc representation and that's essentially a form of systematic racism. representation is mad important. try to imagine if you're a non-white person who is surrounded by media that is filled solely with white people, you never see anyone who looks like you. feels pretty shitty, yeah? all people are worthy of representation, and like dk said, why are there only white people in the future?

racism isn't just overt actions like calling someone a slur. racism takes many forms, including not writing/casting poc characters in your scifi book/movie/etc.

i'm really not the best person to try and explain this, and there's probably a ton of better articles out there (like the one rjbman linked).

but basically it boils down to the new blade runner not writing poc characters is a form of racism by negligence not that it's overtly intended to be racist. it's a manifestation of systematic racism and privilege present in white folks, not out of malice (i hope), but out of the privileges afforded to white folks such that they don't even think about representation as being important.

[CheerUpBrokeBoy]

^ is that a criticism of blade runner just as a film in general, or as a specific narrative universe?

deadkitty's post implied both but what you're saying can be applied to... most movies, really

[silvaeri]

^ is that a criticism of blade runner just as a film in general, or as a specific narrative universe?

deadkitty's post implied both but what you're saying can be applied to... most movies, really

both? like just because what i'm saying can be applied to many movies, doesn't mean that calling out BR specifically is any less valid. blade runner is just another straw on the camel's back for this issue as whole. like yes there's underrepresentation in most if not all movies, but scifi has a history of being pretty fucking racist, so calling out another scifi movie for being racist is not a bad or absurd thing imo. complacency is what leads to no change. we need to encourage this type of criticism towards media, not squash it and call the criticism absurd.

[CheerUpBrokeBoy]

calling out individual films as racist, even if it's completely true, is bad praxis – it atomizes the broader argument into squabbles about individual films, which obscures the systemic racism that pervades the entire film industry. it also makes the argument just about *that* movie, which is not the point at all.

every woke take about individual films should be required to dive deeper into the dynamics and hierarchies of hollywood as a hegemonic culture industry, because nothing will change about american/western filmmaking if progressive energy is fragmented across every individual product of said culture industry. anything less than that is masturbatory imo