this entry is intended to provoke comments
It's always humbling everytime you discover something that someone else has done that you've been wanting to do, or that someone else has already thought of something that you've thought of.
On the plane to Ecuador from Miami, I remember watching the layout of Miami at twilight, just as all the city lights were coming on. All the lights were on a flat plane, organized in straight rows and columns that almost never strayed from right angles. I'm used to US cities being somewhat rectilinear, but this was more rectilinear than any city I've ever known.
Even the water and vegetation are rectilinear.
I thought it looked remarkably like an integrated circuit. In fact, I imagined the car lights as electrons racing around the circuits.
In middle school, my friends and I argued over whether the Alpha's 64 bit RISC architecture was cooler than Intel's new MMX instructions. I remember studying Byte magazine centerfolds as studiously as centerfolds depicting the female body. Only later would I make the connection into a fetish.
As we arrived in Quito, it was still night, but the difference in how the lights were organized shocked me- Quito is situated in the steep young Andes mountains, which means that I felt like I was flying through a three-dimensional cloud of a city, with lights at every possible altitude, following an organic structure shaped by the mountains. This was the polar opposite of Miami.
The comparisons in these images, the comparison of cities to machines (oohhhhh sex), is a visual idea I really wanted to play with once I could get my hands on a camera.
I first saw this done in the classic "Man With A Movie Camera", before integrated circuits had even been invented. I thought more could be done with the idea, in an information age context rather than an industrial age context. Today I discovered a movie that has already done that: "Koyaanisqatsi". This is why I feel disappointed... the movie has done, visually, what I wanted to do, more or less. Unfortunately it does it with an unwelcome "moral of the story", which the director still made obvious despite his best attempts at hiding the movie as "For some people it's an ode to technology, for some people it's a warning; it can be many things to many people; I leave it up to the viewer to become actively involved in interpreting it..."
At the end of the movie, after a space rocket explodes and crashes to the earth, superimposed text comes up which explains "Koyaanisqatsi" as a Hopi term meaning "life out of balance, or a crazy life that needs to be lived differently". The director originally did not want a title for the movie, but instead opted for a word that "would have no cultural baggage". Funny, he just attached a whole load of cultural baggage onto that word, for he made it the title of a movie that documents modern technological life. I take great offense at the suggestion that the space program perpetuates a "life out of balance". I understand the environmental consequences of modern life with cars, factories, rockets, and so on, but I regard our current situation as part of the progress of human society in eventually developing cheap easy renewable clean energy. It's going to take a while, but it is necessary in the progress of the human race, just as the space program is part of human progress. Labeling a technological life as a "life out of balance" throws human progress out the window. Obviously he does not value human progress.
It's art like this that makes me seriously doubt the claim that "art has no intrinsic meaning/value". When the director set out to make this movie, he had a very specific intent, and he had a message he wanted to express. This is evident in the transition from images of nature to images of man dominating and fabricating nature, in the comparisons of images of a hotdog making machine with images of humans on escalators, in the rocket exploding, etc. He even said he wanted to show the "beauty of the beast", of course operating under the assumption that technology is a beast. He is putting a value judgment on these images, and he invites the audience to make their own value judgments- but the way he has cut together the film (and most obviously in revealing the meaning of the title) makes it hard to see things any other way but his own, and we are left making judgments on whether we agree with him or not. The director has put so much meaning into the film (as all directors do to various degrees) that the audience cannot help but glean that one meaning, though they may see other more minor meanings in addition to the big obvious meaning. Does this mean it is intrinsic meaning?
If an artist paints the rape of Europa, and paints it to look like a very traumatizing experience, and titles it "Rape is bad", is there intrinsic meaning in that painting? Ok, so that's not an apples to apples comparison, but I'm trying to find out first if it is possible for art to have intrinsic meaning. Humans often create art to express the meaning they see in the world. But there's a difference between art that answers questions and art that doesn't. "Eraserhead" does not answer questions, and that might mean it does not have intrinsic meaning (after all, it's a non-narrative narrative, intended to expose how we look for meaning in things that have no meaning... though I suppose that in and of itself is meaning). "Koyaanisqatsi" answers a question that is not explictly asked, and I think the film would have been much more effective if the meaning of koyaanisqatsi were not revealed. If the meaning were not revealed, then we can debate the meaning more easily and look for more meanings that we might not otherwise look for. The director obviously wanted the audience to walk away knowing his intention with the film, his meaning of the film, otherwise he would not have revealed the meaning of the word. If a film reveals its meaning to the audience, then does that constitute intrinsic meaning? It's 3 in the morning and I am tired of pseudo-philosophizing in a masturbatory fashion on the internet.
On the plane to Ecuador from Miami, I remember watching the layout of Miami at twilight, just as all the city lights were coming on. All the lights were on a flat plane, organized in straight rows and columns that almost never strayed from right angles. I'm used to US cities being somewhat rectilinear, but this was more rectilinear than any city I've ever known.
Even the water and vegetation are rectilinear.
I thought it looked remarkably like an integrated circuit. In fact, I imagined the car lights as electrons racing around the circuits.
In middle school, my friends and I argued over whether the Alpha's 64 bit RISC architecture was cooler than Intel's new MMX instructions. I remember studying Byte magazine centerfolds as studiously as centerfolds depicting the female body. Only later would I make the connection into a fetish.
As we arrived in Quito, it was still night, but the difference in how the lights were organized shocked me- Quito is situated in the steep young Andes mountains, which means that I felt like I was flying through a three-dimensional cloud of a city, with lights at every possible altitude, following an organic structure shaped by the mountains. This was the polar opposite of Miami.
The comparisons in these images, the comparison of cities to machines (oohhhhh sex), is a visual idea I really wanted to play with once I could get my hands on a camera.
I first saw this done in the classic "Man With A Movie Camera", before integrated circuits had even been invented. I thought more could be done with the idea, in an information age context rather than an industrial age context. Today I discovered a movie that has already done that: "Koyaanisqatsi". This is why I feel disappointed... the movie has done, visually, what I wanted to do, more or less. Unfortunately it does it with an unwelcome "moral of the story", which the director still made obvious despite his best attempts at hiding the movie as "For some people it's an ode to technology, for some people it's a warning; it can be many things to many people; I leave it up to the viewer to become actively involved in interpreting it..."
At the end of the movie, after a space rocket explodes and crashes to the earth, superimposed text comes up which explains "Koyaanisqatsi" as a Hopi term meaning "life out of balance, or a crazy life that needs to be lived differently". The director originally did not want a title for the movie, but instead opted for a word that "would have no cultural baggage". Funny, he just attached a whole load of cultural baggage onto that word, for he made it the title of a movie that documents modern technological life. I take great offense at the suggestion that the space program perpetuates a "life out of balance". I understand the environmental consequences of modern life with cars, factories, rockets, and so on, but I regard our current situation as part of the progress of human society in eventually developing cheap easy renewable clean energy. It's going to take a while, but it is necessary in the progress of the human race, just as the space program is part of human progress. Labeling a technological life as a "life out of balance" throws human progress out the window. Obviously he does not value human progress.
It's art like this that makes me seriously doubt the claim that "art has no intrinsic meaning/value". When the director set out to make this movie, he had a very specific intent, and he had a message he wanted to express. This is evident in the transition from images of nature to images of man dominating and fabricating nature, in the comparisons of images of a hotdog making machine with images of humans on escalators, in the rocket exploding, etc. He even said he wanted to show the "beauty of the beast", of course operating under the assumption that technology is a beast. He is putting a value judgment on these images, and he invites the audience to make their own value judgments- but the way he has cut together the film (and most obviously in revealing the meaning of the title) makes it hard to see things any other way but his own, and we are left making judgments on whether we agree with him or not. The director has put so much meaning into the film (as all directors do to various degrees) that the audience cannot help but glean that one meaning, though they may see other more minor meanings in addition to the big obvious meaning. Does this mean it is intrinsic meaning?
If an artist paints the rape of Europa, and paints it to look like a very traumatizing experience, and titles it "Rape is bad", is there intrinsic meaning in that painting? Ok, so that's not an apples to apples comparison, but I'm trying to find out first if it is possible for art to have intrinsic meaning. Humans often create art to express the meaning they see in the world. But there's a difference between art that answers questions and art that doesn't. "Eraserhead" does not answer questions, and that might mean it does not have intrinsic meaning (after all, it's a non-narrative narrative, intended to expose how we look for meaning in things that have no meaning... though I suppose that in and of itself is meaning). "Koyaanisqatsi" answers a question that is not explictly asked, and I think the film would have been much more effective if the meaning of koyaanisqatsi were not revealed. If the meaning were not revealed, then we can debate the meaning more easily and look for more meanings that we might not otherwise look for. The director obviously wanted the audience to walk away knowing his intention with the film, his meaning of the film, otherwise he would not have revealed the meaning of the word. If a film reveals its meaning to the audience, then does that constitute intrinsic meaning? It's 3 in the morning and I am tired of pseudo-philosophizing in a masturbatory fashion on the internet.