I am traveling to the Edinburgh International Film Festival on the 18th of June! Starting from the 20th of June, it will be showcasing My Secret Heart, the multi-media piece of beautiful artistic work commissioned by Streetwise Opera, a charity which works with homeless people. The music, written by Mira Calix, is inspired by Gregorio Allegri’s 17th-century choral masterpiece, Miserere mei – apparently the beauty of the piece was such that the Vatican put an embargo on it, preventing it from being performed anywhere but the Sistine Chapel (later Mozart visited the Chapel, was able to memorise the work and transcribe it).

The animation was made by my favorite partners in crime at flat-e based on the motions they captured during Streetwise Opera’s workshops, together with programmer and artist Memo Akten, whom you might stalk on twitter if you so please. The animation is projected on a round screen (360 degrees in fact) with surround sound.

Needless to say I am very excited about the whole enterprise. I am now attached to the project so if you have any questions please contact me on ana @ flat-e.com

We will bw in the Dovecot Studios, 10 Infirmary Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1LT. Admission is free, so all the more I’m looking forward to seeing you there!

Here is our Edinburgh flyer (click to enlarge):

Here is the preview of what you will be able to experience at EIFF:

My Secret Heart Teaser from Flat-e on Vimeo.

I have discovered today that swurl.com is no more. Sad day it is as I liked the service, but life is cruel and fast, especially if it’s the on-line life. With a typical promiscuity of a new media user I swiftly moved on to a new, shiny application. 

Introducing: soup.io, a tublr-like service (I parted with tumblr in a very teary, i-can’t-do-this-any-more way some time ago) concentrated on re-posting. Something for Internet recycling age, when there’s so much content we mainly keep repeating ourselves or others – handy to share with these remaining 2 friends who don’t use google reader.

As I realized I mainly like to share funny things and exciting film news (I’m a film news junkie and self-indulgently I assume others are too), therefore meet my new pet  Film + Funny.

Hope you enjoy x

Krzysztof Kieślowski “About Myself”, 1997

Character is everything. Without a strong, complex, engaging character you don’t have a film in my opinion. But finding them is a fucking nightmare. I spend more time looking for them than filming them.

Sean MacAllister “Documentaries…”

Welcome. This is your favourite mac user attempting – yet again – her switch to Linux.  This time, however, it’s serious… Somewhat serious.

It’s not a total switch I admit, but before you smack me on the face with my vicious proprietary machine working on vicious proprietary software, may I remind you I use Final Cut Pro for a living.

In the previous installment I had a go at installing Ubuntu and wrote down few initial impressions. I have since: changed my main machine to higher specs and changed my mind – I installed Mint. Call me shallow, but brown really doesn’t suit me. I now have a 120 GB partition with Mac OS, which boots by default, and a 30GB partition with Linux Mint, which boots when I feel like it and remember to press the option key. Starting up generally takes longer, but it’s a sacrifice I am willing to make for the sake of knowledge of no proven relevance.

There are several practical issues which you will immediately encounter once you install your Linux of choice (including the problem of the choice and instal itself, but we will get t that) in our imaginary world where you are doing that because I encouraged you. But before I get to the nitty gritty I think there are few underlining ideas that you might want to familiarize yourself with and that are not necessarily often discussed in relevant circles. First and most importantly: Linux is for the adventurous. The platform has made enormous progress over past few years, but it still is very much the wild wild west of computing.  As we know the adventurous of the original wild wild west gave the world what later became Las Vegas and Los Angeles, an for the sake of this case I hope they all retired in big fat mansions in California, laying on the side of their pools and drinking local beer – ice cold. I don’t know how historically probable it is, as a matter of fact I’m pretty sure it isn’t, but I am not the person to allow a fact stand in the way of good opinion.

Before the Hollywood, Casionos and regular Celine Dion performances the west was however a jungle and as such was for the tough ones. There was very little rule, other than social manners, who everybody saw as it suited them. So I reckoned it’s best to mention the hardest bits first; if you are an adventurer you’ll appreciate them. If not go back to the suburbs and suffer the boredom. Consider this:

Number one: The big problem of open source community that reflects on usability of its products is the disproportion between the number of progremmers and number of designers. I know of very few good interface designers – even less of programmer capable of designing good user interface. This is not because they’re badly educated or not talented – it is because, though it us often overlooked, programing and design are two different areas of knowledge, two different jobs and i bet if you asked QI they would tell you two different parts of brain are deployed to handle them. Indeed thinking in terms of good design is sometimes contradictory in its principles to thinking in terms of good code. To put very simply programmers think in commands and designers think in menus (by menus I mean not the list of options, but the logics of graphic layout). You will often see open source applications (including web ones) where menus are the literal graphic version of commands. This, for most of humanity, is not going to work. People are used to use computers with menus. And if they are to use commands the command need to make sense in terms of usual language (see ubiquity for an example). Contrary to what seems to be a popular belief among programmers, design is not only aesthetics – its where the usability for a non-geeky person is.

Number two: no matter what they tell you, if you are switching to Linux from other system, it is not good to use out of the box. You will spend some amount of time setting it up and getting it to work, and that is probably mainly due to the fact that you already have your own little ways of doing things and long cultivated habits. It will, for a while, feel like moving in with some one, after you lived on your own for several years. They change your TV channels, they move stuff around in the fridge and you have to wait till they get out of the bathroom. But hey, it’s a bit more fun with company and chances are they will also buy bread and beer when you’ll need it most.

Which leads us to number three: you will need a Linux-literate friend to help you out. And that is probably the very reason for which I would advice it to brand fresh and new computer users; these friends are easy to find. The immediacy of help you will get with your Linux issues is not comparable to anything else. There are always forums, FAQs, wikis, all put together by enthusiasts, but most of all you can always catch some one online who will help you out. Make some friends on identi.ca – or if microblogging is not your thing try forums like these over at LinuxOutlaws.com.

You will often hear that Linux and open source software in general is about freedom of choice and its main advantage is that once can make it whatever they want it to be. That is not strictly true, mainly because most people don’t have the knowledge which is necessary and resources (time, energy) to get the knowledge. The advantages of Linux to a normal user are different than to a user-developer. First and foremost it’s cheap – or for free. Therefore if you are buying a machine with Linux it will come with pretty much everything you might need (except decent video editing software, but that’s a whole other story).  Secondly you will learn a lot out of sheer curiosity. You might not want to go into configuring it and designing it according to your own wishes, but every now and then something will interest you – and as I said if you ask you won’t wait long.

Here we arrive at the fourth and final point: beware extremists on all sides (and occasions, really). As it happens with the wild wild west things tend to get fiery rather easily with some of the open source folk. Any form of compromise tends to equate to either total lack of freedom or betrayal (think Rorschach from Watchmen) of sorts. This in turn limits not only possibility of discussion but the entire enterprise. But that is a whole other story. In general, these are some of the most dedicated and idealistic people you will ever meat and although your attachment to your Apple Mac will make their blood boil they drink beer just as we do. And Russians love their children too.

oh Gary, Gary. What happened to the fact in documentary? What was beautiful about Helvetica, Hustwit’s previous film, was that it was very pretty and interesting visually while introducing the viewer to the discussions in visual communications (modern vs postmodern, clean v grungy, helvetica v hand writing etc etc). Oh, and introduced huge chunk of history of typefaces. Now scrape everything after “very pretty and interesting visually” and you’ll get Objectified.  And the real issues, like sustainability in design and the fact that most designers get employed by companies to design new and tempting objects to make customers buy and buy and buy – i.e. there’s a intrinsic moral dilemma in this job – are barely touched upon. That’s where the documentary was, but we didn’t get to that in 90 minutes.

And yes Jonathan Ive (Apple’s head designer) appears, but doesn’t have much to say either.

I do aknowledge that I am difficult crowd to please for this particular film. I’m fairly familiar with issues of design (though not so much industrial design), I had my certain expectations (after loving the previous film) and I suffer from the filmmaker’s (or wannabe filmmaker’s) syndrom: I can’t watch documentaries without examining them constantly on account of what could have been done differently – and better. If you don’t know much about design on its conceptual level and/or you’re not making documentaries yourself you will enjoy Objectified and you probably should see it, because the issues are very current and relate to all of us. The fact that everything we look at has bee designed by some one, the fact that 80% of it was designed to make us want to buy it – whether we need it or not and the like.

Just bear with the prechiness (along the lines of my previous sentence).

Here are bits and bobs from the first of the last 3 essays, which ended (for now) my academic career. The essay was supposed to be case study illustrating importance of visual phenomena for sociological analysis. I will spare you the argument, don’t worry. However my subject, Hunter S Thompson, is rather interesting in himself. I was writing about the most recent documentary about him, “Gonzo: the life and work of dr Hunter S Thompson” arguing that we recall certain figures (myths) at particular times when there is a need for certain type of nostalgia. Ergo – documentary biopics can tell us what it is, that we are missing as a culture.

In the 2008 film biography entitled “Gonzo: the life and times of dr. Hunter S Thompson”, Jann Wenner, editor-in-chief of the Rolling Stone and long-time friend of Thompson’s recalls the moment when the writer was embarking on the trip that was to result in his most famous book “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”. In order to drive to Las Vegas Thompson rented a Cadillac, which he demanded Wenner paid for – that Wenner didn’t agree to. “He says ‘well I can’t cover the American dream in a goddamn Volkswagen, what the fuck is wrong with you?!’” – Wenner recalls – “And, you know, of course that is quite true”. This story is a typical anecdote about Thompson. As A. O. Scott wrote in a review of the film for The New York Times: “Even if Alex Gibney’s new documentary, “Gonzo,” were not subtitled “The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson,” there would be little doubt about its subject. Thompson, who committed suicide in 2005, survives to some degree in the popular imagination because of his self-burnished reputation for wild excess.” (The New York Times, July 4, 2008). Both this description as well as the story told by Jann Wenner is indeed fitting the popular image of Thompson, one that he, due to his suicide in 2005, is no longer able to attempt to correct. The combat with one’s own myth is a curtail part of any depiction of Thompson’s story, but there seems to be much more to him than outrageous persona of a drug-fuelled, hectic fantasy-journalist. He is also portrayed as a morally compelling figure, deeply patriotic and socially concerned person; a eye witness of the events of late 1960s in the United States of America, uncompromised critic of the state of the nation, it’s culture and it’s politics; the man who saw through cheap political propaganda and foresaw the long lasting war which was to be the result of the events of 11^th of September 2001 in New York.

*

Any film, as a communicative event needs to be analysed in relation to the broader context of discourse practice – which, in turn, is a part of broader socio-cultural practice (Marris P and Thornham S, 2006: 313). “Traditionally”, writes Stuart Hall, “mass-communication research ha conceptualised the process of communication in terms of a circulation circuit or a loop”. However, as he proposes the circulation of a message is a much more intricate process, one that involves the message enter different passages of forms. Hall identifies four of them: “production”, “circulation”, “distribution/consumption” and “reproduction” (Marris P and Thornham S, 2006: 51)… Communicative event takes place when not when the meaning reaches the viewer but when the viewer ‘decodes’ it. “If no meaning is taken”, writes Hall, “there can be no ‘consumption’” (Marris P and Thornham S, 2006: 52). Between the meaning being intended by the producer and ‘taken’ by the viewer it needs to take a form of a message, it needs to become a ’story’ – and that doesn’t take place at random. The coding always takes place in the discursive context of production: “knowledge-in-use concerning the routines of production, historically defined technical skills, professional ideologies, institutional knowledge, definitions and assumptions, assumptions about the audience”. The audience also influences the message through the process of decoding. This takes place within the context of viewer’s cultural knowledge and practices – which obviously need not be the same or even similar as the context in which the meaning was coded.

*

However film, as not only expression of certain political culture, but also a work of art and therefore medium of subliminal messaging, has several means at its disposal that allow articulation of a “feeling”. As mentioned before Thompson is quoted to reminisce about the feeling and energy of the social movements in the Bay Area in the 1960s. It is a sentiment shared by man, that he cam to personify in a way. The scene in which “Gonzo…” discusses 1968 police riots in Chicago use archival TV footage of the event with the accompaniment of Janis Joplin singing “Another piece of my heart” – a version in itself famous and often associated with the spirit of the 1960s. Over that combination, Thompson’s first wife describes writer’s reactions when he arrived home after witnessing the monstrosity of the violence that took place during the riots. “He only cried twice during our 19 years together”, she recalls. This combination of three signifiers – the visual content, the music and the spoken word could only be utilised in a film. What it does, through emotionally charged message, is allowing the viewer to “feel” not only the horror but also the historical significance of the events…

*

Personally I think that Hunter S Thompson evokes the same nostalgia as the 1960s do – our longing for peace and justice, for personal freedom that is not acquired by spreading terror and need to understand turbulent times. After 1968, “the year that changed the world” saw the Chicago riots, Massacre at the Square of 3 Cultures in Mexico, assassinations of Martin Luter King Jr and Robert Kennedy, student protests in Prague and tragic events in Prague and Budapest. “Looking back 40 years on it seems to have a strange 3-dimensional quality. These events took place more than a generation ago, yet they seem incredibly immediate, astonishingly relevant to our lives today” (Tusa J, 2008: pt 1). And Thompson appears to have such strange relevance as well. Perhaps we are searching for the feeling that he remembered from the mid 1960s: ” that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense, we didn’t need that. Our energy will simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were running the crest of a high and beautiful wave”. And we are searching for this man as much as for that feeling that in 1971 he saw to be over: “now, less than 5 years later, you can go on a steep hill in Las Vegas North-West and with the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the high-water mark – the place where the wave broke and rolled back” (as quoted in “Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson”, 2008, dir. Alex Gibney).

 
Did you miss me?

It was a busy few months at the binarylife HQ, not least because I was away for a month in my hometown. Admittedly I spent that month mainly on my friend’s couch playing playstation and consuming copious amounts of beer or getting into rather hazy states at various dubious locals of Warsaw. But not exclusively. I was meanwhile devoting some of my time to reading on subjects such as representation, proliferation of imaginery, film analysis (youkh) and global underdevelopment. I will publish some excerpts from the resulting essays here, ones that are digestible for sociology-lay person, in a vain hope that they will endear the most beautiful of sciences to you (I can say that no that I’ve finished my degree). Obviously, I left myself about 3 days to write that final 15 000 word, the ones that will hopefully see me finally gain some formal higher education and unfortunately released out of the bubble and back in to the “normal life” of capitalistic society. Three hardcore days they were but I could clearly see that I did learn something during almost 5 years of academic life (if you count in my brief romance with higher education in Warsaw): how to write an essay quickly and make it seem like it’s not a total pile of crap. And this knowledge I feel obliged to share with you in case you ever institutionalize yourself in an university.

1. Every effort put in being allowed to write about subject that interests you is worth it. It takes some strong will and a presence of mind to pile through thousands of words of academic essays when you know you could be writing film scripts depicting past few years of hedonistic life, drugs and alcohol abuse and sexual indecency. So it better be interesting.

2. No methodology allows following gut feeling when it comes to choosing which sources to use and trust. However with years your gut feelings will learn to be more and more accurate. So you can trust them – just make sure to make up some highly theoretical excuse for using the books you read because they were most interesting.

3. It’s better to be too critical/suspicious of what you’ve read than too trusting. Trust me.

4. Don’t hesitate to write down sarcy comments while you’re taking notes. “Culture is the essence of life” and some such. Plus they will make your day when you find them later.

5. Don’t be afraid to go off on a rant. Just put yourself a word limit – usually only first two sentences out of a rant make any sense whatsoever.

6. Put in illustrations. Everybody likes books with pictures.

7. Do not check the word count every 2 sentences. You’re only making it worse on yourself.

8. when really short of things to write go into more detailed description of some example or case you mentioned. Make a case of it later (this seems like a tricky bit but actually when approached from right angle everything is of use; make sure to mention that the case can only be generalized to an extend – unless it’s representative of everything).

9. Drink a glass of water for every cup of coffee you consume. And two glasses per each redbull (ps. relentless works just as well and is cheaper). Water is your friend. And when you finish you won’t be too exhausted to get drunk. Celebrating is an important part of symbolic life of your psyche. If you don’t celebrate, you won’t know you’ve finished.

I’ve found this today during a break in writing of the essay on proliferation of imaginery and the crisis caused by intrinsic fraudulence of art. No, it’s not what I chose to do in my free time. It’s due to the demands of society such as being certified (pun intended) by higher education institutions.

I will be back, I promise.

Meanwhile enjoy the genius of language courtesy of engrishfunny.com

I took some photos of the magnet poetry for a film festival poster I made some time ago. I never finished the poster, but I liked the magnets and decided to do something more with them.

The picture being worth thousand words is my pet-hate cliche, I hope this is illustrated here. I also hope it doesn’t imply I don’t like films – to the contrary I love some of them. Only some.

This was difficult in terms of layouting, I’m still not happy with it, but it’s only a concept for somthing that will eventualy be an animation.

Also, I have a hangover ;)

Before we start, here’s a disclaimer, in case you missed out on the preliminary write ups to this research: the objective is to find out how easy an experience it is to switch from closed to open source operating system. In my case Mac OS X to Ubuntu. What helps, what doesn’t and what eventually could be improved. I’m concerned with the failure in communication between open source community and the rest of “human beings” – on both ends. I appreciate the open source philosophy, but this is really not my concern here. If you’re an open source enthusiast, you probably know it all and more, but you still should read it – to see how the little people think and operate.

So here we go. First day with my new friend, the one and only Ubuntu (don’t hold it against me, but my computer in the Ubuntu install is called Buntu.. and in the Mint install Minty). As beginnings tend to be, it was a bit hairy at times, but generally, after initial distrust we discovered we have a lot in common. Trying to think of ways to illustrate these first moments I remembered this scene from one of my all time favourite series, Spaced:

I think in this instance I was Daisy, Jessica Stevenson’s character and Linux was Tim (Simon Pegg) – in the end when I cried, he comforted me.

The hairy beginings were due to the fact that greedy me installed the 64bit version of Ubuntu; initially, before I was told to know better. Apparently .deb files (Linux installation files, equivalent of Windows’ .exe and Mac OS .dmg) for the 64bit version are difficult to come by. Not something the download page would tell you, mind: “32bit version: This works with most computers, 64bit version: May provide additional capabilities to computers that are able to use 64bit software”. Doesn’t sound like big of a deal, but it becomes one later when you find yourself struggling with just about every program you’re trying to install. Still better than the Mint website though, which gives you about 5 different downloads not bothering to describe the difference between them, and the names are not very indicative either.

Download itself is easy as pie. Answer few questions (like where you live and what’s your name), wait about half an hour and voila: you’re in your new operating system.

Which is brown.

BROWN. One of these seasons brown will be in, I’m sure. I mean not so long ago purple was the thing – everything is possible. All I’m saying is: don’t get scared, it can be easily changed. Now, open source enthusiasts will hate me for this, but I have to say it: user interface of Ubuntu really is a lot like that of Windows, specifically XP. This is for the benefit of the people afraid they won’t get used to it. You will, it’s pretty intuitive (mind you i do say pretty).

One thing I noticed and I have been told, is that Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, are pretty hard core about the open source-ness of their endeavours. In your ‘Applications’ menu (top right corner) you will find a pretty handy ‘add/remove applications’ option. Stick to it while downloading new programs – while it takes a while to have the newest versions of them (this is open source there’s new version every 3 to 4 days), it’s all checked, easy to install and will work. Otherwise you will run into unnecessary hassle.

Be weary though. When you first go into the ‘ass/remove’ by default it will look for ‘Cannonical-maintained’ applications only.  That is what I mean by hard core. But also slightly – slightly! – hypocritical. Flash is not open source – but you will need it to surf the web, whether we like it or not. And so on. There is, admittedly, not much need to go mad with downloads, as Ubuntu comes with a lot of the things one will need. You might want to download Banshee, an unfortunately named (this is a theme with open source programs, you will soon discover), but rather slick application, looking much (very much) like iTunes that will cater to all your media files needs including podcasts. Gpodder is also a podcast client, but as it doesn’t have a player built in I personally don’t see much point in it.

The main problem with open source programs is the little flaws in the user interfaces. The un-geeky user doesn’t care much about the performance or beauty of the code. They also won’t put a creation ethos above usability – and it’s neither wrong nor right. But this is a whole different story, which I shall come back to in the next instalment.

I admit towards the evening I swapped back to Mac OS. But it seemed somehow less irreplaceable, than before.

next installment: add/remove and how it could make Linux superior. Should we have a migration editions of Linux distributions?