Early Film + NGV

This week was about early film and art, along with going to the NGV. I was already aware of most of what we learnt about in the early film section, and I've been to the NGV more times than I can count, but I still had a lot of fun with the outing. I struggle with group projects sometimes — mostly in the 'meeting new people' part, rather than the actual project or pulling my weight — but I met some cool people doing a lot of different disciplines. That's really important to the key theme of the course: interconnectivity. Group presentations being across disciplines should create some genuinely unique stuff.

For my project I'd probably make it about media and new media, as early film, social media, and games are the next forefront of information distribution and consumption. The hyperreality of brainrot is almost like a return to form of Dadaism, while tech bros are the new Futurists (as I said in Week 3). These social media apps are run by the new age of Futurists and fascists in the systems of neoliberal ideology.

A key factor of the Dadaists was the material conditions of the time, along with the pressures put upon the people within the environment. I think the same thing is happening today with brainrot culture, where people willingly create absurd or downright terrifyingly weird content as a reaction to how little everything seems to matter nowadays. The creator '7mrog' does a quite extreme version of video distortion and datamoshing under the guise of 'brainrot', but actually follows very closely in the footsteps of Paik and other artists in the field.

Real shame when we went to the NGV the exhibition of optical illusions wasn't running — it would have been very relevant to last week and what we were saying about vision and information management within the human brain. I saw it three years ago, and it was really good, with a focus on mixing the historic works of optical illusion with those of MC Escher, with some optical illusion architecture.

Voyage to the Moon, which we watched in class, is unironically better than a lot of modern Netflix shows, and I hate that fact. A funny parody would be turning it into an 8-episode docudrama — how Netflix tends to turn beloved movies into drawn-out oversimplified series for no discernible reason. A potential for a parody film for my Group presentation project.

The understanding of how film shaped the general perception of the world in the Industrial Revolution was already covered fairly well last week. I wonder if the invention of film shaped other 'classicalist' groups like the Catholic Church, and how that shaping could be linked to a larger societal change? I know that European film commissions had a lot of codes, and even more the American one, shaping culture through what had to be — or couldn't be — on screen. Famously, kisses could not last past 20 seconds, and characters had to be up to a certain standard of morals. Different directors found ways around this, for example by using lots of small kisses in the case of romance movies.

Jordan Peele's NOPE should maybe be required viewing when talking about this. It copies ideas of colonisation through the medium of film and shows the man on horseback that we went over in class. It also shows a very imperialist aspect and the otherwise freeing aspects of new media. Very good horror movie — very in-depth. Don't search anything up before watching it.

The concept of how film evolved more quickly than other genres was also interesting. Do art forms evolve with the evolutionary pressure of being 'deprecated'? Could you say art is akin to some kind of social contagion? Like how we shape and evolve different plants and animals, could we do the same to art through science? AI could be a new genre as a tool, but I'm more interested in what happens to the things it is 'replacing' — like how photography shifted paintings after photorealism was devalued. What is the next step? Sculpture? Or will drawings become cubist and impressionist again? I hope so.

Shock of the New is an amazing web series. I watched the rest of it in my own time and it's personally inspired me to start writing my own sci-fi series based on the theory it speaks about. Even if I'm putting a little bit of a conspiracy theory hat on — the CIA funded 'modern art' in the 60s and 70s, but also the YouTube accounts that say the CIA funded modern art and it's a psyop are also pushed by the equivalent forces of power. The manipulation goes in every direction.