MachineMachine /stream - tagged with the-phantom-zone https://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss LifePress therourke@gmail.com <![CDATA[samueldelany:Samuel Delany reviews the first Star Wars movie,...]]> http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/135368396419

samueldelany:Samuel Delany reviews the first Star Wars movie, 1977, in Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy.

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Wed, 16 Dec 2015 22:52:56 -0800 http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/135368396419
<![CDATA[The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug B-ROLL - Benedict Cumberbatch (2013) Movie HD]]> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqKhVMk8v1k&feature=youtube_gdata

http://www.joblo.com - "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug" B-Roll - Benedict Cumberbatch Performance Capture (2013) Movie HD

The Dwarves, Bilbo and Gandalf have successfully escaped the Misty Mountains, and Bilbo has gained the One Ring. They all continue their journey to get their gold back from the Dragon, Smaug.

Director: Peter Jackson

Writers: Fran Walsh (screenplay), Philippa Boyens (screenplay)

Stars: Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Ian McKellen, Evangeline Lilly, Orlando Bloom, Benedict Cumberbatch

"the hobbit the desolation of smaug" "the hobbit the desolation of smaug trailer" "trailer" "the hobbit" "the hobbit 2" "lord of the rings" gandalf "bilbo baggins" "the hobbit the battle of the five armies" "clip" "official" "HD" "2013" "peter jackson" "ian mckellen" "benedict cumberbatch" "performance capture" "b-roll" "featurette"

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Wed, 22 Oct 2014 16:32:01 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqKhVMk8v1k&feature=youtube_gdata
<![CDATA[Journal Contribution: Exaptation and the Digital Now]]> http://median.newmediacaucus.org/caa-edition/

Earlier this year I devised and delivered the New Media Caucus sponsored panel and journal editorial: ‘Exaptation and the Digital Now’, with Zara Dinnen, Rob Gallagher and Alex Myers: Exaptation and the Digital Now: INTRODUCTION Case Study #1: Holoback Zara Dinnen Case Study #2: The Phantom Zone Daniel Rourke Case Study #3: Fire in the Hole – The Obviously Non-Short History of Art Games Alex Myers Case Study #4: Exaptation, Interpretation, PlayStation Rob Gallagher

The panel took place at the College Art Association annual conference, Chicago, February 14th 2014. Our write-up was featured in the New Media Caucus journal CAA 2014 conference edition. Click-through for each of our papers and the specially extended introduction:

Evolution is a dominant metaphor for thinking about and describing the processes of new technologies; we believe ‘exaptation’ offers a more productive, nuanced approach to questions of adaptation and co-option that surround digital media. [8] According to Svetlana Boym in her essay “The Off-Modern Mirror:”

Exaptation is described in biology as an example of ‘lateral adaptation,’ which consists in a co-option of a feature for its present role from some other origin… Exaptation is not the opposite of adaptation; neither is it merely an accident, a human error or lack of scientific data that would in the end support the concept of adaptation. Exaptation questions the very process of assigning meaning and function in hindsight, the process of assigning the prefix ‘post’ and thus containing a complex phenomenon within the grid of familiar interpretation. [9]

Media is replete with exaptations. Features specific to certain media are exapted – co-opted – as matters of blind chance, convenience, technical necessity, aesthetics, and even fashion. Narratives of progress cannot account for the ways technologies branch out or are reused, misused, and abused across communities and networks. Exaptation offers a way to think about digital culture not as ever-newer, ever-faster, ever-more-seamless, but rather as something that must always negotiate its own noisy history. Yesterday’s incipient hardware becomes the ordering mechanism of today’s cultural affects: a complex renewal that calls into question established notions of utility, value, and engendered experience. Exaptation accounts for features now considered integral to media without falling back into narratives that appear to anticipate what one could not anticipate. This article is a collaborative work that brings together the four co-authors’ various responses to the provocation of exaptation. In what follows exaptation is put into play as a model to help unsettle dominant narratives about the digital image in particular. Considering the digital image in various guises: as animated GIFs, poor images, art games, hardware, and holograms, this article will trace the traits that jump between media and metaphor; complicating linear narratives of progression, and reductive readings of remediation associated with new media. [10]

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Sun, 31 Aug 2014 06:59:28 -0700 http://median.newmediacaucus.org/caa-edition/
<![CDATA[That Time The United Nations Condemned Superman (In Real Life)]]> http://io9.com/that-time-the-united-nations-condemned-superman-1592310861?utm_campaign=socialflow_io9_facebook&utm_source=io9_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

In 1952, the UN issued an urgent report warning that American comic books and their sadistic superhero characters had become a threat to world peace: "By undermining or warping the traditional values of each country, the Superman myth is becoming ...

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Sat, 12 Jul 2014 02:38:31 -0700 http://io9.com/that-time-the-united-nations-condemned-superman-1592310861?utm_campaign=socialflow_io9_facebook&utm_source=io9_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow
<![CDATA[Journey to the Centre of Google Earth - Simon Sellars]]> http://www.simonsellars.com/journey-to-the-centre-of-google-earth

This essay was commissioned by Anne Hilde Neset for Only Connect Festival Of Sound 2014: J.G. Ballard. It was published in the Only Connect catalogue, May 2014. Thank you to NyMusikk and Only Connect for permission to republish it here.

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Mon, 23 Jun 2014 04:53:03 -0700 http://www.simonsellars.com/journey-to-the-centre-of-google-earth
<![CDATA[That Time The United Nations Condemned Superman (In Real Life)]]> http://io9.com/that-time-the-united-nations-condemned-superman-1592310861?utm_campaign=socialflow_io9_facebook&utm_source=io9_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

In 1952, the UN issued an urgent report warning that American comic books and their sadistic superhero characters had become a threat to world peace: "By undermining or warping the traditional values of each country, the Superman myth is becoming a kind of international monster.

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Fri, 20 Jun 2014 07:13:39 -0700 http://io9.com/that-time-the-united-nations-condemned-superman-1592310861?utm_campaign=socialflow_io9_facebook&utm_source=io9_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow
<![CDATA[OK, This Oculus Rift Business Is Getting Out Of Control]]> http://kotaku.com/ok-this-oculus-rift-business-is-getting-out-of-control-1573194348

There's totally a chance that Birdly, a device which simulates flying like a bird, could be an amazing experience. But that doesn't make this elaborate set-up, which includes a fan, a scent machine, and the Oculus Rift, any less ridiculous (in a good way).

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Wed, 14 May 2014 15:20:39 -0700 http://kotaku.com/ok-this-oculus-rift-business-is-getting-out-of-control-1573194348
<![CDATA[Shimmering World Conference, by Shama Khanna / Art Review]]> http://artreview.com/reviews/review_shimmering_world_conference/

The Shimmering World conference at Manchester University, which took place 24 April, saw artists and academics come together to share the same stage, with speakers including David Panos, Tamara Trodd, Melissa Gronlund, Ed Atkins, Hannah Sawtell and myself.

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Wed, 07 May 2014 04:15:32 -0700 http://artreview.com/reviews/review_shimmering_world_conference/
<![CDATA[The Dimesion of depth and objects rushing towards us]]> http://www.filmmakersfestival.com/en/magazine/ausgabe-12010/the-dimension-of-depth/the-dimesion-of-depth-and-objects-rushing-towards-us.html

Or: The tail that wags the dog. A discourse on digital 3-D cinema. Film scholar Thomas Elsaesser on a revolution in perception.

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Thu, 01 May 2014 13:41:45 -0700 http://www.filmmakersfestival.com/en/magazine/ausgabe-12010/the-dimension-of-depth/the-dimesion-of-depth-and-objects-rushing-towards-us.html
<![CDATA[The Phantom Zone overspilleth!]]> http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/83802345778

The Phantom Zone overspilleth!

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Fri, 25 Apr 2014 02:12:27 -0700 http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/83802345778
<![CDATA[Lucasfilm shows off the future of filmmaking? Scenes get rendered out in real time, removing the need for post-production]]> http://www.thatvideosite.com/v/11118/lucasfilm-shows-off-the-future-of-filmmaking-scenes-get-rendered-out-in-real-time-removing-the-need-for-post-production

OVER THE NEXT DECADE video game engines will be used in film-making, with the two disciplines combining to eliminate the movie post-production process. That rather ambitious claim comes from Lucasfilm, the California production company responsible for the Star Wars franchise. Speaking at the Technology Strategy Board event at BAFTA in London this week, the company's chief technology strategy officer Kim Libreri announced that the developments in computer graphics have meant Lucasfilm has been able to transfer its techniques to film-making, shifting video game assets into movie production. Real-time motion capture and the graphics of video game engines, Libreri claimed, will increasingly be used in movie creation, allowing post-production effects to be overlayed in real time. Real-time motion capture refers to the use of a special suit covered in reflective markers along with specialised cameras so computers can calculate the motion of the underlying skeleton in a way that can be used to drive a computer generated character. Extracting and visualising these performances in real-time enables interactive virtual production and allows lens shots on virtual scenes. Apparently this technology will provide means for the removal of the post-production process. "Everyone has seen what we can do in movies, and I think most people will agree the video game industry is catching up quite quickly, especially in the next generation of console titles. I'm pretty sure within the next decade, we're going to see a convergence in terms of traditional visual effects capabilities - [such as] making realistic fire, creatures, and environments - but working completely interactively," Libreri said. "We think that computer graphics are going to be so realistic in real time computer graphics that, over the next decade, we'll start to be able to take the post out of post-production; where you'll leave a movie set and the shot is pretty much complete," Libreri said. Lucasfilm is confident in this concept as it has been testing it in the development of a series of prototypes created with the team at Lucasfilm's motion picture visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). The first was a short film created in eight weeks, with Lucasfilm and ILM working together to heavily modify the Lucasarts' gaming engine. They changed the rendering techniques to produce a video that wasn't rendered in the traditional visual effects way at 10 hours a frame, but generated at 24 frames a second. That's 41 milliseconds per frame, generated on a games engine with a lot of games hardware." "The prototype was a film created on a games engine and a vision statement for where ILM would like to go in the future, and at the same time how Lucasfilm is getting into the same generation of console hardware," Libreri said. After the prototype movie, Lucasfilm and ILM worked on a Lucasarts Star Wars video game project called 1313, which was shown off at the E3 gaming conference in 2012. The game was in development for around two years using Nvidia gaming hardware, before it was cancelled when Lucasarts was shut down by Disney in April this year. However, 1313 has been used by Lucasfilm to demonstrate real-time motion capture, giving it the confidence to believe that video games engines could be used in movies and could one day replace the post-production process. "I think that the current way that we make movies is very pipeline stage process, takes away a little bit of the organic nature of a movie set or real environment. I'm hoping real time graphics technology brings back the creative possibilities that we have in the real world," Libreri said. "Let's not dismiss the artistry you put into a final shot, we do spend a lot of time steadily tweaking blooms and lens flares or the lighting in a shot, but we'll be able to get a lot closer so that more run of the mill windows replacements will be created interactively on stage." Lucasfilm believes that over the next ten years, this concept of exchanging assets between movies and video games will also pave the way for capabilities for viewers to customise movies in real time. Libreri used the future example of an animated Disney film that could be streamed live on an iPad from the cloud, allowing anyone that watches it to customise it; changing the costumes of the princesses, or putting their own friend in the background. "There's so many things that you can do with the fact that video graphics is going to be real-time and not this post-process that we've had traditionally," he added. "If you combine video games with film-making techniques, you can start to have these real deep, multi-user experiences. Being able to animate, edit and compose live is going to change the way we work and it's really going to bring back the creative experience in digital effects. To wrap up Libreri showed off a video demonstrating Lucasfilm's "performance capture stage" driving the game engine for 1313. The video shows the possibilities of this converging world of video games and movies and can be viewed below.

Also:

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2295956/lucasfilm-will-combine-video-games-and-movies-to-axe-post-production-process

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Tue, 22 Apr 2014 15:25:08 -0700 http://www.thatvideosite.com/v/11118/lucasfilm-shows-off-the-future-of-filmmaking-scenes-get-rendered-out-in-real-time-removing-the-need-for-post-production
<![CDATA[Cyberpunk: Our (Post) Modern Mythology]]> http://turnstylenews.com/2013/08/08/cyberpunk-our-post-modern-mythology/

Yearly reminder: unless you're over 60, you weren't promised flying cars. You were promised an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia. Here you go. An always-on, pervasive computer network offers addictive levels of immersion while doubling as a global panopticon.

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Tue, 18 Mar 2014 12:45:01 -0700 http://turnstylenews.com/2013/08/08/cyberpunk-our-post-modern-mythology/
<![CDATA[Shimmering World Conference, 25th April 2014]]> http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/79964750396

shimmeringworldconference:

Vendosculant / Hannah Sawtell 2012 / Image courtesy: the artist and VIlma Gold We can now confirm the following schedule for Shimmering World: —————————————————————————————————————————————- 10.00 – Introduction from conference organisers Paul Clinton & Luke Healey First session (10.10-12.00) Keynote – Dr. Tamara Trodd (University of Edinburgh) Ian Rothwell (PhD candidate, University of Edinburgh) – ‘Bad as in Bad: Collapsing Production Values in Thomas Ruff’s Jpegs’ Harry Sanderson (artist, Arcadia Missa) – ‘In Detail: High-Definition Amplified and Amputated’ Daniel Rourke (PhD candidate, Goldsmiths College)– ‘“I like the glow that flashes red like our Krypton sun. But not this irritating noise. Make way.”’ 12.00 – Break Second session (12.20-14.10) Keynote – David Panos (Hollybush Gardens) Hannah Ellul (PhD candidate, Goldsmiths College) – ‘Picturing Political Agency: Anja Kirschner and David Panos’ Melissa Gronlund (co-editor, Afterall) – ‘Polyphony: The Dialogic and the Digital’ Dr. Cadence Kinsey (postdoctoral fellow, University College London) – ‘Semi-Automatic Images: from HD to materiality’ 14.10 –Lunch (not provided) Third session (15.00-17.10) Keynote – Ed Atkins (Cabinet/Goldsmiths College) Linda Stupart (PhD candidate, Goldsmiths College/associate lecturer, London College of Communication) – ‘Old Objects/New Materialisms’ Sheena Culley (PhD candidate, London Graduate School) – ‘The Photography of David LaChapelle: Reflections on Skin’ Shama Khanna (curator, flatness.eu) – ‘The Resistance of the Immaterial Image’ Kathy Noble (curator, Wysing Arts Centre) – ‘A Material World: The Late Late-Capitalist Body’’ 5.10 – Break 5.30 – Concluding Roundtable with keynote speakers Ed Atkins, David Panos and Dr. Tamara Trodd 6.00 – End of conference —————————————————————————————————————————————-  Hannah Sawtell’s contribution TBA  Event is free but booking is essential: tickets available at Eventbrite  

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Tue, 18 Mar 2014 05:49:00 -0700 http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/79964750396
<![CDATA[Phantom Zone]]> http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/76164662020

catastrofe:

dream job

No wires

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Sun, 09 Feb 2014 15:56:47 -0800 http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/76164662020
<![CDATA[The Phantom Zone]]> http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/sep/10/phantom-zone

The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.

Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto (1991) [1]

This is no fantasy... no careless product of wild imagination. No, my good friends.

The opening lines of Richard Donner's Superman (1978) [2] In a 1950 film serial entitled Atom Man vs Superman [3] television executive and evil genius Lex Luthor sends Superman into a ghostly limbo he calls "The Empty Doom." Trapped in this phantom void, Superman's infinite powers are rendered useless, for although he can still see and hear the "real" world his ability to interact with it has all but disappeared. Over the following decades this paraspace [4]—to use Samuel Delany's term for a fictional space, accessed via technology, that is neither within nor entirely separate from the 'real' world—would reappear in the Superman mythos in various forms, beginning in 1961. Eventually dubbed "The Phantom Zone," its back story was reworked substantially, until by the mid 60s it had become a parallel dimension discovered by Superman's father, Jor El. Once used to incarcerate Krypton's most unsavory characters, The Phantom Zone had outlasted its doomed home world and eventually burst at the seams, sending legions of super-evil denizens raining down onto Earth. Beginning its life as an empty doom, The Phantom Zone was soon filled with terrors prolific enough to make even The Man of Steel fear its existence.

Overseen by story editor Mortimer Weisinger, and the unfortunately named artist Wayne Boring, the late 50s and early 60s were a strange time in the Superman universe. The comics suddenly became filled with mutated variants of kryptonite that gave Superman the head of an ant or the ability to read thoughts; with miniature Supermen arriving seconds before their namesake to save the day and steal his thunder; with vast universes of time caught fast in single comic book panels. It was an era of narrative excess wrapped by a tighter, more meticulous and, many would say, repressed aesthetic:

Centuries of epic time could pass in a single caption. Synasties fell between balloons, and the sun could grow old and die on the turn of a page. It was a toy world, too, observed through the wrong end of a telescope. Boring made eternity tiny, capable of being held in two small hands. He reduced the infinite to fit in a cameo... [5]

The Phantom Zone is one of the least bizarre narrative concepts from what is now known as the Silver Age of D.C. Comics (following on from the more widely celebrated Golden Age). It could be readily understood on a narrative level, and it had a metaphorical dimension as well, one that made conceivable the depths contained in Superman's vast, but ultimately manipulable universe. The Phantom Zone was usually portrayed on a television screen kept safe in one of the many rooms of the League of Justice headquarters. It could also be used as a weapon and fired from a portable projection device—the cold, harsh infinity of the Empty Doom blazing into Superman's world long enough to ensnare any character foolish enough to stand in its rays. Whether glimpsed on screen or via projection, then, The Phantom Zone could be interpreted as a metaphor for the moving image. 

In comic books, as in the moving image, the frame is the constituent element of narrative. Each page of a comic book is a frame which itself frames a series of frames, so that by altering each panel's size, bleed or aesthetic variety, time and space can be made elastic. Weisinger and Boring's Phantom Zone took this mechanism further, behaving like a weaponized frame free to roam within the comic book world. Rather than manipulating three-dimensional space or the fourth dimension of time, as the comic book frame does, The Phantom Zone opened out onto the existence of other dimensions. It was a comic book device that bled beyond the edge of the page, out into a world in which comic book narratives were experienced not in isolation, but in parallel with the onscreen narratives of the cinema and the television. As such, the device heralded televisual modes of attention.

For his 1978 big-budget movie version of Superman, [6] director Richard Donner cunningly translated The Phantom Zone into something resembling the cinema screen itself. In the film's opening sequence, a crystal surface swoops down from the immense backdrop of space, rendering the despicable General Zod and his cronies two-dimensional as it imprisons them. In the documentary The Magic Behind the Cape, [7] bundled with the DVD release of Superman in 2001, we are given an insight into the technical prowess behind Donner's The Phantom Zone. The actors are made to simulate existential terror against the black void of the studio, pressed up against translucent, flesh-like membranes and physically rotated out of sync with the gaze of the camera. Rendering the faux two-dimensional surface of Donner's Phantom Zone believable required all manner of human dimensions to be framed out of the final production. The actors react to causes generated beyond the studio space, the director's commands, or the camera's gaze. They twist and recoil from transformations still to occur in post-production. In a sense, the actors behave as bodies that are already images. With its reliance on post-produced visual effects, the Phantom Zone sequence represents an intermediary stage in the gradual removal of sets, locations, and any 'actual' spatial depths from the film production process. Today, actors must address their humanity to green voids post-produced with CGI, and the indexical relationship between the film image and the events unfolding in front of the lens have been almost entirely shattered. In this Phantom cinema produced after the event, ever-deeper layers of special effects seal actors into a cinematic paraspace. Just as The Phantom Zone of the comic book heralded televisual modes of attention, The Phantom Zone of the 1970s marked a perceptual regime in which the cinematic image was increasingly sealed off from reality by synthetic visual effects.

   For Walter Benjamin, writing during cinema's first “Golden Era,", the ability of the cinema screen to frame discontinuous times and spaces represented its most profound "truth." Delivered by cinema, Benjamin argued, mechanically disseminated images were actually fracturing the limits of our perceptions, training "human beings in the apperceptions and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily." [8]  The cinema screen offered audiences who were confined to finite bodies that had never before experienced such juxtapositions an apparently shared experience of illuminated consciousness. Far from inventing this new mode of perception through the "shock-character" of montage, Benjamin believed that cinema spoke of the 'truths' which awaited us beneath the mirage of proletarian experience. Truths which would guide us—with utopian fervor—towards an awareness, and eventual control, of what Benjamin called the "new nature":

Not just industrial technology, but the entire world of matter (including human beings) as it has been transformed by that technology. [9]

In short, cinema was less a technology than a new and evolving mode of machinic thought, both generated by and generating the post-industrial subject. Observing the relation between representation and visibility, Jens Andermann notes:

Truth, the truth of representation, crucially depends on the clear-cut separation between the visible and the invisible, the non-objectness of the latter. Truth is the effect of what we could call the catachretic nature of visuality, the way in which the world of visual objects can point to the invisible domain of pure being only by obsessively pointing to itself. [10]

As from the Greek root aisthanesthai – "to perceive"—the aesthetic conditions through which The Phantom Zone have been translated frame far more than a supposed fictional void. Called upon to indicate an absolute outside — the unfathomable infinity of another, ghostly, parallel universe — The Phantom Zone instead reiterates the medium of its delivery, whether comic book, television, or cinema, with mirror-like insistency. Such is the power of new technical modes of thought, that very often, they cause us to rethink the outmoded media that we are so used to as to be unaware. The Phantom Zone hides the cinematographic image in plain view. Its reappearance and reimagining over the last 60 odd years, in ever newer forms and aesthetic modes, can be read paradigmatically, that is, as a figure that stands in place of, and points towards, shifts, mutations and absolute overturnings in our perceptual apparatus. Its most recent iteration is in the 2013 Superman reboot, Man of Steel, [11] and in particular in a 'viral' trailer distributed on YouTube a few weeks before the film was released. [12] Coming towards us soars a new mode of machinic thought; a Phantom Zone of unparalleled depth and aesthetic complexity that opens onto a new new - digital - nature.

The General Zod trailer for Man of Steel begins with a static rift that breaks into a visual and audial disarrangement of the phrase, “You are not alone". General Zod's masked face materializes, blended with the digital miasma: a painterly 3D effect that highlights the inherent ‘otherness' of where his message originates. The aesthetic is unsettling in as much as it is recognizable. We have no doubt as viewers of this 'viral' dispatch as to the narrative meaning of what we are witnessing, namely, a datastream compressed and distributed from a paraspace by an entity very much unlike us. The uncanny significance of the trailer stems more from how very normal the digital miasma feels; from how apprehensible this barrage of noise is to us. Indeed, it is ‘other', but its otherness is also somehow routine, foreseeable. The pathogen here is not Zod's message, it is digital technology itself. The glitched aesthetic of the trailer has become so habitual as to herald the passing of digital materiality into the background of awareness. Its mode of dissemination, via the Trojan Horse of YouTube, just as unvisible to us during the regular shifts we make between online/offline modes of communication. The surface of this Phantom Zone very much interfaces with our material world, even if the message it impresses upon us aches to be composed of an alien substance.   Digital video does the work of representation via a series of very clever algorithms called codecs that compress the amount of information needed to produce a moving image. Rather than the individual frames of film, each as visually rich and total as the last, in a codec only the difference between frames need be encoded, making each frame “more like a set of movement instructions than an image." [13] The painterly technique used in the General Zod trailer is normally derived from a collapse between key (image) and reference (difference) frames at the status of encoding. The process is called ‘datamoshing', and has its origins in glitch art, a form of media manipulation predicated on those minute moments when the surface of an image or sound cracks open to reveal some aspect of the process that produced it. By a method of cutting, repeating or glitching of key and reference frames visual representations are made to blend into one another, space becomes difference and time becomes image. The General Zod trailer homages/copies/steals the datamoshing technique, marking digital video's final move from convenient means of dissemination, to palpable aesthetic and cultural influence.  In the actual movie, Man of Steel (2013), Zod's video message is transposed in its entirety to the fictional Planet Earth. The viral component of its movement around the web is entirely absent: its apparent digitality, therefore, remains somewhat intact, but only as a mere surface appearance. This time around the message shattering through The Phantom Zone is completely devoid of affective power: it frames nothing but its existence as a narrative device. The filmmakers rely on a series of “taking over the world" tropes to set the stage for General Zod's Earth-shaking proclamation. TV sets in stereotypical, exotic, locales flicker into life, all broadcasting the same thing. Electronic billboards light up, loudspeakers blare, mobile phones rumble in pockets, indeed, all imaging technologies suddenly take on the role of prostheses for a single, datamoshed, stream. In one—particularly sincere—moment of the montage a faceless character clutches a Nokia brand smartphone in the centre of shot and exclaims, “It's coming through the RSS feeds!" This surface, this Phantom Zone, frames an apparatus far vaster than a datamoshed image codec: an apparatus apparently impossible to represent through the medium of cinema. The surface appearance of the original viral trailer is only a small component of what constitutes the image it conveys, and thus, of the image it frames of our time. Digital materiality shows itself via poorly compressed video clips arriving through streams of overburdened bandwidth. Our understanding of what constitutes a digital image must then, according to Mark Hansen, “be extended to encompass the entire process by which information is made perceivable." [14]

In its cinematic and comic book guises, The Phantom Zone was depicted as “a kind of membrane dividing yet connecting two worlds that are alien to and also dependent upon each other".[15] The success of the datamoshed trailer comes from the way it broke through that interface, its visual surface bubbling with a new kind of viral, digital, potential that encompasses and exposes the material engaged in its delivery. As cinematographic subjects we have an integral understanding of the materiality of film. Although we know that the frames of cinema are separate we crave the illusion of movement, and the image of time, they create. The ‘viral' datamoshed message corrupts this separation between image and movement, the viewer and the viewed. Not only does General Zod seem to push out, from inside the numerical image, it is as if we, the viewing subject enraptured by the digital event, have been consumed by its flow. The datamoshed Phantom Zone trailer takes the one last, brave, step beyond the apparatus of image production. Not only is the studio, the actor, and even the slick appeal of CGI framed out of its mode of delivery, arriving through a network that holds us complicit, this Phantom Zone frames the 'real' world in its entirety, making even the fictional world it appeals to devoid of affective impact. To take liberty with the words of Jean Baudrillard:

[Jorge Luis] Borges wrote: they are slaves to resemblance and representation; a day will come when they will try to stop resembling. They will go to the other side of the mirror and destroy the empire. But here, you cannot come back from the other side. The empire is on both sides. [16]

Once again, The Phantom Zone highlights the material mode of its delivery with uncanny exactness. We are now surrounded by images that supersede mere visual appearance: they generate and are generated by everything the digital touches, including we, the most important component of General Zod's 'viral' diffusion. The digital Phantom Zone extends to both sides of the flickering screen.   References

[1] Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women : The Reinvention of Nature. (London: Free Association Books Ltd, 1991), 149–181.

[2] Richard Donner, Superman, Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi, 1978.

[3] Spencer Gordon Bennet, Atom Man Vs. Superman, Sci-Fi, 1950.

[4] Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 164.

[5] Grant Morrison, Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero (London: Vintage Books, 2012), 62.

[6] Donner, Superman.

[7] Michael Thau, The Magic Behind the Cape, Documentary, Short, 2001. See : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYXbzVJ6NzA&feature=youtu.be&t=4m12s

[8] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge  Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 26.

[9] Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (MIT Press, 1991), 70.

[10] Jens Andermann, The Optic of the State: Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil (University of Pittsburgh Pre, 2007), 5.

[11] Zack Snyder, Man of Steel, Action, Adventure, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, 2013.

[12] Man of Steel Viral - General Zod's Warning (2013) Superman Movie HD, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QkfmqsDTgY.

[13] BackStarCreativeMedia, “Datamoshing—the Beauty of Glitch," April 9, 2009, http://backstar.com/blog/2009/04/09/datamoshing-the-beauty-of-glitch/.

[14] Mark B. Hansen, “Cinema Beyond Cybernetics, or How to Frame the Digital Image," Configurations 10, no. 1 (2002): 54, doi:10.1353/con.2003.0005.

[15] Mark Poster, The Second Media Age (Wiley, 1995), 20.

[16] Jean Baudrillard, “The Murder of the Sign," in Consumption in an Age of Information, ed. Sande Cohen and R. L. Rutsky (Berg, 2005), 11.  

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Tue, 10 Sep 2013 08:00:00 -0700 http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/sep/10/phantom-zone
<![CDATA[Man of Steel Viral - General Zod's Warning (2013) Superman Movie HD]]> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QkfmqsDTgY&feature=youtube_gdata

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The Phantom Zone

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Tue, 21 May 2013 19:44:03 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QkfmqsDTgY&feature=youtube_gdata