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When I took a movie/directors course, our professor told us how to know a good director from a bad one. Very simple, he said. If after the first 30-60 seconds of the movie you feel that you are in good hands, it means the director knows what he's doing. There's no science or method to it.

I haven't finished watching Emilia Perez yet, but I do feel that it's a piece of cinema worth watching.
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Надо еще найти Маска, где он изображает себя с накачанными мускулами.




TWIMC

May. 11th, 2024 11:34 am
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The American Novel Since 1945 with Amy Hungerford. Yale.

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“The genre has been defined as an art of “cognitive estrangement”. This means, in the first place, that science fiction distances us from our everyday cognitive assumptions and frames of reference – which is something that philosophy is also supposed to do. But the definition also implies, at least in some instances, that science fiction works to estrange us from the very possibility of being able to cognize our “immediate experience” at all. In science fiction narratives, cognition may fail because new technologies “alter sense ratios or patterns of perception” so radically that there is no evident pathway from here to there; or because the sort of subjectivity that we take for granted has broken down; or because we encounter alien forms of sentience that are not commensurable with our own.”

Steven Shaviro. “Discognition.”


====
LLMs can be trained to show that can't be shown, i.e. confabulate consistently on a massive scale.
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“Science fiction is a special kind of literature – or better, paraliterature, as Samuel R. Delany calls it – that operates through speculation and extrapolation, and that takes place (conceptually, if not grammatically) in the future tense. It is a kind of thought experiment, a way of entertaining odd ideas, and of asking off-the-wall what if? questions. But instead of approaching its issues abstractly, as philosophy does, or breaking them down into empirically testable propositions, as physical science does, science fiction embodies these issues in characters and narratives.
...
The method of science fiction is emotional and situational, rather than rational and universalizing. ”

Steven Shaviro. “Discognition.”
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Contrary to the common belief that moving images help us to see change, we contend that stillness that helps us to see movement and change. Change is constituted through the relationality of the picture series. The series is a synthesis and analysis of development at once. Development is both the individual form and the series of forms – it is stasis as much as flow. locating development in the images we have created is to imagine development as a pictorial relationship. It is the relationship between the visual forms that produce both the individual stage of development and development as a whole – simultaneously and in mutual dependence (Wellmann 2017: 233).
...
The ‘fishness’ of the fish is maintained through the transformations; each stage bears a unique gradation of colour, repetition of the same form seen from different angles and scales, moving forwards, backwards and sideways, creating a feeling of emergence from a dark background. Klee’s watercol- our washes elevate the forms to a resonant poetry.
...
The essence of rhythm is the fusion of sameness and novelty; so that the whole never loses the essential unity of the pattern, while the parts exhibit the contrast arising from the novelty of their detail’ (Whitehead in Wellmann 2017: 25).



Quoted from Drawing Processes of Life, 2024


Simultaneity of images seems to be key for this representation. Current AR tech is going that way, which might help develop a new way to describe life processes and in general adopt process philosophy-based view of life. Generative AI might help too.
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Ricoeur’s argument regarding selfhood proceeds through a sequence of stages. He begins from the philosophy of language and the question of an identifying reference to persons as selves, not simply things. This leads to consideration of the speaking subject as an agent, passing through the semantics of action Ricoeur had learned from analytic philosophy during his time in North America. Next comes the idea of the self as having a narrative identity which is then is followed by the question of the ethical aim of being such a self. This hermeneutics of selfhood culminates in the conclusion that one is a self as one self among other selves, something that can only be attested to through personal testimony or the testimony of others. Selfhood is thus closely tied to a kind of discourse that says “I believe-in”. Its certainty is a lived conviction rather than a logical or scientific certainty.Read more... )
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ricoeur/

The implication would be that when it comes to self neither logic, nor science applies. Instead, [narrative] art, including gossip, fills this self-space.
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An excerpt from The Good Shepherd (2006) script:



The movie bombed, both at the box and among the critics. But I really like the script, so far.

TIL

Feb. 13th, 2023 11:36 pm
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Charles Perot was 67 when he published his book of fairy tales.
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I just need to tattoo it on my forehead for the next year.

Recovery, Escape, Consolation.
...
Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining—regaining of a clear view.

Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories. ... the desire to visit, free as a fish, the deep sea; or the longing for the noiseless, gracious, economical flight of a bird, that longing which the aeroplane cheats, except in rare moments, seen high and by wind and distance noiseless, turning in the sun: that is, precisely when imagined and not used. There are profounder wishes: such as the desire to converse with other living things.
...
The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well...

--- J.R.R. Tolkien. On Fairy Stories.


Escape is self-explanatory. He never really defines; only argues against a negative interpretation of "escapism."
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В субботу встречался с приятелем, говорили, как обычно, об американской жизни, и он мне посоветовал почитать The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood. (THT). Я начал читать, и узнал привычные детали жизни тоталитарного общества. Одна идея показалась очень знакомой: в новелле женщины, в зависимости от положения в государственной иеарархии, носят платья разного цвета. Сама героиня работает служанкой, поэтому ей положено ходить в строго красном платье.

Я вспомнил, что давным-давно был советский фильм Кин-дзад-за, где в обществе будущего тоже была строгая дифференциация цвета одежды. Кто у кого взял идею? Атвуд опубликовала свою книгу в 1985-м, а фильм вышел в 1986-м, поэтому подозреваю, что цветные штаны в фильме появились неспроста.

С приятелем мы договорились читать эту книгу одновременно и обсуждать ее при встречах. Мне, наверное, это будет немного трудно делать, потому что для него общество из THT – экзотический кошмар, а я там жил. Он же не поверит, что Атвуд, скорее, приуменьшает нормальность тоталитаризма, чем его преувеличивает.
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My lord was pleased to represent me as a great admirer of projects, and a person of much curiosity and easy belief; which, indeed, was not without truth; for I had myself been a sort of projector in my younger days.
....

I was received very kindly by the warden, and went for many days to the academy. Every room has in it one or more projectors; and I believe I could not be in fewer than five hundred rooms.

--- Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift. 1726.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/829/829-h/829-h.htm
Part 3, Chapters 4-5.

Note the meaning of "projector".

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