Some final thoughts
I apologize for my absence today!
I thought I would post the questions I had prepared for today’s class if anyone’s interested in taking a look.
We’ve talked a lot about the technologies we use for filmmaking, game-making, and storytelling. I have been thinking quite a bit about how other more utility based technologies are impacting storytelling. What comes to mind is Jon Rafman’s work, 9 Eyes, where he crowd-sourced Google images. But I’m wondering if we can even make the distinction between utilitarian technologies and artistic ones? And if for instance, we accept that military technologies (for example) are appropriated and/or embedded in artistic practices what are the moral implications? What are the artistic implications?
• 9-eyes.com
• https://devart.withgoogle.com
Are certain mediums more suited to provoking emotion? Are there particular senses that stimulate feeling more? I was thinking about podcasting as such an incredible mode of storytelling as I have been moved to tears many times by the sound of someone’s voice.
Where do we stand as a class: technological determinism? Technogenesis? Social constructionism?
For an interesting look at the relationship between military technologies and aesthetics, read Paul Virilio’s “War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception”. (https://www.library.yorku.ca/find/Search/Results?&lookfor=0860912140&type=ISN)
In my opinion, Virilio is a crotchety French cultural theorist with some brilliant insights into the relationship between the apparatus and the aesthetic. A lot of what he has written here has profound implications on the kind of technologies we looked at in our class that are explicitly linked to the military (VR, AR, GPS, the Internet, etc.)