Change Your Image
jcharlesberry
Reviews
Synthetic Pleasures (1995)
Horrendously alarming in its summation of our tech culture.
Whether concerning morphing one's body or immediate environment through climate control and/or fabrication, this film is extremely disturbing to a true humanist such as myself. The term transhumanist is IMO an oxymoron. Iara Lee's frightening film wakes out of slumber the real person. The one line from Howard Rheingold (one of my fav VR theorists) that summarises the whole movie is, "if the power goes off (one day) then we'll all wake up and see the hell we live in." (par.) Has a diverse cast, including VR pioneer Jaron Lanier.
I rented this together with Machine Dreams, a film solely about machines, AI, and the supposed coming merging of flesh and silicon that quotes people like Marvin Minsky and a former NASA director. Both these films show the danger to "meat," or our flesh. Jaron Lanier recently raised this problem with his One-half a Manifesto on Edge.org, where he terms the simplification of the human being by "cybernetic totalists" (as he puts it ), who use the human as machine metaphor.
This is the battle of The Matrix versus art, poetry, music, nature - right now.
Mindwalk (1990)
Pompous, Pretentious, Simplistic all in one
Pretentious was the word used by the small cult video store nearby when I rented this thing, I'd say because it's all too obvious a vehicle for a Green view with no one really saying "but," "but," "bu-" in between Ullman's long ivory tower ideas. The pompous man-created location fits well. And Ullman's view of science as saviour is exactly the same thing as Cartesianism, who are we kidding? It simply still sets man as the center of the universe, with a different clock only and a demand for one "correct" interpretation. It's scientism at its best.
Science in this context, education in general in another, all to "enlighten" people's minds, "darkened by capitalism's evil hands." Education in not a fix-all. "Imagine" John Lennon and all that in an eco context is still unworkable in reality (please reference Sep. 11/Dec. 13, war, etc.). The burying of this scientism is in informing everyone that the mind-body split is *imagined*. Someone wrote here that Green party theory is nothing other than communism, a failed idea. How right. The Cartesian split does not exist because an unnatural idea cannot evolve from a natural subject. It was just wrong philosophy, not the turning of society away from nature. We are by nature engineering creatures, i.e. we always manipulate our environment more than any other creature can. We are the only ones with the ability to stop our behaviour though. We are not part of nature in the same respect and trying to unify all these disciplines as Ullman lorded is impossible. It's always been tried. It failed miserably in the early 20th Century and it will always fail, especially under such a dominating and simplistic viewpoint as this brand of socialism.