I recently experienced the new Arcade fire 'hyperlink-video', The Wilderness Downtown, and was cautiously moved. The video allows you (or more accurately you allow it) to access the memories of your childhood by incorporating Google Earth images of the address where you grew up.
I must confess that the sense of nostalgia for place, smell, texture, and sounds is overwhelming if you give yourself over to the experience. And certainly, this concept of moving image as a Borgesian 'garden of forking hyperlinked images', may very well be the future of digital cinema. Just image what could be done if, instead of using google earth, we allowed them to use our iPhoto file or our video files!
But I’m leery of the possibilities. For one, this is certainly perfecting the advertising technique called Lovemarks, which is intended to be some kind of 'hyper-brand' or a 'brandless brand' that uses sensuality, intimacy and mystery to sell a product. And lets face it ... the new Arcade Fire album is a product. What greater tool than suturing your own sense of nostalgia for youth and innocense to a product!
The other product is, of course, the Google Chrome web browser, which is 'recommended'. I ran into problems not using it so 'recommended' comes with an ironic asterisk. At one point, I think 6 different screens are used to create a pastiche of memory and movement. You can type a post card to your younger self and share it via cyber magic ...
Even more, however, I'm leery of the digitalization of memory through video and photographs which may spell the end of memory as we know in the human race. We don't remember in web-browser frames at 1080p by whatever --if you're lucky. And we certainly don't remember using copyrighted technologies that give us vantage points that we have no recollection of in the first place. Memory is fleeting and imprecise, it comes and goes as it wills not always when we will. It begins one place and often ends non-diegetically in another.
This is where the cinematic time-image will always be, not only, a superior aesthetic experience, but be a superior medium for entering into the complex mysteries of time, space, and memory. The cinematic time-image is a medium of contemplation and growth rather than the colonization of commerce and the components of the mega-machine via it's increasingly sophisticated delivery device --'artful entertainment'.
It's no wonder the two most successful art forms of the late 20th century and early 21st are advertising and pornography ...
time is certainly out of joint
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