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“Her”: Future Awe by Mark Lieberman

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August 25, 2014

In writer-director Spike Jonze’s Her, Joaquin Phoenix plays the man some of us might turn out to be in twenty or thirty years. Burdened by the constant bombardment of “connection” and “engagement,” Theodore Twombley is perpetually alone, at least in his own mind. Even though he knows his life is stuck in neutral, he feels too threatened by his own sorrows to make any meaningful strides in the right direction. But technology hasn’t hollowed him out. In fact, Theodore radiates empathy and compassion, even when he doesn’t know where or how to direct it.

That’s the contradiction at the heart of this marvelous film, a richly imagined exploration of the nature of relationships and a study in the futility of rejecting technological progress. Her offers a vision of the future that’s both radically different from our world and very much the same. Theodore’s central quandary – is my relationship with an artificially intelligent operating system “real”? – is just a logical extension of our own uncertainty about knowing and connecting with others. As we place our trust in manmade machines that take on lives of their own, we’re simply transferring the central questions of human existence into a more palatable outlet. In the not-so-distant future of Her, those central questions remain the same, even though they’ve evolved on the surface.

Her takes place sometime in the future. It’s not clear how much time has elapsed since 2013, but technology seems to be only a few decades removed from our own. High-waisted pants and brightly colored shirts are the fashions du jour. Everything looks a little sleeker than it does right now, but Theodore lives in a world that is recognizably our own, and his love interest of choice bears a superficial response to our friend, the eternally wise Siri.

Theodore is a dweeby man who mumbles a lot but speaks eloquently, never more so than when he’s composing affectionate declarations of love for his clients at BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com. Phoenix’s performance is delicate and tender, so that Theodore is always a little removed from his surroundings even when he’s talking to other people. No wonder, then, that he takes a liking for his new operating system Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). She accepts his fractured soul because that’s what she’s programmed to do, but the relationship is built on a solid, if unconventional, foundation.

Samantha arrives at an ideal time. Theodore’s marriage has dissolved, his dating life stagnated. He’s lost the ability to offer himself completely to another human being, a necessary component of any long-lasting relationship. He’s grown distant from his estranged wife (Rooney Mara) and finds himself unable to even follow through on a one-night stand (with the gorgeous Olivia Wilde, no less). Samantha offers a tangible taste of another person’s soul without the difficulties of interacting with another human being. It also helps that Samantha is growing into herself as she’s growing closer to Theodore. Johansson’s performance is remarkable – with only her supple voice, she captures Samanatha’s inherent anonymity and unbridled curiosity so convincingly that her physical form, an earpiece and an iPhone-shaped console device, is as compelling as an actual human being might have been. Johansson doesn’t simply read the lines – she translates them into delicate expressions of burgeoning self-actualization.

Her is more than a fascinating premise. Jonze’s perceptive script weaves through each facet of Theodore and Samantha’s relationship both gracefully and thoughtfully, rarely settling for the obvious outcomes. A lesser movie might have hinged on others disapproving of Theodore’s unconventional relationship. Indeed, several characters express that skepticism, but they’re not frowned upon for doing so. The movie questions not only the ethical and logistical issues surrounding this relationship, but also the complications that ensue when it comes to sympathizing with a creature fundamentally different from yourself. Jonze oscillates effortlessly between judging Theodore for his faults and praising him for his unabashed sentimentality. The relationship isn’t inherently winning or troubling – it’s complex, tentative, rapturous and destructive all at once. When Theodore and Samantha “have sex” for the first time, Jonze lingers on Theodore’s face before tenderly cutting to black. Never mind the logistics. This situation is an oddity, and the movie never pretends it’s anything but.

Her is constructed so purposefully that the quality of the details is almost beside the point. In a throwaway scene, Theodore visits his friend Amy (Amy Adams), who shows him a rough cut of her new documentary. It’s a still shot of a middle-aged woman sleeping in her bed. Theodore asks if there’s more to it. “No, that’s it,” she replies. Amy’s husband (Matt Letscher) suggests talking heads or reenactments to articulate Amy’s intended theme. Amy refuses – it wouldn’t be real anymore. Try to explain this movie’s premise to someone who’s never heard of it. You’ll feel like Amy pitching her documentary or Theodore condensing his relationship with Samantha into a single sentence. Her contains multitudes. Its point is that relationships do too.

Mark Lieberman is a rising junior majoring in journalism and minoring in cinema studies at American University. He is the Managing Editor of The Scene at The Eagle, covering arts and entertainment, music and lifestyle around campus and across DC. He is currently interning at USA Today, where he has written articles for the Life section and USA Weekend Magazine, in addition to managing the web site and social media accounts for USA Weekend. He is passionate about all forms of pop culture from movies and television to music and books, and he believes that thinking about and discussing entertainment is a worthwhile and critically important pastime. You can read his work on The American University Eagle, USA Today, and his blog: liebermannolie.wordpress.com.

This article was selected as a finalist in the 2014 DC Student Arts Journalism Challenge, an annual competition designed to identify and support talented young arts writers.

Jodorowsky’s Dune Brings Epic Back by Emilia Brahm

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August 25, 2014

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Jodorowsky’s Dune Brings Epic Back by Emilia Brahm

“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.” Frank Herbert’s seminal science fiction novel Dune asserts an unattainable reality, a universe represented by the innovators who see one step beyond the expected and the logical.

If assessed by his oeuvre of absurd, surrealist films, Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky is either many steps ahead or totally befuddled. Based on his bizarre 1970 hit El Topo and the more erratic The Holy Mountain (1973), Jodorowsky seems the latter—the films are enticing for their outlandishness but present no digestible philosophy.

After the wild cult success of his mystic and surreal early films, Jodorowsky decided to take on a new project: turning Herbert’s Dune into a film. Jodorowsky’s Dune, directed by Frank Pavich, chronicles the attempt and failure to realize this project in fascinating detail, doubling the audience’s regret that Dune was never made.

But, rewind: the year was 1974 and the time was right. Jodo, as he is known by his former colleagues interviewed in the documentary, was popular in art circles, he had the funding, the vision, and more than enough energy, and soon began amassing a team of, in his words, “prophets…and warriors to change the world.”

Jodorowsky’s Dune interviews these said-warriors, showcases their work, and highlights how magical the process ofDune’s pre-production was. They—notably all men—are nerdy, awkward oddballs, and very talented in their own realm. It was Jodorowsky’s impassioned encouragement that brought their life’s best work out, as many of them acknowledge.

Beyond the stories of the participants in this three-year attempt at making Dune, the film shows a world begging to be put to film. The illustrator Moebius’ intricate storyboards and the planet of the evil Harkonnens, designed by the undeniably eldritch H.R. Giger, stand out. In combining story and imagery and music, Jodorowsky’s Dune succeeds on many levels.

In fact, it’s an adept piece of documentary filmmaking. The music is tight, the imagery smooth, the cinematography clean – only once is it slightly out of focus as it zooms out to capture Jodorowsky spontaneously picking up his cat to tickle him.

And yet—it was too perfect. What a criticism—too perfect? But for a story about the creation of Dune—a story of a secret meeting with Dalí in the St. Regis hotel bar in NYC under the 8-by-30 foot Maxwell Parrish painting of King Cole farting, a story of chasing a retired, huffing-and-puffing obese Orson Welles around the bistros of Paris and hiring him with payment of unlimited ambrosial catering from his favorite bistro (the gourmand swallowed the bribe like a draught of expensive wine with his coq au vin)—the presentation was too divorced from reality, technically flawless, and boring.

I wanted messy, strange, quixotic, like Jodo’s story. I wanted young Jodorwsky, wild haired, throwing himself into new characters and around the city with strange friends.

But just like the vast phantasmagoria that was—and would have been—Dune, the movie, this version of Jodo was not sustainable. After the failure of Dune, Jodorowsky formulated psychomagic, a practice based in Tarot cards and zen buddhism. Psychomagic asserts that a symbolic act, like hypnotism or even more active, risible spectacles, can be taken as fact by an unconscious mind, and therefore heal internal conflict.

Dune as Jodorowsky planned it never came together (David Lynch made an embarrassingly mediocre version in 1984—not good enough to deserve praise, not bad enough to become a cult film). And yet, the symbolic act of the two-year compilation: planning, sketching, modeling, has been taken as fact by Jodo’s unconscious (and conscious mind, too).

Jodorowsky has moved beyond the wave that peaked at Dune, and this documentary does too. Perhaps the clean editing and sharp image are the zen version of maturity, adulthood, where we can enjoy and learn from the wildness of youth from a safe distance, like looking through the scrubbed-clean glass window of Jodo’s Paris apartment at the street below, where Jodo once ran, wild-haired, with Mick Jagger and Salvador Dalí, shouting about madness and art as loud as he could.

Emilia Brahm is a writer of journalism, criticism, and fiction. She currently studies at Georgetown University, where her academic focus is Gender Studies and Urban Agriculture, as well as Polish and Arabic Language and Literature . Her work can be found at http://emiliabrahm.wordpress.com/ and in the Georgetown Voice.

This article was selected as a finalist in the 2014 DC Student Arts Journalism Challenge, an annual competition designed to identify and support talented young arts writers.

Human After All: Distinguishing the Human from the Computer by Sean Stempler

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August 25, 2014

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Human After All: Distinguishing the Human from the Computer by Sean Stempler

In a world where Twitter inhabitants connect with their friends, share their daily lives and identities with the general public, @horse_ebooks offered a beautiful and bewildering glimpse at the heart of the internet. It was a text bot with over 200,000 followers. The account, unquestionably an international phenomenon, transcended the boundaries of memetics and spontaneous retweets into the realm of worldwide discourse, even making appearances in academic publications. It questioned at the universe like most people gaze up at the stars while simultaneously demonstrating an absolute lack of humanity.

Almost equally mystifying was Pronunciationbook, the YouTube channel responsible for such clips as “How to Pronounce Gnocchi”, “How to Pronounce Ke$ha”, and “How to Pronounce Acai”. For nearly three years, the channel seemingly plucked words from random from dictionaries and across the Web, hitting on a strange side of popular culture by, oddly enough, providing standard English pronunciations. All appeared mundane, if not a bit inhuman, until the channel released a video simply entitled “How to Pronounce 77”.

In one of the greatest revelations to which the internet has ever borne witness, Jacob Bakkila, creative director at Buzzfeed, and Thomas Bender, formerly vice-president of product development at Howcast, have stepped out of the shadows to reveal the fruits of nearly three years of work. When did this happen? The two most bizarre fusions of human insight and mechanical constraint ever released upon Earth were not, in fact, products of a mysterious and ever-evolving Internet, but the workings of a couple of guys who asked the most brilliant and relevant existential question of our times: how do we distinguish computer from human.

The answer is harder to arrive at than we once may have thought; anonymity in writing is far easier to come by in the modern age than ever before. Physicality has become a non-essential quality of things in our world, reflected in our increasingly apparent lack of understanding of the real impacts of the internet. This uncomfortable unknown is what led tens of thousands of people worldwide to presume that @horse_ebooks was nothing more than an automated piece of script trawling the web for random snippets of text, that its philosophical ramblings were the miraculous products of chance and interconnectivity of communication.

Turing Test be damned; @horse_ebooks has proven more of a threat to the tangibility of humanity than any supercomputer AI. That’s the remarkable elegance of the project: dredging up the thematic core of sci-fi works from Asimov’s novels to The Matrix, shouting to the universe that something just doesn’t make sense. The very notion of machines challenging our cognitive superiority and human spirit makes us very uncomfortable. Inverting this fear forms the basis for Bakkila and Bender’s pieces, which ask us if we can distinguish computer-like speech from something actually generated by a computer, a sort of reverse-Turing Test. As it turns out, humans are exceptional at masquerading as machines attempting to be human.

PronunciationBook factors smoothly into this examination by stabbing at the universal desire to find patterns in chaos. Though the esoteric YouTube channel never received the same sort of ontological attention as @horse_ebooks due to its usage of a distinctly human voice, it nonetheless built a massive following of investigators determined to uncork its bottle of mysteries. A firestorm brewed with the release of the aforementioned countdown videos, beginning with “How to Pronounce 77”’s chilling proclamation that “Something is going to happen in 77 days”, followed up by the downright disturbing pronunciation of 76, which stated that “I have been trying to tell you something for 1183 days. Something is going to happen in 76 days.” Whereas @horse_ebooks didn’t fully attempt to reach humanity, PronunciationBook reflected a fusion of man and machine, the voice of a person passing on the ramblings of a random text generator.

Throughout the several-month-long countdown, PronunciationBook rapidly transitioned from these brief apocalyptic prophecies to phrases of nonsense, then to several-minutes-long narratives about intertwining character arcs and surrealist events, and finally to an unsettling weeks-spanning sonnet which waxed romantic about systems. The so-called 77 Days community online speculated about terrorist attacks, political uprisings, plots of war in the Middle East, religious movements, and a whole lot more.

Adding to the mystery, the last 20 seconds of each video culminated in a quiet orchestra of machine noise. 77 Days’ army of tech-savvy investigators developed an algorithm that decoded the whirring to produce an image. Growing day-by-day, the resultant spectrogram horrifyingly built up to a figure in a suit.

After almost three years of waiting, PronunciationBook released a video entitled “How to Pronounce horse_ebooks”, and Bakkila and Bender acknowledged the accounts as conceptual art pieces. The video further complicated matters by revealing the pieces as viral marketing for Bakkila and Bender’s upcoming choose-your-own-adventure game, Bear Sterns Bravo. While this felt like a mundane result, Bear Sterns Bravo continues the pair’s investigation into systems and modern paradoxes. The disturbing figure from the spectrogram was eventually revealed as the antagonist of Bear Sterns Bravo, Bear Sterns CEO Jackie Dalton. Dalton constantly wears a stock ticker in front of his eyes, becoming one with his capitalistic machine.

Reactions to the reveal were, needless to say, diverse. Everything from unrestrained outrage to bewilderment and assenting claims that the connection was somehow obvious the whole time burst forth from all corners of the internet and major publications like the New Yorker. Chief among the choruses of questions and thoughts about the two projects was, strangely enough, a classical one: were the two accounts “real” art?

The avant-garde has consistently been deemed trivial and worthless by contemporaries, only to be hailed by historians as unappreciated brilliance. Whether these works will end up being enshrined in the pantheon of artistic advancements remains to be seen, but their contemporary value as art, in my eyes, is incredibly strong. Even if the only thing @horse_ebooks ever did was make a reader chuckle, and all PronuncationBook managed to do was spawn an even more notable parody account, PronunciationManual, both projects captured an element of the zeitgeist of the 2010s. Somehow, the mad ramblings of both masked men hit just the right notes in just the right way as to make it all mean something. Even if they angered you, they angered you for a reason.

The most shocking truth that the project revealed is more deeply unsettling than anything the accounts ever released: the answer to our first question, how we go about distinguishing computer from human, might be completely irrelevant. “Everything happens so much” doesn’t need to come from either man or a machine to be such a uniquely thoughtful 26 characters.

Sean Stempler

Sean Stempler is a rising Junior and an English and Journalism student at Georgetown University. He is Managing Editor for the Georgetown Independent, as well as a staff writer and editor on other publications like the Anthem and Georgetown Radio’s The Rotation. In his spare time, he freelances for several online publications, including recent work for Game Cupid. His work is collected in an online portfolio, seanstempler.wordpress.com.

This article is a finalist in the 2014 DC Student Arts Journalism Challenge, an annual competition designed to identify and support talented young arts writers.

Take Me to the River By Richard L. Dana

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May 17, 2014

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At the end of May I’ll be going to Montevideo to participate in a collaborative project with six Uruguayan visual artists. Coming with me will be eight artist friends, fellow members of Take Me to The River (TMTTR), an international artists’ collective, of which I am a co-founder and project director.

TMTTR was born in 2002 when my friend Mansoora Hassan, who was living in Cairo at the time (but calls DC home), was asked by the Egyptian Minister of Culture if she would like to arrange an exhibition there. Mansoora invited me and two other DC-based artists (Judy Jashinsky and Betsy Stewart) to exhibit with her. Because we are four very different artists, we needed a theme to make the exhibition cohere. After much discussion, we decided the theme should be water. Then, at a meeting in my studio before the exhibit, Al Green’s song Take Me To The River was playing in the background. Great song! About water. The Nile and the Potomac. One thing led to another, and the Cairo exhibition grew to be eight artists: four Americans and four artists from other countries living in DC. The Cairo exhibit became the first expression of the artists’ collective, Take Me To The River.

Now there are 16 permanent members of TMTTR, including Joan Belmar, John Brown, David Carlson, Eglon Daley, Victor Ekpuk, Mansoora Hassan, Deirdre Saunder, Betsy Stewart, Andres Tremols, and me. We’ve staged projects in Cairo, Washington, DC (twice), Pretoria, Wichita Falls (Texas), Istanbul, and Aix-En-Provence. Projects are in the planning stages for New Orleans and Sao Paulo.

SHINY-TOXIC-REEF-EVENT — Shiny Toxic Reef Event by Richard L. Dana, 2014

The upcoming Uruguayan collaboration came about through my friend Vivienne Lassman, an independent curator here in DC, who is also a close friend of Jessica Racine-White (daughter of dearly departed DC art patron Herb White). Jessica, who has a second home in Montevideo, mentioned to Vivienne that she wants to get more involved in the Uruguayan art scene. Vivienne, who has served as a TMTTR curator in previous projects, told Jessica: “You’ve got to get TMTTR to do a project in Montevideo.” From that suggestion, to help make it happen, Jessica identified for us a group of six Uruguayan artists who already work together in the same workshop. Over e-mail, a dedicated Facebook site, and phone calls, we devised a collaborative project with several parts.

First, the fifteen artists were divided into five groups of three; each group has a mix of Uruguayan and TMTTR artists. Through a dialogue and the exchange of imagery via the internet, each group is creating a triptych, all of which should be more or less completed before TMTTR artists arrive in Montevideo. When I and the other TMTTR artists arrive in Montevideo, we will work with our Uruguayan colleagues for ten days to create a large-scale collaborative work; each artist will have a wooden surface of the same size to work on. The artists will be looking at each other’s work in progress and visually jamming, as musicians do. The Uruguayan artists have arranged for an exhibition of the project’s work at one of Montevideo’s most prestigious art venues -The Iturria Foundation.

I come to the art world from an international affairs perspective. My first career was as an international economist, specializing in technology transfer issues for a variety of DC-based consulting firms, and as a Soviet affairs expert. My last “real” job was as a civilian employee for Air Force Intelligence, where I was the current intel expert on Soviet / East European political, economic, and ground force issues. In that job I worked deep in the Pentagon in a vault. But all during school, college, and afterwards, I painted feverishly in my free time, and morphed into a full-time artist in the early 90s.

For more than a decade, TMTTR has given me wonderful opportunities to travel and present my work. In creating with people in these other places around the world I become more immersed in a location’s culture, and gain more understanding of it. TMTTR is personally important to me because it is a bit like a family, with members like brothers and sisters. We don’t always see eye to eye, and conversations can get lively, but in the end we move forward together into a new experience.

When creating art alone in my studio I must take it on faith that the long studio hours will result in some positive contribution, however small, to the world I live in. Through Take Me to The River projects, even again as the contribution may be very small, I feel as if I am more directly and concretely doing a good thing, promoting understanding and harmony between people around the world. The upcoming project in Uruguay will be the first TMTTR project in South America, and the first to feature collaborative work with other artists, something we are all very excited about.

Richard L. Dana is a self-taught artist who creates art, both large and small scale, in a range of media, including digital art, mixed media painting, drawing, and installations. He has exhibited extensively in the United States and internationally in 25 one-person and over 100 group exhibitions. Selected venues in the United States include the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), the Chrysler Museum (Norfolk VA), the Octagon House Museum (Washington, DC), the Drawing Center (New York, NY), Tribes Gallery (New York, NY), the Print Center (Philadelphia, PA), the International Monetary Fund (Washington, DC), Maryland Art Place (Baltimore, MD), the Washington Project for the Arts (Washington, DC), the Wichita Falls Art Museum (Wichita Falls, Texas), and the Troyer, Fitzpatrick, Lassman Gallery (Washington, DC). Internationally Mr. Dana has exhibited in museums, galleries, and biennials in the following countries: Belgium, Brazil, Egypt, Germany, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Russia, Senegal, South Africa, Spain, Taiwan, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.

Immersion, a project of Take Me to the River, featuring fifteen artists from seven countries, will open on May 30th, 2014 at the Iturria Foundation in Montevideo, Uruguay.

Full Fathom Five by Liz Lescault

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May 1, 2014

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My and Alison Sigethy’s organic sculptures will be shown together in May in an exhibit titled “Full Fathom Five” at VisArts’ Gibbs Gallery in Rockville. This is our second collaboration, allowing us to revisit and expand on our previous work. Our first collaborative exhibition, “Fathom,” took place in May 2013. In this exhibit, as in the last, we’re creating an immersive gallery experience for viewers, including an interactive soundscape.

Alison and I share similar aesthetic sensibilities. Although we work in different media, Alison primarily with glass and myself with clay, both of us create sculptural forms that relate to the natural world in a non-literal way.

A Lure, 2013, Lescault and Sigethy, 5 inches x 11 inches — ALure, 2013, Lescault and Sigethy, 5 x 11 inches

My sculptures combine visual elements from nature, including imagery from the ocean depths, the detritus of the forest floor, and microscopic life. My goal is to create work that can be simultaneously sensual and scientific, beautiful and ominous. Alison’s glass forms are also organic, and abstract. Her pieces embody contradictory ideas of beginning and end, rebirth and decay, without preference. Her goal, she’s told me, is to create dialogue about the continuum of life and our place in it.

The idea to collaborate was spontaneous. There was little forethought, just an on the spot mention of the possibility and an immediate acceptance of the idea. Our collaboration was seamless, and in many ways simple. Throughout we were of the same mind.

The process we used for creating our collaborative sculptures involved each of us developing a form or forms and turning them over to the other to complete. Alison gave me a multitude of small glass forms; delicate, lacey and colorful… very different from my own work. Viewing and handling the work was a pleasure in and of itself and it piqued my fancy. The forms I created in response were designed to hold her work as if the glass pieces were growing or blooming out of my clay form.

Alison and I involved John Vengrouski, a sound designer, to create a sound environment for our work to exist in. John regularly creates soundscapes for galleries, theater, dance and film, and the song movements John created are, at core, tone poems… emotional mood setters. Their intention is to create a sense of reverie. As a collaborative work, they are also pointedly intended to complement a set of visual pieces, not replace them or reduce them in the audience’s attention. Our intention is to create a true multi-level collaboration engaging the audience’s attention and focus, and I’d love to hear what you think of the exhibit.

Liz Lescault and Alison Sigethy, Full Fathom Five: Going Deeper, April 30-June 1at VisArts at Rockville, 155 Gibbs Street, Rockville MD. The opening reception is May 9 from 7-9.

Liz Lescault is an accomplished ceramic artist known for her vessel forms and luscious glazes. Liz lived in Botswana and Lesotho where she studied traditional African ceramic techniques and in France where she studied watercolor. A selection of her work is part of the permanent collection of the National Museum of Botswana.

Liz has exhibited widely in the Washington Metro region both in solo-exhibitions and group shows. She was awarded a 2012 Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award. In 2013 her work was selected for the “Sculpture Now 2013” Exhibition curated by Florcy Morisett and for “Siting Presence” curated by Sarah Tanguy. She also organizes and curates art exhibitions, and teaches art in her home studio. www.lizlescault.com

Featured image is: Blue Peristome, Alison Sigethy and Liz Lescault, 2013, Ceramic, 8×13 inches