My new article discussing the titles for The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly is online today at Bright Lights Film Journal.
The glitch and other details of his first on-screen credit distinguish Lardani's title card from the rest of the sequence in a very dramatic way unlike the other titles, which are immediately obvious as credits, it is possible to miss his credit entirely, a strange distinction to choose given his role and, according to his son, complete freedom in creating the design. It is almost as if his title card is hidden in plain sight.
ZXX is a computer 'font'--a group of typefaces for digital use--created by artist Sang Mun that currently result in illegible printed material when scanned by OCR technology that existed when it was initially produced. This qualification--when it was produced--is actually very significant to this kind of project because the various letter forms are (as with any typeface) 'set' and so will remain constants even though their size, arrangement and contents will inevitably vary from use to use: because these letter forms are a finite value, and are generally known, it would be relatively easy for a high powered OCR system to have this 'font' simply become one of the things it scans for, then error corrects so the contents become machine readable.
While the "Luddite Fallacy" clearly applies to some kinds of mechanization--the implementation of machine tools and automated processes which amplify and create efficienciesthe creation of autonomous tools raises fundamental questions about the assumption that new technological innovations that eliminate human labor necessarily simply shift it to other sites within the economy. This assumed validity for the Luddite Fallacy remains true if and only if the invention of autonomous tools do not function in a fashion similar to slaverythat the robot (a word derived from the title of Karel Čapeks 1920 play which means in Czech serf labor")does not displace or entirely replace human labor because it is a conscious agent capable of performing the same essential rolethe intellectual component of facturecurrently held exclusively by human labor. This agency is the difference between an automated process and an autonomous one: the automated process requires the oversight provided by human agency, an autonomous one, by definition, does not (autonomy means there is no required oversight).
My analysis of Bitcoin has been published on CTheory.
What is apparent in Bitcoin is a dramatic reification of capitalist ideologies and valorization of commercial exchanges as the currency itself (new Bitcoins are mined through the exchange of existing Bitcoins) in a direct expression of the capitalist imperative to expand into new domains: the valorization of social activities -- such as friendship circles, browsing in a bookstore, or shopping without purchasing -- becomes valuable as the "authorship" already present in social media is taken to its logical conclusion as the Bitcoin.
Incite has launched an Indiegogo campaign to raise funds for the printing of Issue #4, their largest, most ambitious to date, which runs until early July.
