| Mark Titmarsh | |
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The Titan's Goblet |
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Now Hereland |
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| The island of Utopia is shaped like a distended rectangle and emits as it does a blue and lovely flickering. The inhabitants are fair and gorgeous, having dispensed with the cacotopia of primary information they bask instead in the infinite warmth of the residual, the trivial. The secrets of Utopia are not confined to the geographical coordinates of this tiny island. Utopia tends to cut perpendicularly across all places and times. Curiously enough any television set opens out onto high sierras and winding trails that lead inexorably down into the heartlands of Utopia. Along some of those trails, high above the mists I have found communities of solitude, a kingdom ruled by rational horses another by intelligent dolphins, idylls of extra-sensory-perception, prison dystopia where all are compelled to do the same thing at the same time, a colony of scientists devoted to the perfection of a gene that produces short intense life spans and other places of infinite grace. In the dawn the distance bristles up into pyramids, futurist towers and dark interwoven labyrinths become the resplendent city of light. A city-machine devoted to the division and re-division of light from darkness, where no objects actually exist, just the continuous play of extremely brief impressions | |
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The Garden Of Forking Paths |
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In the opening credits of the N.B.C. Today programme the continents of the Earth are created by a golden electronic rain that falls vertically down onto the smooth surface of the planet. Likewise, the Today programme documents the journey of two modern nobles through the immediate aftermath of the world’s affairs. The two anchorpersons, Bryant Gumble and Jane Pauley, are not only journalists, raconteurs and screen presences, they are high ranking diplomats and figures of sovereignty in a great new electronic state. Their resources are speed and the size of their constituency, their audience; in their domain any piece of information acquires infinite potential since it is pushed to the speed of light. Consequently they are able to lure most of the political and cultural powers that be. Consider the way an entire nation like Italy, from Fellini to the Pope’, paid court to the travelling studio-palaces of the Today programme while it was temporarily resident in Rome for holy week. Bryant and Jane’s portfolio takes in the full spectrum of information becoming entertainment. That is, a circular chromatic scale not unlike light, that shades through the primary hues of Information, Designer Information Cultural Artefacts, Consumer Issues, Entertainment, and the Trivial. At one end of such a scale might be the T.W.A. hostages and at the other, chewing guru in a squeeze tube. Again like mixing colours, any combination of the six points of the chromatic scale produces its own specific blend of information/entertainment. Each programme is entirely non-narrative, crammed with discreet items and events held in suspension by notions of contemporaneity and an exhilarating form of on-screen-private-discussion While news can only take place where there are cameras, the weather occurs by virtue of imagination and wilful conjecture in the form of Willard Scott and his accessories: hand crafted stick-on graphics that represent thunder, tornadoes or blizzards and sweeping video graphics that literally become ‘the domestic representation of the sky’’. Paradoxically, the weather forecast, amidst the innumerable contingencies of world affairs becomes a lone and poetic monument to certainty.
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Babel Canyon |
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Television becomes ecological due to its magnitude and scale of complexity. It is diffused through this tiny universe of ours, not as a physical substance but as a pure active force. The Couch Potato or the retarded sauvant concentrates the undamaged part of the brain like a laser beam. Conversely it takes a certain level of easy commitment for the viewer to achieve cool viewing which is the ability to respond to the right programme at the right time coming off the tube without warning. Oh Moloch, window upon the sublime, theatre of great infidel experiments, Oh Television, total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk 5) so close to us now as to be incomprehensible. Or as Marshall McLuhan has suggested, every new environment creates an intense image of the old one’’ while ‘‘the new one is invisible’’. ‘‘While we live in the TV environment we cannot see it’’. Only when ‘‘TV ceases to be environmental and becomes content ... will we understand its glorious properties’’ 6. Maybe that containment of television, television becoming content is happening now with computers and video cassettes wrapping broadcast television in a new environment of manipulation and dialogue. So that television is no longer merely reducible to fireside glow or plug-in drug, though it undoubtedly is that, but is as well a designer’s table, a home accounting system, a newspaper, a game of skill, a functional tool and a vast field of play for the speculative mind. |
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