Future Culture Issue #367

 From ahawks@nyx.cs.du.edu Sat Apr 17 19:35:08 1993

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Issue #367

Saturday, April 17th 1993

 

Today's Topics:

---------------

 

 Computer Class

 Encryption Back Doors?!?

 Re: A Day in Life of FC And How!

 Re: Ok This is gonna sound lame...

 Re: the right to eavesdrop.. :eR

 Re: White House Crypto Statement (fwd)

 WAX press release

__________________________________________________________________________

 

From: Meng Weng Wong <mengwong@pobox.upenn.edu>

Subject: Re: Ok This is gonna sound lame...

Date: Sat, 17 Apr 93 13:36:35 EDT

mindy gardberg pounds randomly on the keyboard and comes up with

| 

| I know what IRC is but not how to get there.

| Someone tell me please, please, please. <-- does begging work in here?

good grovel.  more sound effects next time.  a dollop of whipped cream

wouldn't hurt, either.

aah, the ravages of net.fame ... get to help newbies twice your age :)

OK.  beginner's guide to the IRC.

-------------------

There are (pick a random number) (ok) 3 ways of getting onto

the Internet Relay Chat.

1) IRC Telnet Client    telnet bradenville.andrew.cmu.edu or telnet 128.2.54.2

                        telnet ircclient.itc.univie.ac.at 6668 or 131.130.39.10

   (uk users only)     +telnet irc.ibmpcug.co.uk 9999 or 192.68.174.240 9999

telnet irc.nsysu.edu.tw

2) at your system prompt, type

irc

IRC

... or some combination.  If IRC is a supported service

at your site, then it will be accessible this way.

find someone at your site who has an IRC client

installed.  use hirs.  If necessary, send mail to

me and I'll check on the IRC to see if anyone from

your site is calling.

3) install the client yourself.  The following are instructions for standard

   Unixes, your mileage may vary significantly.

ftp cs.bu.edu

name: anonymous  password: your email

cd irc/clients

binary

get ircII2.2.1.2.tar.Z

quit

uncompress ircII2.2.1.2.tar.Z

tar -xf ircII2.2.1.2.tar

mkdir IRC

cd ircII2.2.1.2

csh install

[user], ~/IRC, ~/IRC/irc, enter enter enter,

(if you don't know what servers to use, try "polaris.ctr.columbia.edu")

enter enter enter a few more times, then chdir to your IRC dir, "irc"

and you're off!

-------------------

Once You're In

all commands are preceded by a / character.  anything else is spewed to the

channel.

/help

/whois xxx (never do /whois *)

/join #channel (action will be on #leri)

/who * (only after joining a channel)

/me executes an action.

/yournicknamehere does the same thing.

/leave #channel

/msg nickname blah blah blah

/nick newnickname

/quit /exit /bye

/set novice off to allow yourself to join more than 1 channel

/window new to create a new window

/win goto 1 goes to the top window on the screen

/win goto 2 ... and so forth

/win balance evens out the windows

/win chan #xxxx activates that channel.

-------------------

protocol  [grins evilly]

this is a newly-invented protocol developed by a whole bunch of us.

[ ] START END as delimiters, do not interrupt

targetname: xxxx specifically directed message

*: message for all to look at

for more information, access the alt.irc FAQ.

Enjoy.  See y'all on tonight.  :-)

FreeSide

(random plug: check out fcBot, LogBot, and DictServ.)

(random warning: beware of Strangers.)

 

______________________________

 

Date: Sat, 17 Apr 1993 13:49:26 -0400 (EDT)

From: mindy gardberg <mgardbe@andy.bgsu.edu>

Subject: Computer Class

Hey!

I am currently putting together a class to teach next year entitled:

Computers as Culture

What do you wonderfully wacky folks think it should include?

Subjects

Reading Lists

Assignments

Etc...

 

______________________________

 

From: eknipp@lobo.rmhs.colorado.edu (Ethan Knipp)

Subject: Re: White House Crypto Statement (fwd)

Date: Sat, 17 Apr 93 11:53:08 MDT

Greaat.  Well, looks like it's time to research those voice encrypting 

algorithms, what?  What the hell, everything *I* put out that may be 

questionable will be PGP, that's for sure.  Hopefully someone can come up with 

something like PGP for cellular.  Or maybe just an add on chip to this chip 

that changes the scrambling a little bit?

-T'han

 

______________________________

 

Date: Sat, 17 Apr 1993 14:27:31 -0400

From: <grad3057@writer.yorku.ca>

Subject: WAX press release

I've seen WAX, and I urge everyone else on here to send David the 40

bucks for the tape.  It'll be the best investment you make in video

(and the people who produce it) this year.

Look for an in-depth interview with David Blair in the upcoming VIRUS

23; in the meantime, here's one of his press releases.

Darren Wershler-Henry

grad3057@writer.yorku.ca

==========================================

PLEASE FEEL FREE TO REPOST

8.1.92

DESCRIPTIVE PACKAGE FOR :

"WAX or the discovery of television among the bees" 

(85:00, mono) (copyright 1991: Blair)

CONTACT:

David Blair 

P.O. Box 174, Cooper Station, New York, NY 10276   

"WAX or the discovery of television among the bees" is

set in Alamogordo, New Mexico (1983), where the main character,

Jacob Maker, designs gunsight displays at a flight simulation

factory. Jacob also keeps bees. His hives are filled with

"Mesopotamian" bees that he has inherited from his grandfather.

Through these bees, the dead of the future begin to appear,

introducing Jacob to a type of destiny that pushes him away from

the normal world, enveloping him in a grotesque miasma of past

and synthetic realities. The bees show Jacob the story of his

grandfather's acquisition and fatal association with the

"Mesopotamian" bees, in the years following the First World War.

The bees also lead Jacob away from his home, out to the

Alamogordo desert, slowly revealing to him their

synthetic/mechanical world, which exists in a darkness beyond the

haze of his own thoughts. Passing through Trinity Site,

birthplace of the Plutonium bomb, Jacob arrives at a gigantic

cave beneath the desert. There, he enters the odd world of the

bees, and fulfills his destiny. Traveling both to the past and

the future, Jacob ends at Basra, Iraq, in the year 1991, where he

meets a victim that he must kill.

Independently executed over six years, "WAX or the

discovery of television among the bees" combines compelling

narrative, in the realistic/fantastic vein of Thomas Pynchon or

Salman Rushdie, with the graphic fluidity of video technique. The

result is an odd, new type of story experience, where smooth and

sudden transpositions of picture and sound can nimbly follow and

fuse with fantastical, suddenly changing, and often accelerated

narrative. The result resembles story-telling in animated film.

Yet location photography and archive research form the backbone

of the piece.

"WAX or the discovery of television among the bees"

(85:00, mono) provides an example of a new type of independent

"electronic cinema" that will become more common as the 1990's

progress.

================================================

Review for 

"WAX or the discovery of television among the bees" 

from the magazine "MONDO 2000"

(Volume 7, August 1992)

article by Richard Kadrey

Throughout the history of the film biz there have been

occasional attempts to shoot whole novels. The silent era gave us

Greed, a 12-hour misery-fest that was ultimately chopped up and

sold as guitar picks by the studio heads. Fassbinder was more

successful with his 15-hour Berlin Alexanderplatz, but that was

shown in installments on TV, so the accumulation of action and

information was greatly diminished.

In the literary world, J.G. Ballard experimented with

"condensed novels" in his book The Atrocity Exhibition. The idea

was to boil away all character and plot and leave just the

steaming residue of motive, action and response, to create the

cumulative effect of novel-like density in just a few pages.

  David Blair's video, WAX or the Discovery of Television

Among the Bees, is sort of a combination of these earlier

experiments, and yet is something wholly new. Through a

combination of archival film footage, new video and computer

animation WAX achieves the effect of a novel (density, the

passage of time, dramatic changes in character), and it does so

in the 85 minute running-time of a regular feature film.

It's almost impossible to describe the plot of WAX; it's a

Zen koan told as a Burroughs cut-up. We open with experimental

cinematographer James Maker, a member of the Supernormal Film

Society who accompanies a British Royal expedition to Antarctica

in hopes of filming the spirits of the dead. Flashfoward to James

Maker's grandson, Jacob Maker, a computer programmer working on

targeting systems for the Air Force at their Alamagordo test

range. Jacob keeps bees, the bees that once belonged to his

father and grandfather, a semi-famous keeper of bees himself,

friend of the man who first imported Mesopotamian bees to

England. Jacob grows unsure of the work he is doing for the Air

Force, telling us that "To hit a simulated target was to prepare

murder against a real target." As his uncertainty grows, he

spends more and more time with the bees. He has blackouts; time

turns liquid, and he loses hours at a time. The hives are

endlessly fascinating to him. And then one day, he thinks he can

hear voices speaking to him from inside the hives. . . .

After that, Jacob quickly leaves behind almost everything we

would consider normal life and embarks on a Ballardian quest that

takes him from his home in Alamagordo, to Trinity site (location

of the first nuclear bomb was detonation, coincidentally on the

day of Jacob's birth), to the underground lair that is the real

home of the bees (where the bees commune with the dead, and

prepare new bodies for them), to the Land of the Dead itself and

to Iraq during the Gulf War where Jacob is reborn briefly as a

bomb, guiding himself with the same targeting system he worked on

back when he was a programmer.

Blair labored for six years to finish WAX, working when he

could from grant to grant, scrounging and convincing people to

contribute to the project through the force of his vision, the

strength of which is evident in the extraordinary production

quality of WAX. The scenes set in Alamagordo and Trinity Site

were really filmed at those locations. Blair convinced the Air

Force to let him take his video crew deep inside the highly

restricted WSMR bomb range. On the day Blair and company were

shooting, a celebration was on nearby, an annual party marking

the anniversary of the first nuclear bomb test. Technicians set

off a small chemical explosive, sending up a tall, white mushroom

cloud, a moment captured by chance by cinematographer Mark

Kaplan, and incorporated by Blair into the finished film. Stealth

bombers practiced bomb runs over the shooting site, using the

Trinity marker as ground zero on their targeting grids-- Blair

and his crew were being virtually bombed the whole time they were

filming.

Another striking sequence in WAX is the underground cavern

where the bees make wax bodies for the dead to inhabit. Blair

shot these scenes in off-limit locations inside Carlsbad

Caverns, conning and cajoling his way into sectors of cave that

even the park rangers generally avoid. It's during this act that

Jacob enters the Land of the Dead, and the audience gets a tour

of the afterlife via Florence Ormezzano's lovely computer

graphics. WAX neatly avoids the problems of mainstream films like

Lawnmower Man where films and effects live and die by their flash

quotient. WAX refuses to compete with Hollywood's ideas of

special effects. The computer images we get are startling, from

the bat-winged and multi-skulled spirit guide to the biomorphic

squiggles that are the alphabet of the dead. These are dream

images from a lost digital tribe, pixelated runes and

hieroglyphs. Imagine what the Maya might have left behind if they

had vanished into a virtual world instead of the Mexican jungle.

WAX is the first generation of a new video-based artform

that Blair calls is "independent electronic cinema." Like

home-recording studios and the zine world (like the zine you hold

in your hands) recent advances in technology have put powerful

editing tools into the hands of anyone with the need and desire

to use them. WAX was assembled using the Montage Picture

Processor, a relatively new "non-linear" video editing system,

which allowed Blair to work quickly and intuitively, digitally

cutting and pasting the work together from as many as six video

segments at once.

Both Blair and WAX, however, are having to pay a price for

their ambition. Nobody wants to show or distribute WAX. The art

video crowd has rejected it because it's too long and too

expensive, a PC no-no. The film community is strictly hands-off

because WAX  is video-based. This is almost always the fate of

the new. Tuxedoed and tiaraed royals rioted at the premier of the

Rite 

 

______________________________

 

Subject: Re: A Day in Life of FC And How!

Date: Sat, 17 Apr 93 13:05:53 CDT

From: Ed <ed@cwis.unomaha.edu>

happy zamboni happened to formulate...

> >   "I hereby invite any musical members of FC to provide the soundtrack.

> >    Ed Stastny           | OTIS Project, END PROCESS, SOUND News and Arts"

> > 

> "I'd be willing to give it a shot."

> Or rather,

> Who do I send tapes to, and how many do you want?

I'd guess you'd send them to the central editing facility....BUT....I

will volunteer my services to collect the music.  I do this for a few

reasons...number one among them is that I enjoy new music.  I will also

do the little service of reviewing anything I get in either(or both) END

PROCESS or/and SOUND.  Both are publications I'm working on...SOUND

prints about 20,000 copies monthly and saturates Omaha/Lincoln....END

PROCESS will only print about 500...a bit more selective distribution (I

don't know that I'll be putting reviews in it either).  My reviews will

also be sent out to Factsheet Five and the Independent Music mailing

list (just in case they want to republish).  Also, we haven't decided on

a central editing location as of yet...but I know I REALLY want to be

involved in this as it happens...so I'll just sent out the batch of

music I get to the central location when it's decided.  How's that?

 

Please send tapes, cds, 7"s, etc to:

 

Ed Stastny

PO BX 241113

Omaha, NE 68124-1113

 

...e

Ed Stastny           | OTIS Project, END PROCESS, SOUND News and Arts 

PO BX 241113      | FTP: sunsite.unc.edu (/pub/multimedia/pictures/OTIS)

Omaha, NE 68124-1113 |      141.214.4.135 (projects/otis)

---------------------- EMail: ed@cwis.unomaha.edu, ed@sunsite.unc.edu

 

______________________________

 

Date: Sat, 17 Apr 1993 14:50:44 -0600 (MDT)

From: BOTTGERBRET@yvax.byu.edu

Subject: Encryption Back Doors?!?

Please someone tell me this new Clipper Chip is a sick joke.  I thought that

technology was supposed to liberate us from "Big Brother" scenarios.  And what

about these "paired keys" they keep locked up, just in case they need to bust

some "drug dealer"?  I bet that they're talking about digital keys, easy access

-- it doesn't matter where they are physically located if they're bits of data.

I'm no criminal, I just am sure that the government doesn't always have my best

interest in mind.  They've oppressed my people before; what would stop them

from doing it again?  For your information, check out your American history

under Mormons -- we've had our right to vote removed, had extermination orders

levyed against us, had our city and temple destroyed....

Remember the wise words of the Clash:

 

 "The future is unwritten.  Know your rights."

Anxiously from Utah,

BADGER

 

______________________________

 

From: hassinge@sfu.ca (Sebastian Daniel Hassinger)

Subject: Re: the right to eavesdrop.. :eR

Date: Sat, 17 Apr 93 14:50:29 BST

______________________________

 

From: the!

 

 > -Eric

 > zamboni@ap.cl.msu.edu

 > 

-- 

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -fold here- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

  Ha!sSinge  #  "well we had to drown the gat, but we saved you two gittens"

------> Sebastian Hassinger, dehabiltated net.lurker: hassinge@sfu.ca <------

 "run, run as fast as you can, you can't catch me, I'm the gingerbread man!"

 

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