Hardware Film Quotes

Jesus must have had man hands. He was a carpenter, the Bible tells us. I know a few carpenters, and they have great hands, all muscled and worn, with nicks and callused pads from working wood together with hardware and sheer willpower. In my mind, Jesus isn't a slight man with fair hair and eyes who looks as if a strong breeze could knock him down, as he is sometimes depicted in art and film. I see him as sturdy, with a thick frame, powerful legs, and muscular arms. He has a shock of curly black hair and an untrimmed beard, his face tanned and lined from working in the sun. And his hands—hands that pounded nails, sawed lumber, drew in the dirt, and held the children he beckoned to him. Hands that washed his disciples' feet, broke bread for them, and poured their wine. Hands that hauled a heavy cross through the streets of Jerusalem and were later nailed to it. Those were some man hands.

Although earlier computers existed in isolation from the world, requiring their visuals and sound to be generated and live only within their memory, the Amiga was of the world, able to interface with it in all its rich analog glory. It was the first PC with a sufficient screen resolution and color palette as well as memory and processing power to practically store and display full-color photographic representations of the real world, whether they be scanned in from photographs, captured from film or video, or snapped live by a digitizer connected to the machine. It could be used to manipulate video, adding titles, special effects, or other postproduction tricks. And it was also among the first to make practical use of recordings of real-world sound. The seeds of the digital-media future, of digital cameras and Photoshop and MP3 players, are here. The Amiga was the first aesthetically satisfying PC. Although the generation of machines that preceded it were made to do many remarkable things, works produced on them always carried an implied asterisk; “Remarkable,” we say, “. . . for existing on such an absurdly limited platform.” Even the Macintosh, a dramatic leap forward in many ways, nevertheless remained sharply limited by its black-and-white display and its lack of fast animation capabilities. Visuals produced on the Amiga, however, were in full color and could often stand on their own terms, not as art produced under huge technological constraints, but simply as art. And in allowing game programmers to move beyond blocky, garish graphics and crude sound, the Amiga redefined the medium of interactive entertainment as being capable of adult sophistication and artistry. The seeds of the aesthetic future, of computers as everyday artistic tools, ever more attractive computer desktops, and audiovisually rich virtual worlds, are here. The Amiga empowered amateur creators by giving them access to tools heretofore available only to the professional. The platform’s most successful and sustained professional niche was as a video-production workstation, where an Amiga, accompanied by some relatively inexpensive software and hardware peripherals, could give the hobbyist amateur or the frugal professional editing and postproduction capabilities equivalent to equipment costing tens or hundreds of thousands. And much of the graphical and musical creation software available for the machine was truly remarkable. The seeds of the participatory-culture future, of YouTube and Flickr and even the blogosphere, are here. The

Writing an interactive brief 1. The contest of the interactive(s) within the story of the exhibition. 2. The key content messages. 3. Key learning outcomes—what should the visitor take away from the experience? 4. Details of the assets available—this could be a list of objects, set of reference images, data information or moving film footage. 5. Audience profile—who is the intended audience? 6. Initial specifications of the audiovisual hardware likely to be used. 7. Budget.

Key Elements of Five Year Plan ’77 What follows did not happen overnight. Among the guidelines set in February 1977 (remember, Fair Trade on alcohol was not finally ended until 1978): Emphasize edibles vs. non-edibles. I figured that the supermarkets would raise their prices on foods to make up for the newly reduced margins on milk and alcohol. This would give us all the more room to underprice them. During the next five years we got rid of film, hosiery, light bulbs and hardware, greeting cards, batteries, magazines, all health and beauty aids except those with a “health food” twist. We began to cut back sharply on soaps and cleaners and paper goods. The only non-edibles we emphasized were “tabletop” items like wineglasses, cork pullers, and candles. It was quite clear that we should put more emphasis on food and less on alcohol and milk. Within edibles, drop all ordinary branded products like Best Foods, Folgers, or Weber’s bread. I felt that a dichotomy was developing between “groceries” and “food.” By “groceries,” I mean the highly advertised, highly packaged, “value added” products being emphasized by supermarkets, the kinds that brought slotting allowances and co-op advertising allowances. By embracing these “plastic” products, I felt the supermarkets were abandoning “food” and the product knowledge required to buy and sell it. But this position wasn’t entirely altruistic. The plan of February 20, 1977, declared, “Most independent supermarkets have been driven out of business, because they stupidly tried to compete with the big chains in plastic goods, in which the big chains excel.” Focus on discontinuity of supplies. Be willing to discontinue any product if we are unable to offer the right deal to the customer. Instead of national brands, focus on either Trader Joe’s label products or “no label” products like nuts and dried fruits. This was intended to enable the Trader Joe’s label to pick up momentum in the stores. And it worked.

The conceptual auto-disaster. The volunteer panels were shown fake safety propaganda movies in which implausible accidents were staged. Far from eliciting a humorous or sardonic response from the audience, marked feelings of hostility were shown towards the film and medical support staff. Subsequent films of genuine accidents exerted a notably calming effect. From this and similar work it is clear that Freud’s classic distinction between the manifest and latent content of the inner world of the psyche now has to be applied to the outer world of reality. A dominant element in this reality is technology and its instrument, the machine. In most roles the machine assumes a benign or passive posture - telephone exchanges, engineering hardware, etc. The twentieth century has also given birth to a vast range of machines - computers, pilotless planes, thermonuclear weapons - where the latent identity of the machine is ambiguous even to the skilled investigator. An understanding of this identity can be found in a study of the automobile, which dominates the vectors of speed, aggression, violence and desire. In particular the automobile crash contains a crucial image of the machine as conceptualized psychopathology. Tests on a wide range of subjects indicate that the automobile, and in particular the automobile crash, provides a focus for the conceptualizing of a wide range of impulses involving the elements of psychopathology, sexuality and self-sacrifice.