ALFAVILNIUS. . . . . . . . . Blogasis Alfavilio miestas-dvynys The evil twin city of Alphaville

Šį ketvirtadienį, vasario 12 d. 19 val., 314 auditorijoje
Thursday, 12 February, 7 pm in classroom no. 314

“Iškrypėlio kino gidas” (The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema) rež./dir. Sophie Fiennes, 2006

su Tomo Čiučelio atsakymais ir Valentino Klimašausko klausimais (arba atvirkščiai)
with answers by Tomas Čiučelis and questions by Valentinas Klimašauskas (or vice verse)

Filmų, į kuriuos pateksime “Iškrypėlio kino gide”, sąrašas:
List of movies we are going to visit through “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema”:

Possessed (1931)
The Matrix (1999)
The Birds (1963)
Psycho (1960)
Duck Soup (1933)
Monkey Business (1931)
The Exorcist (1973)
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933)
Alien (1979)
The Great Dictator (1940)
Mulholland Drive (2001)
Alice in Wonderland (1951)
The Red Shoes (1948)
Dr. Strangelove or:
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Fight Club (1999)
Dead of Night (1945)
The Conversation (1974)
Blue Velvet (1986)
Vertigo (1958)
Solaris (1972)
Wild at Heart (1990)
Lost Highway (1997)
Persona (1966)
In the Cut (2003)
Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
The Piano Teacher (2001)
Three Colors: Blue (1993)
Alien: Resurrection (1997)
Dogville (2003)
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
Frankenstein (1931)
The Ten Commandments (1956)
Saboteur (1942)
Rear Window (1954)
To Catch a Thief (1955)
North by Northwest (1959)
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005)
Dune (1984)
Kubanskie Kazaki (1949)
Ivan the Terrible: Part II (1958)
Pluto’s Judgement Day (1935)
Stalker (1979)
City Lights (1931

Kodėl
iškrypėliams
reikalingas
kino gidas? /
Why Perverts Need a Guide to Cinema? PDF

LOOP

«Some three or four hundred meters away from the Pyramid I bent over, took up a handful of sand, let it fall silently a little further on, and said in a low voice: “I am modifying the Sahara”. The deed was minimal, but the not ingenious words were exact and I thought that I had needed my entire life to be able to say them. My memory about that moment is among the most important things I brought from Egypt».

Jorge Luis Borges, “Desert”,
from “Atlas” collection

This short film is dedicated to analyze the time phenomenon. As time is a crucial element of cinema and as time is influencing the storytelling itself, this film is going to analyze the phenomenon of time in cinema by using the techniques of a documentary, mocumentary, live-acted film, travelogue and television; it will create a narrative on the phenomenon of time in the very specific place, i.e. the beach.
A beach is the ultimate institution for comfort, beauty and relaxation; a contemporary beach recalls the Greek symposium which were a key Hellenic social institution - it was a forum for citizens to debate, plot, boast, or simply to party with others. Therefore, being both – private and public at the same time, the beach is a unique institution to philosophize and relax. In these conditions the time becomes the key character in the film which is questioning every second of (well)being.
The see, sun, sand, sand sculptures, waves, (semi)naked bodies, music, games, good views, good company around – all this sounds and looks like the perfect place you would like to be looped in for ever. Therefore a time loop is another keyword of the film. There are few theories explaining time loop:
• In a physical time loop (rarely seen in the media), the spacetime loops around to form several closed-timelike curves. Since the time in that region is looped, you could only escape it by leaving the affected area. Also, there would be an infinite number of copies of any matter in the area, unless an object left the loop. In that case, there would only be as many copies of that object as many times it completed the loop. This type of time loop cannot be ended or destroyed. Therefore, there would be few copies of the same actors in the movie.
• A time loop or temporal loop is a common plot device in science fiction in which time runs normally for a set period (usually a day or a few hours) but then skips back like a broken record. When the time loop “resets”, the memories of most characters are reset (i.e. they forget all that happened). This situation resembles the mythological punishment of Sisyphus, condemned to repeatedly push a stone uphill only to have it roll back down once he reached the top, and Prometheus, condemned to have his liver torn out and eaten by an eagle each morning. The plot is advanced, however, by having one or more central characters retain their memory or become aware of the loop through déja vu. One well-known example of this is in the 1993 film Groundhog Day, although time loops had appeared in many fictional works prior to that. Stories with time loops commonly center on correcting past mistakes or on getting a character to recognize some key truth; escape from the loop may then follow. (also see “The Last Day of Summer”, “Blind Chance” by Krzysztof Kieślowski, “Come into My World” (song) by Kylie Minogue);
• A predestination paradox. It exists when a time traveler is caught in a loop of events that “predestines” or “predates” them to travel back in time. Because of the possibility of influencing the past while time traveling, one way of explaining why history does not change is by saying that whatever has happened was meant to happen. Dual example of a predestination paradox is depicted in the classic Ancient Greek play ‘Oedipus’ or in popular “Terminator”. A paradox of time travel, first described by the science fiction writer René Barjavel in his 1943 book Le Voyageur Imprudent (The Imprudent Traveller); also “La jetée” by Cris Marker; (source: wikipedia)

PLOT

The film opens in the sunny and sandy beach, summer 2009?, where a suspiciously looking stranger (terrorist, corrupt politician or just small time crook?) appears. From his phone conversation we understand that he has a very limited time (21 minutes) to make a very important decision which might influence his life and lives of others. He does not have time to think properly – he immerses into the beech life by looking at, communicating, making friendship and conversations with other strangers: sportsmen, girls/relaxing philosophers. Soon, he meets another himself and he realizes that he is in the time loop. Although he is shocked by his revelation he likes the current situation except the secretive phone calls that are insisting him to make the decision. The philosophers help him to find the way out of the situation, but he has himself to take a moral stand to escape the situation and the time loop.
By doing it, he finds himself in making a time travel and meeting Jean Paul Sartre and Simone Beauvoir, while the narrator (deaf old person who is explaining the story) himself appears to be Borges himself.

(Definitions of the In-Between Zones, Discluded Neologisms, their Meanings, Speculative Thought, Controlled and Unlikely Futures and Realities, Public and Artistic Disobedience, (Post)Self-Colonialism, the Complex of Victimization, Articles, Essays, Shifting Psycho-Geographies And Other Missing-What?

WHY (INCOMPREHENSIVE)? Coming from cities (Vilnius, for example) that were governed by 12 different state units in 20th century only; and coming from the countries that only few years ago shifted to the most Eastern state in EU from the most western country in former Soviet Union; therefore, living in a constant in-between zone(s) of shifting political, aesthetical, psycho-geographical and other realities we see the urge to make a research on a site-specific DICTIONARY (or encyclopedia) of the in-between zones. As the in-between zones are full of mist and slowness (they are full of fences, customs, control zones, tunnels, pikes, radars, etc.) a new (mutated, remixed and reversed) and a broad range of tools including biopolitics, ideology critic, psychoanalysis of psycho-geographies, art criticism are urgently required.

WHY DICTIONARY? Normally, dictionary is defined as a comprehensive written compendium that contains information on all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge; encyclopedias are divided up into articles with one article on each subject covered. It means that encyclopædia is a compendium that inserts new subjects between A and B, or Aa and Aab. (Uncomprehensive) performative pocket dictionary will act differently, it will comprehend what is between the given subjects that are listed in alphabetical order, let’s say between Zizek and zizz, or Jalal Toufic and Jalalabad. But what if the accidental, alphabetical and symbolic gap between Jalal Toufic and Jalalabad is not even larger than it seems, but also is spacer?
In this light dictionaries and encyclopædias may be seen as filling tool of the huge void between 2 alphabetical (ideological) structures. This is just one of the reasons why the in-between zones may be numbered and analyzed better by using the tool of the gap (or the difference) machine – the Encyclopædia.

WHY POCKET SIZE? Let’s repeat it one more time - “but what if the accidental, alphabetical and symbolic gap between Jalal Toufic and Jalalabad is not even larger than it seems semantically, but also is spacer”? What if what looks just “pocket size” actually is “stadium size”? Why some things always stay in pockets and why some pockets always stay secret, unseen and unchecked, out of sight of normality?

KEYWORDS concept manufacture, extraction of concepts, public and artistic disobedience, self-colonialism, activism, performative re-search, a possibility space, collaboration, neologisms, pop-poetics, reverse anthropology, shadow, vampires and zombies vs. hackers and robots, shifting borders, locality, re/de/coding (artificial, hybrid, nomad, precarious, sustainability, temporary, void), re-mixing, hacking, pirates, language robotics, daydream, metaphor, etc.

FORMATS As language is the main and mostly the only form of scientific researches think about the language as a programming tool, the tool to decode and re/de/program such phenomena as (yet) unclear or hybridist forms and shapes. Acting in such vast arias our concept manufactures and tools may vary from typical academic researches to art projects, speculative essays, “reverse engineering”, etc.

HOW TO USE IT? (Incomprehensive) performative pocket dictionary (encyclopædia) of the in-between zones may be used for all kinds of accelerations and radicalizations, for textual-social analysis of particular in-between vectors, would serve to understand concepts that are pushed, stretched, reversed, blurred, recombined, negated, and mutated by various ideological and other powers.
MISSING-WHAT? (Collaborators and pockets).

Flowers to be put on the tomb of Warhol

Lipni skulptūra, kurios pavadinimas - “Aloginės jungtys, kurios atsiranda man galvojant apie tave”, autorius nežinomas, dvipusė lipni plėvelė, 2008 m.

Sticky sculpture entitled “Illogical connections that appear while thinking of you”, unknown author, double-sided tape, 2008

foto/photo: Darius

Subject line: “From Anthony Well !!!!! Please I need your help”

Dear One,

I am anthony well 21 years old and the only son of my late parents Mr and Mrs well My late father was a highly reputable business
merchant in a cocoa who operated in the capital of Ivory Coast during his days.

Unfortunately I lost him mysteriously died in France during one of
his business trips abroad last year 2007. though his sudden death was linked or rather suspected to have been masterminded by an uncle of his who travelled with him at that time. But God knows the truth.My mother died when I was just 4 years old, and since then my late father took me so special. Before his death on Octomber 9th/2007 he called the secretary who accompanied him in hospital and told him to call me, on my arrival to the hospital my father told me that he deposited the sum of 10.5 million US Dollars. (10.5 million dollar) left in suspense account in one of the leading bank in Africa.

He further told me that he deposited the money in my name as the next of kin Now I want an account overseas where I can transfer this funds.Am ready to offer you 20% of this money as compensation once this money get into account another 10% on any expenses you may incur during this transfer please i really need your asssistant This is because I have suffered a lot of set back as a result of family enemity and incessant political crisis here in Ivory coast.

Please, Consider this and get back to me through my
personal mailbox at:( anthonywell01@yahoo.co.jp )
Thank you so much.
My sincere regards,
anthony well

Ciao,
This is a letter to everyone who might be happy to spend the NY celebration on their own, reading books or feeding their parrot. If they look for something specially designed to read while they listen fireworks outside this New Year reading list may help.

Interview with a guy who was working on something for two decades:
Q&A: Ridley Scott Has Finally Created the Blade Runner He Always Imagined
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/15-10/ff_bladerunner

Composers’ Lives: Speed Is Critical, Not Length from NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/29/arts/music/29youn.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

An inspiring blog on perfume and its history (and time) as the PDF (2 Mb) file by Luca Turin a biophysicist with a long-standing interest in the sense of smell, the art of perfume, and the fragrance industry. He is the author of the book The Secret of Scent (2006), which details the history and science of his theory of olfaction. Since 2003, Turin has also written a regular column on perfume, “Duftnote,” for NZZ Folio, the German-language monthly magazine of Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung and that’s there this PDF comes from:
www.flexitral.com/research/Blogtextweb.pdf

If you still want to browse more I recommend fascinating link-blog by Francis McKee:
www.francismckee.com

Happy New Year,
(Sharing with my friends last drops of tequila and running out for snowy weather),
<V>

Frank Zappa is reported to have said of the Shaggs, “This sounds like the missing link between Fanny and Captain Beefheart & his Magic Band.” Zappa rated The Shaggs #3 best band in history in a Norwegian newspaper (April 1988).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shaggs

Thanks to Darius

LETTERS, SEND & RECEIVED. TOKYO VOLUME
The Book As The Platform Of Meetings.
Preparations Of Curating The Exhibition In A Form Of A Book.

Project “LETTERS, SEND & RECEIVED: TOKYO VOLUME” may be conceived as the preparations of curating the exhibition in a form of a book. The content of the book would be prepared from cultural research of Tokyo, reel and imaginary meetings with Tokyo insiders and outsiders: local and international artists, theoreticians, philosophers, writers, designers, city dwellers, etc. The final result, depending on the process of the project may end up in public meetings, lectures, exhibition, book, website, or even in all mentioned forms.

Therefore I have to stress that this project is curatorial and collaborative project: the artists, photographers, writers, designers or active and creative city citizens, I would meet or would be interested by the idea, would be a part of correspondences, which would define Tokyo city.
There are few inspirations that inspired the project LETTERS, SEND & RECEIVED: TOKYO VOLUME:
• The project by Alexandra Mir, who took a map of metropolitan Tokyo, where the streets have no names, and superimposed names upon it based on suggestions from friends and fellow artists including Matthieu Laurette, Jeremy Deller, Nicolas Bourriaud, etc… Her idea is based on the fact that Westerners often complain that Tokyo has no street names and that you can’t find your way around without a guide who innately knows the logic of his own city. The new fictional Tokyo was born.
• Stretching the genre of documentary the movie, the experimental film of fictional letters by Chris Marker SANS SOLEIL is a rich composition of thoughts, images and scenes.
• The so called “typical” knowledge and stereotypes of what is meant to be Japan and what is Japanese and how the idea of Tokyo is conceived and imagined by people who have never been in Tokyo.
• The unexpected - surprises, people, new acquaintances, coincidences and other inspirational experiences I am going to meet or receive during my visit in Tokyo.

From my residences experiences I know that by staying in residency you always meet new people, you communicate with someone by email, phone, skype, etc, by making inquires into history of the city and explaining it to yourself and to others. Communication with new, strange and already familiar is the daily basis for a residence. That’s why I am completely positive that this project would be an interesting and meaningful activity by which new, both fictional and real relationships between insiders and outsiders of Tokyo would be established.
After you complete this residency program, how you can contribute the activities of Tokyo Wonder Site Exchange with other artists and citizens, debriefing session, workshop, etc (200 words)

As this project is curatorial and collaborative: the artists, photographers, writers, designers or active and creative city citizens, I would meet or would be interested by the idea, would be a part of correspondences, which would define Tokyo city.

As project “LETTERS, SEND & RECEIVED: TOKYO VOLUME” may be conceived as the preparations of curating the exhibition in a form of a book, and the content of the book would be prepared from cultural research of Tokyo, reel and imaginary meetings with Tokyo insiders and outsiders: local and international artists, theoreticians, philosophers, writers, designers, city dwellers, etc, so the final result, depending on the process of the project, may end up in public meetings, lectures, screenings, exhibition, book, website, or even in all mentioned forms.