Without a Vision, the People perish
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Other Media: Film The Ad and the Ego. Parallax Productions and the Philadelphia Council for the Arts, Harold Boiham, producer, 2002. With major military contractors General Electric and Westinghouse owning NBC and CBS respectively, and the “news” being driven by commercial considerations, the domestication of consent and consumption has reached a level of sophistication and uniformity which would be the envy of any previous, more rude totalitarian state - or so the contributing media analysts contend. Jeane Kilbourne (Killing Us Softly), Stuart Ewan (All Consuming Images), Sut Jhally (The Codes of Advertising), Bernard MacGrane (The Ad and the Id), and Richard Pollay contribute pungent insights in this non-stop blitz of media images and messages extracted from the matrix – our matrix of collective memory. Henry Ford’s innovation of Mass Production and the phenomenon of over-supply deriving from excess capacity of impelled the corporate world to become producers of consumers, above all else. Hence the rise of Advertising in its role not of informing the consumer, but of
own design. A modern fairy tale for adults. Bowling For Columbine. Michael Moore, 2002. Possible links between student violence in Columbine High School and the institutionalized violence of home-town Lockheed-Martin, world’s largest “defense” contractor. Chac. Rolando Klein, 1975. Enter into the realm of the Chiapas Maya as they pray and work for rain; the shaman sacrifices all. Days of Heaven. Terrance Malick. director, 1978. Gorgeous film footage vision of Elysian America in the turn-of-the-century years just before it totters over into the abyss. Forbidden Planet. Fred McLoed Wilcox, director., 1956. Seminal science-fiction treatment of the uncontrolled forces of the id, adapted from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest and displaced into outer space. Great 1950's filmwork. Jackass – the Movie. MTV Films, 2002. For badly needed comic relief. Like Water for Chocolate. Alfonso Arau, director. Film. Mexican gemut. Men With Guns. John Sayles, director. 1998. Film. Political/cultural reality of death-squad Guatemala lands on the head of a well-meaning but ignorant professional as he suffers a cruel initiation, one that is nothing compared to that of the local people. Koyaanisqatsi, (Life Out of Balance). Godfrey Regio, director. Also: Powaqqatsi (Life in Transformation) and Naqoyqatsi (Life as War). From 1982, 1988, and 2002. Site at: http://www.qatsi.com/index.php From it: Not for the answers that might be given, but for the questions that can be raised is this website established. Indeed, the question is the mother of the answer. KOYAANISQATSI’s task is to raise questions that only its audience might answer. KOYAANISQATSI is the first part of the QATSI Trilogy. POWAQQATSI, the second film, was completed in 1988. NAQOYQATSI, as yet unfunded and in search of an angel/investor, will complete the Trilogy. As KOYAANISQATSI focuses on the north and POWAQQATSI on the south, NAQOYQATSI will project its gaze on the global world. With NAQOYQATSI’s completion, the QATSI Trilogy will stand as a cinematic utterance to an untellable event – the technological transformation of the planet. As the general focus of the QATSI Trilogy is the technological milieu, it is the purpose of this site to foster a web-dialogue on this little understood, yet ubiquitous subject – the nature of technology. What we know about the subject is vastly promotive, over-the-top positive, coming to us from the producers of global technology. A glowing wonderland of unlimited opportunity is promised by the good life of the technological order. Infinite capacity, virtual immortality, super human cognition – attributes that have until now been reserved for the divine are indicated for technology. A new technological pantheon has been established in the horizonless world of the Blue Planet. But is technology what it appears to be? Have we looked behind the shimmer of its glowing surface? Very little, if anything, reveals its meaning through mere appearances. Most everything is more complex, full with a universe of hidden dimensions. Is technology an exception to this common experience? Or, have we accepted its truth as the truth? Is technology a new and comprehensive environment, the host of life, that has replaced the natural order? Is technology the new universal religion? Can faiths unquestioned become our prisons? Should we place blind faith in the techno-clergy of the new order? Does the computer reproduce the world in its own image and likeness? Is technology a mere tool, as we are told, that can be used or misused depending on one’s intentions? Is technology neutral? Does it possess a life of its own? Is it the effect of technology on this or that (the environment, etc.), or is it that everything is situated in technology? Has technology become an addiction, an altered state that we cannot live without? Is technology a way of living? Do we use technology or do we live technology? Is it our consciousness that informs our behavior or is it our behavior that informs our consciousness? Do we now live in a world beyond the senses, in a micro-universe, where small is dangerous? Is technology synonymous with the machine or has it become ordinary daily living? What better place to raise these and other questions that on/in the global Internet? This high-tech nervous system, this digital alchemy, this synthetic organism that is changing the world seems ideally suited for such a task. If entering the medium questioned to raise questions seems contradictory, this is because it is. To freely embrace this contradiction is the motivation for this site. Like the oxygen we breathe, technology is the big force, omnipresent and inescapable. It appears as a force of nature. Who can question nature or acts of god? Something this prevailing, this present, is normally taken for granted. Only the heretic could dare to be so blasphemous. Could it be that our language is no longer capable of describing the world in which we live? Perhaps, the world we see with old eyes and antique ideas is no longer present. Do we inhabit a technological universe the laws of which are unknown? The world we see is being left behind. A new untellable world is unfolding. As the human race accelerates into the twenty-first century, we enter a virtual, digital environment, a world where far and near, past, present and future are simultaneous realities. The human center of gravity seems to be blasted into the void. Our bodies are less central to our lives, our physical involvement with an increasing synthetic world grows less. Have we arrived at an unthinkable post-natural and post-human condition? Does this singular event offer to all that will, the extraordinary opportunity to re-name the world in which we live? Are we, appearing to be human, already the cyborgs of the fiction of science? These are the questions that motivated KOYAANISQATSI, the other films of the Trilogy and, hence, the website that we offer for your participation, inquiry and dialogue. This is our beginning effort to supposit these films into the web, to mainline the QATSI Trilogy. In closing we offer two reflections that articulate the point of view of this site: one from Elias Canetti, a Nobel Laureate for literature; the other from French philosopher and writer Jacques Ellul.
- Canetti "...The crisis that we are approaching today is of yet another order. For it entails the transition, not from one form of society and power to another, but to a new environment...The present crisis...is a total crisis triggered by transition to a new and previously unknown environment, the technological environment....The present change of environment is much more fundamental than anything that the race has experienced for the last five thousand years." - Ellul
Lone Star. John Sayles, director. One of his very best, pitch-perfect opera of the modern American Southwest. He gets everything right. Metropolis. Fritz Lang, director, Kino on Video, Restored Authorized Version, 2002 (from 1927). Cinematic milestone. Forget the thrice-edited and thoroughly botched, out-of-focus 1998 Hollywood Classics edition; get the version recently released and now available from www.kino.com/metropolis, restored and refurbished with loving care by Martin Koerber and Alpha-Omega (1,300’ of film added since the last release in 1987). Now 124 min. See: The Eternal Gardens, the New Tower of Babel, The Moloch Machine, The Machine Man, The Call of the Catacombs, The Dance of the Whore of Babylon, and the Storming of the Heart Machine! From A. O. Scott, N. Y. Times film reviewer (Fri., July 12, 2002): The story of the scientist Rotwang, a modern Pygmalion designing a female robot to replace his lost love, stands between Frankenstein and A. I. as an expression of the defining modern preoccupation with machines that blur the boundary between the human and the mechanical.
and Ahriman in this textbook example of the corruption of genius by power. Scathing, hilarious. Music Bach, Johann Sebastian. Mass in B minor, BWV 232. John Elliot Gardiner, cond., The Monteverdi Choir, the English Baroque Soloists, DGG Archiv Produktion 415 514-2, 1985. 2 CDs. Two-fisted religiosity in the service of a spiritual vision second to none. - Christmas Oratorio, BWV 248. John Elliot Gardiner, cond., The Monteverdi Choir, the English Baroque Soloists, DGG Archiv Produktion 423 232-2, 1987, 2 CDs. Bach as shaman? Listen to the opening and closing choruses to the sixth cantata in this cycle, accompanied by prominent trumpets and drums which proclaim the victory of the warrior of God. - Cantatas Wachet Auf und Rust die Stimme BWV 140, Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben, BWV 147. John Elliot Gardiner, cond., DGG Archive Pruduktion, 1992. Two of Bach’s most popular works, full of heart and soul.
CorpWatch. http://www.corpwatch.org/home/PHH.jsp Information Clearing House. http://www.informationclearinghouse TruthOut. http://www.truthout.org/ Counterpunch.org. http://www.counterpunch.org/ Military Week.com. A Weekly Anthology of Military Affairs. http://www.militaryweek.com/ Richard K. Moore. Articles on culture, politics, and change. http://cyberjournal.org/cj/rkm/ Moore – Escaping the Matrix Fresia - Towards an American Revolution – Exposing the Constitution. From the Wilderness Publications. http://www.FromTheWilderness.com/index.html AlterNet. http://www.alternet.org/index.html Project for the New American Century (PNAC). http://www.newamericancentury.org/index.html (.../statementofprinciples.htm) Theocracy Watch.org. Tracking the Rise of the Religious Right in the Republican Party. http://theocracywatch.org The Yurica Report. Tracking Dominionist Agendas. http://www.yuricareport.com/ Networks Productions. Los Alamos Peace Project. www.networks.org. Thom Hartmann. Visionary analyses of culture, politics, economics. www.thomhartmann.com Spirituality Steven McFadden. Chiron Communications. Astrologer, cultural healer, journalist of Native American happenings. www.chironcommunications.com. Stephen Clarke. All Our Relations. Internet discussion group hosted by the author. For these and related subjects. The Rudolf Steiner eLib. http://elib.com/ Southern Cross Review. Online magazine of culture and spirituality. http://www.southerncrossreview.org Catherine MacCoun. Work On What Has Been Spoiled. Avoided and denied issues in Anthroposophy. in Anthroposophy. http://members.aol.com/kitmac/workon.htm Donald Grabau. Starpath Visions. A Gnostic, Occult, and Imaginative Approach to Astrology. http://www.starpathvisions.com/ containing: The Christ Bomb. http://www.starpathvisions.com/christbomb.html The Gnostic Ring of Power. http://www.starpathvisions.com/RINGOFPOWER.htm The Enchanted Bomb. http://www.starpathvisions.com/enchanted.html The Coming of Planet X - http://starpathvisions.com/TheComingX.html R. J. Stewart. Dreampower.com.. http://www.dreampower.com/ Society of the Inner Light. http://www.innerlight.org.uk/index.html John & Caitlin Matthews. http://www.hallowquest.org.uk/ Gareth Knight. http://www.angelfire.com/az/garethknight/ Michael Heralda. Aztec Visions. http://aztecstories.com/ Jay Kinney. http://jaykinney.com/ Starhawk. Pagan Activism. http://www.starhawk.org/index.html
- The Nature Institute. http://www.netfuture.org/ Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. http://www.bullatomsci.org/index.html Environmental Research Foundation. Rachel’s Newsletter. http://www.rachel.org/home_eng.htm Los Alamos Study Group. Citizen watchdog group. www.lasgnm.com Nuclear Watch New Mexico. Citizen education. www.nukewatch.org The rising hills, the slopes, of statistics lie before us. the steep climb of everything, going up, up, as we all go down. or the one beyond that, they say, are valleys, pastures, we can meet in peace if we make it. To climb these coming crests one word to you, to you and your children: stay together learn the flowers go light - Gary Snyder: Turtle Island, New Directions, 1974 Directory: Objects Objects -> Engine Manufacturers Association v. South Coast Air Quality Management District, 124 S. C Objects -> Basic telephone etiquette Objects -> Review of Probability (a) Probability distribution function for Objects -> Internet Mini Case 1 Palm, Inc Objects -> Apple Computer Inc v. Franklin Computer Corp Objects -> Pointers and Dynamic Arrays Objects -> Chapter 16: Population Growth and the Atlantic Migration Summary Objects -> Environmental protection Objects -> Toyota and the Changing Car Market a case of non-price competition Download 0.88 Mb. Share with your friends:
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