In spite of this, one thing that has always helped my psyche to settle has been film. So: this should help explain my writing style! Even right now – I’m writing, idly checking up on twitter, and listening to Coil, and Scott Walker, and Rammstein. This, while conversation or, at least, a vague environmental awareness surrounds me meanwhile, and thankfully the end, my brain races to parse and categorize and judge and secure not the information it is being fed, now, at this moment, multitudinously, but information from this session yesterday, or the day before, or something a friend said that wasn’t directed at me last week but which I fear was deliberately, specifically pointed at a failing I suspect I possess that literally nobody else could know about, much less care about. I cannot focus on anything for more than five seconds because my baseline quality for “a soothing period of relaxation” is a five-pronged sensual and informational assault podcasts from my phone and youtube on my laptop, while simultaneously being fully engaged in playing – something, who knows – on the TV. One of those problems is hypersuperultraoverstimulation.

Of late: I have been forced to reject employment (lol) and engage in a series of corrective courses of action to fix whatever is going on with me.

(Computer animation is not the problem, rest assured.) And yet, here we both are. Except the superliminal era, of Schwarzeneggers and Cruises, wasn’t enough, and has given way to what I guess I have to call the hyperliminal? A decade ago I wouldn’t have made it here, arguing that it’s a problem that films cost the GDP of a mid-sized nation and consist of three-quarters computer animation. Subliminal messaging doesn’t work ergo, art under late capitalism has opted for Superliminalism, of the variety described by The Simpsons. I’m pretty sure it’s two acts, anyway.)Īrt, then, takes its cues from advertising, which takes its cues from psychology but not the good kind of psychology you go to someone for help with, but the bad kind, that Capital engages with, to better determine how to swell and replicate itself via not-quite-lies, mind-game trickery, or, most subtly, constant, anxious reinforcement of FOMO.

(That’s not how it should be but that is how it is.) Art exists because of franchises, and product placement, and tentpoles, and Multi-Tiered Fan Engagement programs we get Ant-Mans because it’s time, the metrics and algorithms determine, for another Ant-Man to be produced and released, because there must be three steps between Part One of Story K and Part Two (and, as we all know, the two-act structure is a key component of staged storytelling. Alasdair MacKenzie on | 0 commentsĪrt under late capitalism is a dicey proposition.

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