Are You Sure You Want to Do That?

I was lucky enough to be commissioned to write for a new website produced by ABC Arts Online called Strange Attractors that will showcase Australian animators to the rest of the world. My task was to write a critical essay on new media artist Simon Norton’s work Testimony: A Story Machine. Simon did a great job with the work, has scored lots of teaching work and awards from his creations. Testimony was created a few years ago though and in his interview with me he mentioned that he learnt that people want to be TOLD a story. His goal to produce a work that does rely on the reader’s work in producing a story is admirable. And I’m sure that he will find the tenuous balance between Barthes’ ‘writerly’ text and ‘readerly’ text. More about this in my article.

Check out fellow writer and researcher Adam Ford’s review of the entertaining animation by Dan Hartney: BucketHead. A must see animation in the series (there are many) is Adam Duncan’s ‘Robot Republic: The Uncertainty Principle’. What do robots do when faced with Schrodinger’s cat? The results is hilarious and makes complete sense. But the robots can solve this in a way humans cannot. Here’s a quirky program playing with Schrodinger’s Cat.

Another one I found very funny is a satirical animation called The Game by Lucas Licata. Here the consequences on violence in games for game AI is spelled out in a government-warning style. This reminded me of the clever ‘rewriting’ of games at Red vs Blue.