Authors — Scott Macaulay
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SXSW 2013
Mars is a lonely, spiritually bereft place in Philip K. Dick’s science-fiction classic The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Colonists live inside, away from the planet’s harsh elements and unexpected predators, whiling away the hours by playing a hallucinatory role-playing game called Perky Pat. Using little figurines — avatars, really — and a psychoactive drug, they transport themselves into a consumer fantasy world back on Earth. I thought of Dick’s book as I walked past an exhibit at SXSW Interactive this year. A company was demonstrating its 3D-printing prowess by making little plastic figures based on your Facebook photo — […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 23, 2013 -
Handed Down: On Deceptive Practices: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay
“A magician is an actor playing the part of a magician,” the 19th-century stage conjurer Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin once said. But if that’s true, then what about all those aspects of acting — such as figuring out character, backstory and motivation? Those are questions all professional magicians have to grapple with at some point early in their careers. Or, to put it another way: Where does a magician’s magic come from? A kid doing a magic trick can answer that question easily: it comes from a magic kit their father bought them. The amateur doesn’t need really need to answer […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 23, 2013 -
Frame of Reference
What does it mean, in 2013, to photograph — to reproduce — a painting? Does it, as Walter Benjamin wrote in his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” drain the painting of an essential “aura,” even as it makes the image itself accessible to a much larger audience? Does it, as John Berger elaborated in his 1972 book and television program, Ways of Seeing, alter the painting’s meaning, rendering the original a symbol of capitalist exchange? Or, in today’s image-sharing world of Tumblr, is reproduction nothing more than whimsical statement of affinity, of a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 23, 2013 -
Trailer Watch: Jono Oliver’s Home: ___
Last year Jono Oliver’s Home:___ was one of our recommended projects on our curated Kickstarter page and now it’s finished and beginning to premiere on the festival circuit. At Shadow and Act, Tambay Obenson weighs in with thoughts following a screening: I attended a screening of the film at the DGA theater here in New York over the weekend, going in with really no idea of what to expect (which is rare for me), because I hadn’t seen anything of the film before then, with Gbenga, Morton, McDaniel and Whitlock being the actors in this ensemble cast whose previous work […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 22, 2013 -
Failure, Brian Eno, the Vanishing Gallery Show and More: Sunday Links
At Vulture, Jerry Saltz bemoans the “Death of the Gallery Show,” particularly the effect new ways of seeing and purchasing art are having on the discourse around art itself: Gallery shows: light of my life, fire of my eyes. I love and long for them. I see maybe 30 a week, every week of the year. Much of what I know about contemporary art I learned from hanging around artists and from going to galleries. Bad shows teach me as much as good ones. A great thing about galleries—especially for someone who spends most of his time alone at a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 21, 2013 -
25 Picks for the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival
In the world of film festivals, “12” isn’t a particularly notable number. “Ten” — connoting if not institutional status than at least permanent residence — has come and gone. So too the after party of “11.” “Twelve” should just be rolling along, business as usual, dependent more on the quality of that year’s cinema than anything else. So, while it would be a stretch to say that Tribeca has reinvented itself for its twelfth edition, which opens today, I can’t help but note that something seems pleasantly different. Maybe it’s the lack of celebrity bloat — gone are the tin-ear […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 18, 2013 -
Ryan Koo on Amateur, Feature Fundraising, and the Kickstarter Long Game
In the Fall of 2011, filmmaker Ryan Koo — featured along with then-partner Zachary Lieberman on our 2008 “25 New Faces” — announced his debut feature, Man-child. Embarking on an ambitious Kickstarter campaign, Koo leveraged not only the community he had been building via his excellent website, No Film School, but also his project’s selection for the IFP and Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Emerging Visions program. The campaign was a success, raising $125,100, and, as he’s moved his story of youth basketball forward, Koo has been, essentially, open-sourcing his progress, giving advice on not only social-media fundraising but screenplay […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 17, 2013 -
Kickstarter Tax Implications, Veronica Mars, SFX and a Tragic Dimension: Sunday Morning Links
Bruce Sterling’s closing remarks at SXSW Interactive have been posted at Wired’s Beyond the Beyond blog. It’s a long talk on the aesthetic and moral dimensions of disruption, an emergent Southwest and the tackiness of 3D figurines. An excerpt: And then there’s this empty pretense that these innovations make the world “better.” This is a dangerous word. Like: “If we’re not making the world better, then why are we doing this at all?” Now, I don’t want to claim that this attitude is hypocritical. Because when you say a thing like that at SouthBy: “Oh, we’re here to make the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 14, 2013 -
Vimeo Scopes out the Gear at NAB
Our friends at Vimeo passed on this short piece by Olivia Speranza shot at NAB. In just three-and-a-half minutes, she scopes out several interesting pieces of gear: The first big takeaway from this year was 4K’s continuing spread into cameras and display devices. If you haven’t heard yet, 4K is the next level in image resolution. As our hunger for pixels knows no limits, we’re seeing more cameras that can shoot at this higher image size that boasts four times the pixels of the 1080HD format. As you can imagine, 4K televisions are now being manufactured, but they remain both […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 12, 2013 -
Wayne Coyne on “Paul is Dead”
Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne appeared as a guest DJ on the All Things Considered radio show and podcast recently, speaking about his band’s own songs and their influences in a great interview that began with a startling track: “Strawberry Fields,” by the Beatles. Okay, it’s a fantastic song, but what startled me was Coyne’s reasons for selecting it. Coyne describes listening to the track as a kid, discovering the so-called “Paul is Dead” conspiracy and having the song’s final words, “I buried Paul” “seared into” his brain: “What a strange, strange way to end any record by any weirdo […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 11, 2013
