The Clockwork Penguin

Daniel Binns is a media theorist and filmmaker tinkering with the weird edges of technology, storytelling, and screen culture. He is the author of Material Media-Making in the Digital Age and currently writes about posthuman poetics, glitchy machines, and speculative media worlds.

Year: 2022

  • I bought an NFT and all I got was this stupid NFT

    Today I bought an NFT.

    I realise that with this post I run the risk of coming off as Steve Buscemi with the skateboard. But — despite my being a reasonably tech-savvy person, even I struggled to really wrap my head around NFTs until I managed to scan, verify, and confirm my way through several phone and browser-based transactions. I’m still not sure I really get it, but here’s how it went down, for the Nifty-curious.

    Note that this post is not about the IP, industrial, ethical, and environmental implications of NFT and blockchain technology, though I am working on a piece that takes all of these issues and more into account.

    (more…)

  • A Saturday

    The roof structure at Industry Beans, Fitzroy.

    Phone calls, coffee, vinyl. A Melbourne cliché.

  • Back on the (block)chain gang

    My current writing project is around blockchain and the entertainment industries, and mostly involves sorting hype from legitimate ideas. This is one of the first not-super-conceptual academic pieces I’ve written, so it’s interesting to sort through a whole bunch of reportage, blogs, videos, and just get a sense of what the current atmosphere around something is.

    In this case, that ‘something’ is blockchain, crypto, NFTs, and how, in the wake of That Sale, everyone wants one, is selling one, or is just trying to understand one.

    In much of my work — particularly around cinema — the films I’m writing about, or the technology of film itself, has been around long enough for a wide variety of opinions and theories to have circulated and settled. In this case, with web3, it does occasionally feel like it’s happening live.

    If you try to get above the arguments, rage, and gatekeeping (I see you, unnamed social media platform rhyming completely unironically with ‘bitter’), the kinds of questions being asked are legitimately interesting and important. And those contributing to the discussion are a unique mixture of techs/programmers/engineers, artists, philosophers, and media pundits.

    Soon, a favourable peer review pending, I guess I’ll be one of them.

Her language contains elements from Aeolic vernacular and poetic tradition, with traces of epic vocabulary familiar to readers of Homer. She has the ability to judge critically her own ecstasies and grief, and her emotions lose nothing of their force by being recollected in tranquillity.

Marble statue of Sappho on side profile.

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