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.

Author: dan

  • stuff

    A thing from last year.

  • the freshness of being

    The doggo at the end of the world.

    I couldn’t stop watching it. Again.

    Like, the film is two hours and forty fucking minutes long.

    It’s also been a solid two years or so since the first time I saw it. And it’s not the same.

    I thought it would feel slower. That I would be made to feel each agonising camera movement again and again.

    But honestly: it felt speedy. It felt measured. It felt right.

    Yesterday I watched Dave Grohl’s Sound City, and in that they get a bunch of musos to define ‘feel’.

    Essentially ‘feel’ is that moment where everything else fades away, where it’s just you and the music, where everyone is just on the same wavelength.

    I was feeling this film today. It was just me and the film. I was on its wavelength (I promise I’m not high, though can you imagine).

    This time I thought about the doggo. This time I thought a lot about Annihilation (and I’m not the first).

    I came in thinking eco-cinema, and once again that narrowness of vision was devastated.

    What. A. Film.

  • Housebound

  • Notes on a theme

    It’s happened again. I hit a certain point, usually every twelve months, sometimes sooner, where I get annoyed with my WordPress theme. This layout for my website that I have handpicked from dozens of options, that at the time of choosing I was most satisfied with, has now outstayed its welcome. Its geometries, its fonts, its white spaces, no longer hold any appeal, and I find in them nothing but frustrations.

    Why? Why do I care this much?

    An academic career shifts and morphs like sand dunes. I’ve only been in this game some eight or nine years and I can already look back over the different, distant chapters, each with their own opportunities, challenges, roads taken or ignored. The one constant has been this site, with its patient recording of my achievements and publications. The site is more personal, too, in that among the more formal, reviewed outputs, there are half-formed thoughts, works in progress, and other fleeting words, images, visions.

    It is a mode of performance, but one that is not held in the strictures of yearly reviews, promotion criteria, or key performance indicators. It is a more accurate record of the long periods of absence, or busy-ness, or chaos, or calm, or joy, or sadness, or heartbreak, that this life I’ve chosen can encapsulate.

    This year has been very, very long. It began with the passing of a close colleague, and it feels as though we have been dragging ourselves through two long semesters of teaching, trying to stoke the fires of thinking, innovation, writing, and making sure a brave and supportive face is put on for our students: this face is never a mask, but like a mask it’s harder to wear on some days more than others.

    This year has also held opportunities: travel, creative work, and in the last few weeks, a great acceleration in word output in order to complete a first working draft of a manuscript. I’ve watched some wonderful films, and managed to leave the house on multiple occasions to Have Some Fun(tm).

    In short, perhaps, it has been a year like any other, with many ups and many downs. I have a week still to work, and I plan to spend most of that week watching, thinking, and writing.

    All years are similar, then. Some ups, some downs. Each year is a variation on a theme. So maybe that’s why I feel this annual need to change mine.

  • Inhuman Screens

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    I am thrilled to announce that I’ve been invited to present at the inaugural Inhuman Screens conference, convened in conjunction with Sydney Underground Film Festival.

    I’ll be presenting my research on drones and cinematography. This work considers the embodied experience of flying a drone, and some of the philosophical/existential questions that experience raises, as well as how drone shots might be brought into the language of film distinctly from other aerial footage.

    All speakers, keynotes and primary stream, comprise many of my film theory faves, so I look forward mostly to getting my presentation over and done with, and simply basking in the awesome to follow.

    Tickets available at the Inhuman Screens website.