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

  • dust to dust

    I’ve attended three memorial services this year. March isn’t over yet.

    Annihilation is one of my favourite books, and I can’t tell you why. It’s something about the way humanity is reduced to just its connection with the world around us, and done so simply, and only in words. Names, backgrounds, the trimmings with which we identify ourselves. None of it matters.

    Today’s memorial service was secular. It was a fitting and touching reminder of how life is about family, it’s about vitality, about making the most of every day. But it was primarily about the connections we form with each other, be they familial, be they long-lasting, be they fleeting.

    There is no real rhyme or reason to this post. Sometimes you are a member of the expedition, working your way through the unknown; sometimes you are Area X itself, all-knowing, but also uncaring. Sometimes you want answers; sometimes you want to just give in, let go, and be.

  • scopeX

    video experiment…

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KD79cCD9f1Q]

    part of research, I guess?

    It’s a process.

     

  • The Adrian Miles Reading List

    Screen Shot 2018-02-09 at 2.05.34 pm

    I and many others in the RMIT community are struggling to find ways to deal with the loss of our dear colleague and friend Adrian Miles. Adrian had a profound impact on me in a very short space of time. My current book project has a foundation in many of the challenging ideas he threw at me; so much so that picking up work on it again will be tough.

    Finding words is something Adrian never struggled with. I thought I’d collate some of the hundreds upon thousands he foisted on colleagues, students, and friends. Suggestions welcome in the comments: I’ll update the post with any additions.

    If you’re wondering how best to remember Adrian, maybe pick up one of the following, or take 25 minutes’ silence, with a 5-minute break.

     

     

    Bogost, Ian. (2012). Alien Phenomenology, or What it’s Like to be a Thing. University of Minnesota Press.

    Ingold, Tim. (2011). “Rethinking the Animate, Reanimating Thought.” Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Routledge.

    Latour, Bruno. (1987). Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Harvard University Press.

    Pickering, Andrew. (1995). The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science. University Of Chicago Press.

    Stewart, Kathleen. “Atmospheric Attunements.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (2011): 445–453.

    Vannini, Phillip. (2015). Non-Representational Methodologies: Re-Envisioning Research. Routledge.

  • Romance and reflection

    There is a mode of writing about film that I really enjoy reading — I’m cautiously calling it romantic-reflexive. Practitioners of this style include Murray Pomerance, Geoff Dyer, Raul Ruiz. It’s a style I enjoy because it feels immediate, almost as if the thought had just occurred to the writer. It’s an informed style, but rather than be peppered with footnotes or citations at every turn, the reader is just aware that they’re being spoken to by someone who’s done a lot of reading.

    It’s a style that permits idiosyncrasies, but one that does not allow laziness. It allows for a nuanced discussion of film, but a discussion that is not hyper-critical. The analysis is not over-wrought, such that the film loses all magic, all its moments. I sense that this is a difficult style to master, but I’ve sketched out a few projects in the coming months that will hopefully allow me to give it a try.

    For now, though, here, on this blog, I’m going to run the style past whatever I’m watching in the next few weeks, months. I’m currently halfway through Paris, Texas, so maybe that’ll be first.

  • Another one bites the dust

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    I received this text message today, and it made me sad.

    I lived in Katoomba for a couple of years while I was working on the PhD, and somewhere between the Carrington Hotel and Civic Video, plus the not too shabby view off the back verandah, was maybe one of the most blissful and productive times (creatively and intellectually) in my life thus far.

    Civic Katoomba had a top range; a diverse clientele, from tradies and proper, honest working class folk (with proper, real jobs), to commuters like me who taught at unis or were authors or artists or similar. They also sold Ben and Jerry’s, which made for an irresistible weekend combo.

    If you can get there in the next day or two, catch yourself a bargain. Otherwise, like me, you can reflect once again on the past, and how things change, and how places, buildings, businesses that you thought would be forever, turn out to be just as fleeting as everything else.