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.

Tag: France

  • Push the button for a sweet treat

    I had grand plans of posting something about Godzilla today, but that will have to wait for these delightful rats. These tiny furry folx learned to associate pushing a little button with getting a sugar treat. As time progressed, though, they ended up just pushing the button for fun.

    The results are about as delightful as you’d expect.

    The project was led by French photographer Augustin Lignier, whose work explores the technography and performativity of photography. I came across the work due to the mighty Kottke, who quotes a New York Times piece where Lignier considers that the rats’ continued button-mashing as a neat analog for our addiction to social media.


    As platforms morph, shrink, converge, collapse all over the internet, one begins to wonder what the web of the imminent future might look like. While I did mention grassroots movements and community-run services like Neocities in my last post, the network effects that platforms like Substack, X, hell, even WordPress right here, can offer, are often more tempting than a cutesy throwback. That is to say nothing of the ease with which said platforms integrate with other services to maximise attention on their users.

    Substack and X are feeling the squeeze of the real world to greater and lesser degrees; the former as a safe space for Nazis, the latter as a haven for AI-generated deepfakes. But where one platform collapses, another will happily take its place, unless we all decide to opt out together.

    The internet of the future will be several interweaved different platforms, modes, nodes, devices, personalities, and communities. In a way it has always been so, but with its sheer ubiquity, the way it layers over and enfolds so many aspects of existence, thinking ‘the internet’ (or even ‘the Internet’, as autocorrect seemed to cling to forever) as a monolith is now a waste of time.

  • Look inside

    mare incognito

    While abroad in January, I was invited to a premiere screening of De Humani Corporis Fabrica, a pretty harrowing slice-of-life documentary set in a French hospital. A bizarre experience for my first couple of days in France, as my middling language skills were tested; but many lovely moments of juxtaposition of sound and vision, particularly with surgeons discussing quotidian, often humorous, matters as we see the confronting effects of their actions on the patient on the table.

    My overriding thought through the whole thing – perhaps as a kind of coping mechanism – was how amazing we are as a species. While there is still so much to learn in every realm of science (will we ever learn everything?), we know so much about ourselves; certainly enough to remedy a host of ills.

    There was also something about watching this post-lockdown, post-anti-vaxxers, and during whatever social suspension of disbelief is trending right now. Something about health workers, be they heart surgeons, nurses, or morticians, just cracking on with their work, looking after everyone because it’s their job. Cracking on in spite of the horrendous rhetoric they’ve had to put up with over the last few years, not to mention even before COVID being treated, on the whole, very poorly.

    The confrontational aspect is the very objective views of internal organs being sliced open or purged, or just scalpels digging into human flesh, or various other procedures of increasing or decreasing discomfort to both patient and viewer. After a while I actually found myself somewhat desensitised, while also thinking about the scientific advancements that led us to this point. There’s also something about seeing a body flayed open that made me think of old anatomical drawings, as a kind of map of the human form, but also as a visual diary of the evolution of how we think about bodies, corporeality, mortality, existence.

    Old maps, too, command a kind of fascination, and a strong connection to anatomical illustrations. The visual style is sometimes similar, but particularly there is an element of the unknown present in both. We seek to fill the unknown with something, anything; in many historical cases that was some kind of ethereal force, be it religious, cosmic, or fantastical.

    We are more willing now, I think, to accept the infinite, the ungraspable. This is sometimes an aspirational quality for academics, to be sure, but there is the increasingly pervasive aspiration of intellectual humility: a willingness to acknowledge one’s limits or boundaries, to hold space in one’s mind for what we do not (or indeed, cannot) know. This film put me, once more, in awe of medical professionals, and of modern science, and very willing to sprinkle a little ‘here be dragons’ over that kind of knowledge.

    What a privilege it is to be able to see films like this; and what privilege to be able to think and write about them. The most any of us can hope for is to wear that privilege as humility when, invariably, we have to enter some kind of healthcare setting at some point in our lives.

  • It Boy (2013)

    pano1_20-ans-d-ecart-sm

    I have a big soft spot — a cultured gooey centre, if you will — for French farces. Often romantic comedies, though also often full of slapstick and cases of mistaken identity, I’ll watch the lot.

    Unfortunately, this habit is dependent on whatever French films period — let alone any from a specific genre — are imported to Australia (and adequately subtitled, etc.). To this end I’m incredibly reliant on the likes of Hopscotch and Madman.

    Thankfully, Madman saw fit to include the charming little Parisian It Boy in its 2013 catalogue. This light, breezy, highly improbable comedy sees a 21-year-old become infatuated with a much older woman based on a bumpy plane ride. Perfectly reasonable.

    Virginie Efira is delightful in the main role, with excellent support from the rumpled French Matt Smith aka Pierre Niney. The girl called this the French Devil Wears Prada, which I guess is kind of apt. Suitable acting, beautiful location, and perfectly-executed comedy cinematography. A solid and contented three stars. More of this, please, Mr. Madman.

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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