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: philosophy

  • The world is so unutterably boring

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    Sometimes it’s the movement. Just the movement. As the light hits a blade of grass, or a leaf — something that’s completely out of a cinematographer’s control.

    Sometimes it’s the perfect placement of a vaguely recognisable object — like a syringe, or a coin, or a calendar page — just below the surface of a liquid such that it shimmers ethereally.

    Sometimes it’s the way you’re cued to recognise each of three craniums at varying stages of baldness.

    Sometimes it’s the crease of a wrinkle, the way a brow furrows, the tiniest glimmer of a smirk.

    It’s a character breaking the fourth wall an hour into a film and it somehow feeling like the most natural thing in the world.

    It’s rain falling completely out of nowhere, indoors, for no reason.

    It’s a little girl, apropos of nothing, moving a couple of glasses with her mind.

    And sometimes, just sometimes, it’s all of these things.

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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