Re: <nettime> Soviet Antarctica: Ice, Ice, baby...

[t byfield <tbyfield@panix.com>]

Since Spooky insinuated offlist (for the umpteenth time) that his
latest press release didn't appear on nettime fast enough because I'm
somehow racist, this caught my eye:

anansi5000@gmail.com (Tue 07/08/08 at 08:21 AM -0400):

> Here goes: it's going to be in the style of a silent movie - we have
> weird footage of the first Soviet expedition, and it will be a kind
> of science fiction type intermission in the middle of my film -
> very "propaganda" a la Stanislav Lem's Solaris or Boris and Arkady
> Strugatsky - two of the Soviet Union's top science fiction writers.
> By the way, all of the text below will be translated into old school
> Soviet propaganda fonts for the film.

Spooky, I know it's hard to tell all those ex-Easterners apart with
their crazy writing and all, but Lem was Polish. How does conflating
Poland and the USSR fit in with the past views you've expressed on
various kinds of oppressive relations?

Also, the idea of "old school Soviet propaganda fonts" seem to me, as
MasterCard would say, priceless. Who would have thought of it?!

     http://flickr.com/photos/laughingsquid/2261032778               /
     http://flickr.com/photos/paulogabriel/2471810284                /
     http://flickr.com/photos/aleveritas/1326239108                  /

"Etc, etc," as you like to say. Anyway, in looking at your Terra Nova
project, I'm curious: can you explain the sophisticated play of irony
operating on multiple levels that sets this apart from run-of-the-mill
backwards-R=USSR=Russia graphics stupidity? Quite a bit has changed in
that part of the world since proto-neocons were hopping on the "end
of history" bandwagon. I don't see how your emphasis on "style" (your
word -- me, I like Bakhtin) does anything more than blenderize what,
for most people, was already confusing. Sorry if this seems petty,
but I really am fascinated by the prominent role that commodified
drunkenness has played in mediating the ex-East and its history.

Cheers,
Ted
---
b1ff.org








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