Matrix...

April 8, 2003 7:11 PM

Will we ever know what is real anymore?The making of the Matrix sequels. After these movies, will we ever be able to tell what is real or not on the small and large screen?
posted by npost (72 comments total)

I quit reading pretty early in, despite great interest. The article looks spoilerific.
posted by NortonDC at 8:05 PM on April 8, 2003

NortonDC: I read most of it earlier today before it was posted here (I never think of posting anything I find online, especially when its stuff like this)...It doesn't give any real spoilers, I thought. It talks some about wicked fight scenes and how they were pulled off, and then goes into the techno-wizard's history (though I did stop reading after there cause' it got boring...I can only handle a page or 2 of wired's writing)
posted by jmd82 at 8:17 PM on April 8, 2003

jmd82: Is there some way I could make my writing more interesting to you? I'm serious. It's not "Wired's" writing -- we all have different styles. What is it that bored you?

-- Steve Silberman, Wired
posted by digaman at 8:23 PM on April 8, 2003

There's some bloody good stuff in that article. Makes me itch to see the films even more now, if that's possible.
posted by dazed_one at 8:25 PM on April 8, 2003

^^^
Heh. Only on MeFi....

The article names new characters and tells you about highly recognizable interactions with well known old characters, giving you a reference you can use to say "X still has to meet Y, and both will live through these situations because they have to appear in Z scenario still."

Spoilers, but maybe that's just me.
posted by NortonDC at 8:29 PM on April 8, 2003

Yup. I'm steering clear of all trailers, and articles, wanna go in the theatre clean-slate.
posted by Fupped Duck at 8:35 PM on April 8, 2003

I'm not interested in paying to see films in theaters anymore - except the Matrix sequels. This article was great and made me look forward to the films even more. What a PR sucker I am! Great job, Steve.
posted by neuroshred at 8:39 PM on April 8, 2003

There are no spoilers - it just documents the massive technical undertaking required to pull off what the Directors wanted to do in the next two films... very impressive, though i guess knowing how they achieved it might dispel some of the magic (not for me! :)
posted by elphTeq at 8:42 PM on April 8, 2003

It gives locations, actions and character lists for major scenes, all on the first page.
posted by NortonDC at 8:50 PM on April 8, 2003

Well, now we know how to get digaman to comment on MeFi!

As for the question about distinguishing reality from photoreality, see The Reconfigured Eye by William J. Mitchell. Although more than a decade old and primarily about still photography, it offers and interesting analysis of the ethics of "visual truth".
posted by samuelad at 8:53 PM on April 8, 2003

Heh, samuelad. I've actually read MeFi for a long time and just have never commented (I tire out my commenting fingers on The Well), but tonight when I cruised by to see what MeFi was up to, and then saw that a link to my article was posted at the top, I couldn't resist [grin].
posted by digaman at 8:57 PM on April 8, 2003

By the way, npost's first question -- how will we know what's real anymore? -- is something that the effects guys who are making these movies have thought a lot about in perfecting the technology to create totally photorealistic computer-generated human beings. (The CG versions of Keanu Reeves and Hugo Weaving in these movies blows away "Final Fantasy," believe me.) In my article, I mention that John Gaeta, the visual effects supervisor for the Matrix trilogy, had written a letter to the former President Clinton about that very issue. [If you haven't read the article yet, you might want to skip the rest of this post.]

I wasn't able to use his entire quote in my article alas, but this is a verbatim transcript of what he said:

"I believe this technology can be used for both absolute evil and absolute good. I wrote a letter to President Clinton that went unanswered, in which I said, 'I am one of the few people who happens to know that the threshhold is being broken right now in creating virtual humans. While this may not happen in our free society, these techniques could be misused.' I never got an answer, but I'm sure I'm on a hundred lists now. Leading a country by video is not yet affordable and efficient, but ten or twenty years out, we'll be doing all virtual movies, and these techniques will be pushed way beyond providing entertainment into esoteric scientific and military usages. There will be a lot of blurred lines in the next few decades."
posted by digaman at 9:10 PM on April 8, 2003

So, is Gaeta less of a tool in person than he seems like in the Matrix DVD extras?
posted by NortonDC at 9:20 PM on April 8, 2003

Heh. "Tool" doesn't strike me as the right word, even for his presence on the DVD -- he constantly says things in those interviews that seem designed to piss off Warner Bros., even saying at some point that The Matrix ruined his life. But he does come off in those interviews as pretty arrogant.

In person, Gaeta was very bright, forthcoming, and friendly, albeit with the personality quirks that I described in the article. (I'm in favor of personality quirks.) He didn't come off like a corporate lackey at all, but more like a very sharp geeky guy who has been able to make a living doing what excites him most.
posted by digaman at 9:27 PM on April 8, 2003

digamon: I e-mailed you about my opinion of Wired's writing from [e-mail] (it didn't feel necessary to bore everyone else with my ramblings)
posted by jmd82 at 9:29 PM on April 8, 2003

Got it, and replied, thanks!
posted by digaman at 9:37 PM on April 8, 2003

If you want to learn more about The Matrix, this is not the book for you.
posted by homunculus at 9:39 PM on April 8, 2003

From the article:

A similar evolution has already occurred in music. The first electronic keyboards sought to re-create a piano's acoustic properties by amassing sets of rules about the physics of keys, hammers, and strings. The end result sounded like a synthesizer. Now DJs and musicians sample and morph the recorded sounds of actual instruments.

It sounds like a good analogy, but it's basically wrong. The first synthesizers used square waves, sine waves, sawtooth waves, and sine waves because it was easy to make circuits that generated these relatively simple waveforms, not out of a desire for realism. And indeed, early synths sound nothing at all like any real instrument (well, okay, a square wave sounds sort of like a clarinet, but that's more or less coincidental). These waveforms were shaped by using filters of various sorts to remove some frequencies from the output. Hence the term "subtractive synhesis." (When someone talks about "analog" synthesis they almost always mean subtractive.)

The next big thing was FM, a digital method, which modulated one audio-frequency signal with another, creating a complex audio spectrum by connecting "operators" together in "algorithms." Again, some programmers managed to create fairly realistic sounds using FM (it was pretty good for chimes, brass, and there was an electric piano sound in the Yamaha DX7 that found its way onto thousands of recordings) but again, this wasn't because FM developers set out to duplicate any real-world instruments. No real-world instrument uses FM.

Then came sampling and a variety of sample-playback synthesizers that played back pre-sampled sounds out of ROM. A vast number of today's synths and samplers are of this type; it's cheap to make ROMs containing many megabytes of samples. By combining these with subtractive-style filters (from way back in the analog days), you can get a lot of realistic sounds from them. It's basically like replacing the oscillators in an analog synth with a recording of a real instrument. Some synths of this sort used a sample just for the initial portion of a sound, then a more traditional synthesized tone for the body. (The popular Roland D-50 worked that way.) Others used samples for the entire sound.

Within the last few years, a new approach has taken the industry by storm. For the first time, digital signal processing is fast enough to simulate the physics of real instruments. It's called "physical modeling" and it reproduces as closely as possible the real physical properties of an instrument. Each class of instrument (e.g. brass) has its own model and individual simulations (e.g. trumpet, trombone, freedom horn) are basically parameter sets for this model. PM synths sound very good indeed. What's really cool is that you can, if you want, set the parameters to values that don't correspond to real-world instruments. In some cases they couldn't exist because of physical constraints. For example, what does an instrument midway between a cornet and a trombone sound like? What does a 100-foot-long electric guitar sound like? What does a microscopic kettledrum sound like? You can make some freaky sounds this way.

I'm rambling now, but my point is that attempting to emulate real instruments closely is a newer phenomenon than sampling. So the analogy doesn't really hold.

Frankly, I'm a little disappointed to hear that digital animators have resorted to techniques like the ones disclosed in the article. Motion capture feels like cheating to me, and this new technique is just as shallow. (For the record, I feel the same way about sampling -- at least for most of the uses to which it is put today.) It's a clever shortcut, but it feels too easy to be art.

Of course, I'll probably still go see the movies.
posted by kindall at 9:40 PM on April 8, 2003

Kindall, I agree with you that at that level of resolution, my analogy doesn't work [grin}.
posted by digaman at 9:43 PM on April 8, 2003

The reality/artifice distinction has been around for a long time. Yes, an invasion of human visual perception is disturbing.

Still the Greek skeptics, with their high-octane skepticism, blew this intellectual and perceptual territory open thousands of years ago.

One thing, at least, has changed since then though - that which we must doubt, challenge, or succumb to has invaded our visual and tactile realms and now such technologies can be used to manipulate great masses of humanity.

So: propaganda, a la Ed Bernays, gains a terrible new persuasive force. Trust in shared, consensus reality crumbles and humans retreat to a bitter, paranoid solipsism while those enlightened few in the (relative) "know" run rampant as they act out their expansive schemes....
posted by troutfishing at 9:46 PM on April 8, 2003

So what else is new?
posted by adamgreenfield at 9:50 PM on April 8, 2003

Yeah, when the actors suck, you'll know they're real.
posted by HTuttle at 9:50 PM on April 8, 2003

I don't agree, Kindall, that the "universal capture" process that I describe in my article -- basically, digital photogrammetry done with super-hi-res video -- is "shallow." What makes it shallower than photography? And photogrammetry, as I explain at length in the piece, has been around since nearly the dawn of the daguerrotype. It's widely used to create arcitectural models and topographical maps, and is being used more and more in movies (Fight Club, City of Lost Children, Lord of the Rings) to create truly beautiful scenes. I found the process used by the Matrix guys at ESC fascinating -- much "deeper," as it were, than just applying synthetic texture maps to CG wireframe models.

For a great run-down of the roots of this process, by a guy I mention in my article, check out Paul Debevec's website.
posted by digaman at 9:53 PM on April 8, 2003

Yeah, the results are better, but it's less work. So it feels like cheating. I'm not saying it necessarily is, just that it feels that way to me. Not that a lot of moviemaking isn't cheating to begin with. Sets are built with only the walls we'll ever see. Props we'll see only in the background are given just enough detail to be believable from that distance and not one bit more. Actors are made up so that they'll look good from the angles needed for a particular shot and no attention at all is paid to the side of the face that won't be visible. And so on. So, this is just more of that.
posted by kindall at 9:59 PM on April 8, 2003

adamgreenfield - yup, exactly.
posted by troutfishing at 10:04 PM on April 8, 2003

Less work? Are you serious? Did you read beyond my bad synthesizer analogy? [smile] Using video this time did save them the trouble of setting up thousands of Bullet Time still-camera-rigs, but universal capture is certainly not less work than standard motion-picture photography. It's more, because, just as you say:

Actors are made up so that they'll look good from the angles needed for a particular shot and no attention at all is paid to the side of the face that won't be visible

The whole point of universal capture is that many things that would be invisible to a standard motion-picture camera have to be thought about carefully, because after a scene is "ucapped," the director may want to "shoot" it from completely different angles.

In fact, the entire process seemed like an almost Sisyphusian amount of work to me -- and I mean for the humans involved, particularly the actors, not just the rendering farm.
posted by digaman at 10:09 PM on April 8, 2003

Steve, I'm curious - because I was under the impression that you were always more interested in articles from the business end of things - why the fascination with The Matrix?
posted by adamgreenfield at 10:12 PM on April 8, 2003

I loved the original film, and loved it even more after seeing it several times.

I don't usually write about business, actually, as a quick perusal of my homepage will indicate. In the past couple of years, I've written about autism, bacterial communication, the FBI and child pornography, Dr. Oliver Sacks, surveillance... not much business. Thank goodness!
posted by digaman at 10:22 PM on April 8, 2003

Oh lord, sorry, got my own homepage link wrong.
posted by digaman at 10:23 PM on April 8, 2003

It sounds like a good analogy, but it's basically wrong.

I dunno, I think it's valid. As you pointed out, synthesizers first used simple waveforms, then FM, then sampling, and now that the technology has matured, they're moving into actually modelling the sound. Digital effects have gone a pretty analogous route - simple polygon models a la Tron, then wholly synthesized images like in Jurassic Park, now using sampling as in the Matrix sequels, and in a few years, computers will have the horsepower to synthesize completely photorealistic actors on the fly. The timelines are a little different, but the route is basically the same.

And FWIW, Steve, I liked the article and didn't find it boring, but I can see why some folks would - I just happen to like reading about John Gaeta and his work, but to a non-rabid fan the article seems to meander a bit. Is it about the technology used to make The Matrix movies, or about how The Matrix changed cinema, or about the ontological dilemma? It's not exactly focussed. But as I say, I found it interesting.
posted by RylandDotNet at 10:40 PM on April 8, 2003

If Saddams regime had this kind of tech they could have given him eternal life...
posted by zeoslap at 11:50 PM on April 8, 2003

>If you want to learn more about The Matrix, this is not the book for you.

Actually here are the books to read, or avoid.

They gave him some books to read: “The Moral Animal,” about evolutionary psychology; “Simulacra and Simulation,” by Jean Baudrillard (“Oh it’s fun! It’s fun!” says Reeves); and Kevin Kelley’s “Out of Control,” a book about machines and social systems. “They just said, ‘Go read, go read, go and see what it does,’” said Reeves. “I think they gave me the phenomenal world, the internal words and the simulation that occurred in that.”

Source
posted by skallas at 12:45 AM on April 9, 2003

That picture of 'the beginning of the Burly brawl' is soooo Redfern, the slightly slummy area south of Central Station in Sydney, near where I used to live.

I'll feel dumb if I'm wrong (not that either of those things are anything new), but that particular shade of grime-coated brick takes me back....
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 12:47 AM on April 9, 2003

This is exactly the type of thing Saddam was working on. I'ts why we had to go in there.

Try to keep up, zeroslap. Sheesh.
posted by dglynn at 12:56 AM on April 9, 2003

"The Burly Man is the title of the script on Barton Fink's desk. We all loved that movie," he explains. "The lesson at the end of it is that after all these ordeals, all this agony, you finally arrive at the culmination of your entire life's work - and it's a wrestling picture."

Beautiful.

Also, it may only be me, but reading this

"What this means for moviemaking is that once a scene is captured, filmmakers can fly the virtual camera through thousands of "takes" of the original performance - and from any angle they want, zooming in for a close-up, dollying back for the wide shot, or launching into the sky. Virtual cinematography."

made me think porn. In the literal sense, as well as the techfetishist sense.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 12:57 AM on April 9, 2003

Here's an interesting thought.

Not too far in the future (two or three decades maybe), the Beatles will have a reunion. It will be a sequel to Help or Hard Day's Night, and the film will look like it was just unearthed from some time vault.

The film will look aged and worn, just like any seventy year old movie should, but it will be a new Beatles movie with a completely new Beatles soundtrack, and even the most die hard Beatle's fan will find it impossible to tell the difference, between the new film and the original.

Now this new technology is disturbing enough, when it applies to music and art, but as a tool for government propaganda, I find it frightening.
posted by Beholder at 1:41 AM on April 9, 2003

After these movies, will we ever be able to tell what is real or not on the small and large screen?

Dear god, I hope we won't. I'm getting so sick of crappy computer generated fight scenes (see 1, 2, and 3) that I just want them to either fix it or junk it completely. I'm nervously anticipating this movie, if the computer graphics *bs* ruins it I just might cry...

Interesting to see negative comments on the quality of the writing, I read the whole thing and liked it, specifically:

Action-movie mogul Joel Silver was enthusiastic about the script, but with its gnostic allegories, Baudrillardian subtexts, and Philip K. Dick mindfuckery, it was no Die Hard With a Modem.

The interfaces of our souls are designed to be read in a heartbeat.

Whoever wrote this (apparently digaman) has a real interest in the movie, and is able to talk about the ideas it presents.

Why so hard on the guy?
posted by cohappy at 2:11 AM on April 9, 2003

So when will the next cannonball run come out?
posted by password at 2:43 AM on April 9, 2003

You're not real - any of you. Metafilter is a computer generated, advanced DARPA project.
posted by troutfishing at 4:48 AM on April 9, 2003

Apparently, there is a spoon -- but only the photogrammetry and laser topography of a spoon overlaid on a 3D wire mesh.
posted by thanotopsis at 4:49 AM on April 9, 2003

You too, thanotopsis.

It's being developed to allow the chattering classes to harmlessly vent political dissent.

It's a adaptive software program which learns the user's preferences and quirks and adjusts the comments of the Metafilter "community" to be more congruent with preexisting biases. This will, ideally, provide the user with a warm and cosy sense of belonging to a 'community'.

But it's in the Beta stage, and so I'm the only real one here.

This explains why some people here keep saying the same things over and over again: software glitches.

over and over again: software glitches.

over and over again: software glitches.

over and over again: software glitches.

over and over again: software glitches.

over and over again: software glitches.
posted by troutfishing at 5:04 AM on April 9, 2003

Insert auto generated MeFi slogan script:

MetaFilter: Over and over again: software glitches.
posted by ?! at 5:26 AM on April 9, 2003

Arnold Schwarzenegger can have a detailed laser-scanned body map done, and his estate can make royalties off it in perpetuity. Just think: He could be making action movies fifty years after his death.
posted by alumshubby at 5:31 AM on April 9, 2003

With the state of theatre audiences I see maybe 2-3 films a year. However, I don't feel this film should be seen any other way. Forget virtual actors. I want a virtual -- and quiet -- audience.

beholder: If you can convince this Beatle fan those are the Fab Four making something as good as Hard Day's Night -- I don't care if they're virtual. If you convince me they're the Beatles selling vacuum cleaners -- I'm leaving the asylum to hunt you down.

alumshubby: Now you've convinced me this is just an evil evil technology.
posted by ?! at 5:33 AM on April 9, 2003

Arr me hearties! Soon you'll be able to go online with pirated software, download pirated voice and body models, and with other pirated software make your own matrix sequels complete with a soundtrack of pirated music. We might soon have to add SAG to the list of evil corporate interests who will be trying to oppress us.
posted by wobh at 5:42 AM on April 9, 2003

I know there's a program that allows you to build a 3d model froma photograph and automatically map the real textures to it, but I can't remember the name. Anyone?
posted by signal at 5:58 AM on April 9, 2003

Beholder:Not too far in the future (two or three decades maybe), the Beatles will have a reunion. It will be a sequel to Help or Hard Day's Night, and the film will look like it was just unearthed from some time vault.

Made me think of this AICN rumor about a plan for making a "lost" Marx brothers movie.
posted by PinkStainlessTail at 6:07 AM on April 9, 2003

"Arnold Schwarzenegger can have a detailed laser-scanned body map done, and his estate can make royalties off it in perpetuity." - Alumshubby

Eeeewwww......yick.

Wobh - Arr me hearties! We've got a lot of time on our hands...
posted by troutfishing at 7:14 AM on April 9, 2003

The film will look aged and worn, just like any seventy year old movie should, but it will be a new Beatles movie with a completely new Beatles soundtrack, and even the most die hard Beatle's fan will find it impossible to tell the difference, between the new film and the original.

I'll bite. 1) the Beatles movies sucked. Of course you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

2) If you can make music that is so good that it fools die hard Beatles fans, then it is in and of itself great art. What's wrong with that?
posted by norm at 7:23 AM on April 9, 2003

norm. norm. norm. Them's discussing words, but not on this thread. I'll throw down the gauntlet at FilmFilter.

wobh: Now you've convinced me it's a good idea again. I can't want to make Romeo and Juliet with James Dean and Jodie Foster.

PST: Any more news from that Marx Brothers idea???

We now return you to The Matrix.
posted by ?! at 8:51 AM on April 9, 2003

As always, the Porn industry will lead the charge on this one...

How popular are faked "celebrity" hardcore pics on the internet? No need to answer that... then what about fake videos? If someone made a realistic Brittney Spears hardcore vid right now, that person would be a bajillionaire, no question.

At some point in the future, being a celebrity will mean enduring fake porn vids starring yourself, all over the internet (or whatever the new one will be called).

How strange would it be to watch yourself "perform" in a gangbang that never happened?
posted by BobFrapples at 9:02 AM on April 9, 2003

PST: Any more news from that Marx Brothers idea???

I'd take anything I read on Ain't It Cool News with a very large grain of salt (perhaps a saltlick, even), and googling on Warren Zide turns up bupkiss on this project. It's fun to think about, but finding a Harpo imitator who can also play the harp seems like the major stumbling block to me. If they try to fudge around that, it won't look right. "Maybe the Matrix folks could lend a hand", he said, suddenly bringing relevance to his comment.
posted by PinkStainlessTail at 9:05 AM on April 9, 2003

digaman, awesome article. everyone, awesome discussion. npost, thanks for the, er, post, as I was otherwise ignoring this article.
posted by billsaysthis at 9:33 AM on April 9, 2003

Well you could also star in as many porn flicks as you wanted and then claim they were fake.
posted by zeoslap at 9:56 AM on April 9, 2003

Thanks, billsaysthis!
posted by digaman at 10:00 AM on April 9, 2003

can't type much--eating hummus. but, for the record, the matrix was dumb. this thread is better sf. the sequels look dubious at best. (imo)
posted by wobh at 10:23 AM on April 9, 2003

When I said the method being used was "less work," I of course don't mean "less work than regular photography." I meant "less work than traditional 3D modeling." You know, where you create the digital data yourself rather than "sampling" from the real world in whatever way (3D scanning, motion capture, now this).

Although it is also technically true that it is less work than photography too. Since getting the desired images using physical techniques is impossible, it by definition would require an infinite amount of work. Anything that can be done with finite resources in finite time is easier than that. ;)
posted by kindall at 10:26 AM on April 9, 2003

I would like to shoutout to digaman that I read the Wired article yesterday, actually blew off work for quite a while so I could savor every word. I enjoyed your treatment of Gaeta, (even down to describing his sideburns!) as well as the technology he uses to do what he does. It was an excellent article and had my attention from start to finish. I'm so glad to know someone who writes as well as you do is a MeFi member!
posted by Lynsey at 10:44 AM on April 9, 2003

Thanks, Lynsey! This is a very special place.
posted by digaman at 10:50 AM on April 9, 2003

My god, I leave the discussion for a few hours, come back, and all you DARPA computer algorithms are still chatting away at each other, just for my benefit!
posted by troutfishing at 11:24 AM on April 9, 2003

If you want to learn more about The Matrix, this is not the book for you.

Perhaps because "Welcome to the desert of the real." is a Baudrillard quote.

If you want to learn more about The Matrix, this is not the book for you.
posted by armoured-ant at 11:27 AM on April 9, 2003

If you want to learn more about laughing at crazy people, this is the book for you.
posted by PinkStainlessTail at 11:31 AM on April 9, 2003

Arr me hearties! Soon you'll be able to go online with pirated software, download pirated voice and body models, and with other pirated software make your own matrix sequels complete with a soundtrack of pirated music. posted by wobh at 5:42 AM PST on April 9

Add in those body scanners that can see through clothing and amateur porn gets a lot more interesting and/or personalized. Who do you figure will be on the top ten lists of illegally acquired body models? Brad Pitt, Ms Hawn, the Olsen twins?
posted by Mitheral at 11:35 AM on April 9, 2003

Scientists estimate by the end of this century, via the means of virtual reality, a man will be able to stimulate making love to any woman he wants through his television set. You know, folks, the day an unemployed ironworker can lie in his BarcaLounger with a Foster’s in one hand and a channel-flicker in the other and fuck Claudia Schiffer for $19.95, it’s gonna make crack look like Sanka. -Dennis Miller
posted by Mapes at 1:13 PM on April 9, 2003

I'm the only real one here.

Interesting, the simulation is showing signs of self-awareness...
posted by inpHilltr8r at 1:54 PM on April 9, 2003

>If you can make music that is so good that it fools die hard Beatles fans, then it is in and of itself great art. What's wrong with that?

I don't see anything wrong with that. If fans are so enamored with the Beatles "brand" that they will buy similations then more power to them. Currently, there are a few famous Beatles cover bands that play surprisingly large venues.

This argument seems to focus on the technology, but its really about how some consumers will consume any sentimental crap.
posted by skallas at 2:55 PM on April 9, 2003

skallas: But isn't that the direction fans of "beatle" music will have to take? After all, we can't go watch Mozart conduct his music. We're forced to watch a group try to recreate it, and maybe add a little of themselves. Not too much, or the audience rebels.

With the Beatles it's a similar problem. Some just play the music straight. Some cover bands try to recreate the shows because that was part of the experience.

I don't believe it is sentimental crap, but then again the girls here at the Sunnyvale Old Folks Home always get randy when they remember their salad days screaming in near-ecstasy at John, Paul, George, or even Ringo. You know, some girls just love an underdog. Beatles cover bands are big here.
posted by ?! at 5:30 PM on April 9, 2003

signal: I know there's a program that allows you to build a 3d model from a photograph...
Are you thinking of Canoma by Metacreations?

wobh: can't type much--eating hummus.
Funniest thing I've read all day.
posted by chrismear at 12:51 AM on April 11, 2003

Low tech films, kindall?
It's all good.
posted by asok at 5:05 PM on April 11, 2003

Arrgh, late to the party. Oh, well.

At some point in the future, being a celebrity will mean enduring fake porn vids starring yourself, all over the internet (or whatever the new one will be called).

Conversely, this will mean that as a celebrity you'll get to do pretty much whatever you want without the risk of harming your career-- any video of the event will be indistinguishable from a (much cheaper, easier-to-make) fake. There probably won't even be any more paparazzi.
posted by Tlogmer at 11:57 AM on April 15, 2003

Re: the original post's question: It's also interesting to note that 'there is no spoon' is also a quote from Baudrillard, from Cool Memories II. Also of interest, check out Bill Eggington's article on reality-bleeding in journal Configurations, one of the 2002 issues.
posted by hank_14 at 4:23 AM on April 16, 2003

In regards to all of the comments about the reality of metafilter: one only needs to look here for explanation.
posted by rorycberger at 11:13 AM on April 22, 2003