{ 1936 Berlin }

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{ Dreams Rewired, 2015 }

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” Connection so fascinates us in our wired-in, modern times, but hardly any film has been able to speak inventively about it. Precautionary tales like “Disconnect” or “Men, Women & Children” have gone in one ear and out the other, no different from tedious Facebook posts griping that our phone usage must be the downfall of all communication. The irony of disconnection through connected tech proves too easy, the nostalgia for non-wired-in days too shallow.

In floats “Dreams Rewired,” which took three directors (Martin Reinhart, Manu Luksch and Thomas Tode) to assemble. It feigns no resolution to the concerns of our screen-craziness. Instead, the ethereal essay provides a bounty of poetry, in the form of a measured narration by international treasure Tilda Swinton, and an extensively labored assembly of 200 black-and-white film clips. “

From Nick Allen’s review at RogerEbert.com

We should probably begin our critique here by saying: One shouldn’t go to a film geeks’ ( and media peddlers’ ) pages to find any manuals on how to escape the 21st century’s mediated-world hijack in mid-flight !

Here below is an XLterrestrials psychomedia analysis / review in a humble attempt to… SCREAM :

” Your lives and your planet are in grave danger, mate… Better not spend your precious hours now strolling through the poetic media arcades ! Ya know, Walter Benjamin put a bullet in his own head at the previous gates of this new world Mordor. Beware ! Our own geopolitical coordinates today are likely not far off from this same tragic frame.”

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An XLterrestrials Film review

Dreams: Rewired / Captured / Un-Hacked …

work-in-progress

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” There is no shortage of documentaries that come off like soapbox sermons, leaving audience members itching to sign a petition. Dreams Rewired does not have any specific call to action, other than to be aware of the world around you and its changes.”

from another review by Jordan Hoffmann at The Guardian

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Our reaction was somewhat the opposite… We can be equally dismayed by ineffective soapboxy docs that make people mildly itch for petitions AND films that have no call for action !

While this film is a beautiful, methodic, skillfull edit and artful meditation on the media environments…

WHY no calls for action ?! is our immediate instinctual + urgent question.

Is it not obvious that the powers unleashed by the corporate shaping of our communications and societies through tech are a rather disturbing matter and global crisis !?

[ To grab just one example from a loooong list of critical analyses, misdirections, grievances, house of horrors and realtime emergencies: Like the fossil fuels era, there’s a number of ( underdeveloped and over-plundered ) countries with the necessary “conflict minerals” to supply the continuing consumer expansion of all our hyper-connected communications tools, not to mention the eco-theft required for the energy to keep all those screens + data glowing and flowing. Currently, no corporation, no manufacturer and no state have any substantial plans to regulate and relieve the grotesque situations + exploitation of these (client-) regions and peoples, to avoid creating more victims of accelerating 1st world telecomm giants + their techno-industrial dystopias. ]

The way D-Rewired concludes their narrative helped us come to a sharper focus for investigations …

We are left with this soft Tildian message that we are all so fascinated by this desire for connectivity, this hyper-connectivity, this somewhat impossible and contradictory global connectivity, this highly problematic connectivity. Note: Attempting to broadcast the Berlin Olympics in 1936, is the epitome of the mass media dream-trajectory of the 20th century. It’s the ultimate narcissistic-dysfunction “connectivity” power trip, the logical endgame of mass media now implemented as consumer-grade weaponry.

Archival footage, not from Riefenstahl as we might expect, along with Swinton’s often far-too-whimsical narration, inform us that Nazi Germany was in fact the first attempt at a state “broadcast” of mass Spectacle ( and nationalist agendas ), albeit pre-network times, filmed and then “transmitted” or distributed to various locations for viewing.

Of course there’s multiple, though not exactly diverse, pathways of the history of mass media from thereon, but one of the actual core dreams is revealed. Not exactly a general nor innate public/social desire, but perhaps better described as a militarized technological advance, a totalitarian state enterprise. The primordial mass media Grope !? And/Or an ethereal neo-Taylorism of the new immaterial/cognitive labor ?! Are we Now at the stage of the all-seeing-all-collecting and smiling Zuckerborg !? The answer is probably not poetic.

[ Note: as a young billionaire pup, M.Zuck, along with his handlers of course, once invited GW Bush to have his post-prez autobiography book launch in Mountainview at the Fbook HQ ! ]

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The filmmakers here are adept media analysts and obviously took a long and thoughtful time to develop this tour-guiding script [+5 years in the making]. We are talking about a multiple-layered and extremely complex relationship to technologies and media. And there are not so many films that provide such an expansively compiled collection of archives ( and in this rare case not heavily US-centric ) to ponder where we are headed in this all-encompassing dilemma. What the XLterrestrials prefer to consider as a precarious mediated + borderline psychosis of a now grand, epidemic and globalized scale.

The directors’ confinement and decision to use archives from media all prior to the 1950s ( and color ), is a useful approach to get at the roots of this hyper-mediated era, and to give some distanced, hilltop or aerial view onto our current tumultuous and accelerated traps.

But their conclusion is not far off from the general advertisements of the dreamy technotopian enterprise ! The new Silicon Valley pitch for the post-human all-powerful future, sold + managed of course by them ! … Of course, there’s a few good tiny bones of dystopian critique thrown at us, like the moment we see a glimpse of this tentacled mess as it reaches the outliers, say Africa, i.e. the scarred slaves, the victims of the empowered … but certainly the film cannot be said to have taken any tactical position in analyzing this from the haunted subjects’ angle!

[ Craig Baldwins' works from Tribulations 99 to Specters of the Spectrum come to mind as a sharper knife in the cutting rooms of media archeology ! Godfrey Reggio might be another. Others ? … Adam Curtis, Caroline Martel, Lutz Dammbeck, Poitras, Alfonso Cuarón… EyeWar ! , etc. ]

So a tactical line that might make more sense now is to confront the mediated world which is more than ever on the rise and aiming for much deeper and implicating versions ( i.e. IOT and Smart Cities ) , and deconstruct these supposed ” connectivity desires” , everyone is always talking about.

More controversially, and in an attempt to challenge the now fully-incorporated and immersive game, we must ask if we have had our dreams rewired … And hacked … And owned … precisely because our more ‘authentic’ connectivity has been mostly obstructed in the techno-industrial society ! Community, belonging, sense of purpose, present un-instumentalized life, shared and embodied freedoms, brother+sisterhood, kinship to the organic, living and non-antrhopocentric dominated environments, etc.

Have all these more traditional and essential human + cultural relationships been repackaged as a desire for global high-tech pseudo-connectivity ? It’s easier to sell this massively internalizng and un-democraticly planned technotopian implosion, an exodus of being, when you simultaneously construct ( and demolish) the outer world… into a threatening place, a shithole, a distrusted, out-of-control mess… Better and safer now to just sit here in these new cozy infinite air-conditioned, isolated, play-station cubicles. [ A bit like the warmongers' ruse dissected in Underground by Dušan Kova?evi?. and E.Kusturica, 1995. ]

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We happen to be reading/researching Alan Watts (again) at the moment… The Wisdom Of Insecurity…
and came across this great line this morning:

“The human organism has the most wonderful powers of adaptation to both physical and psychological pain. But these can only come into full play when the pain is not being constantly restimulated by this inner effort to get away from it. To separate the “i” from the feeling ” …

(more quotes from these angles to be added )

XLterrestrials would more likely conclude that today’s obsessions for global connectivity, is not so much a desire… but more a fetish, which becomes a desperate means to escape the psychological trauma and pain of separation, brought about by a corporate krapitalist system that has engulfed us.

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to be cont. ?

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The Trailer for Dreams Rewired on Vimeo

And an excellent resource , and links to more works from Manu Luksch :

ambientTv