Georges Méliès, mad magician

For your viewing pleasure…The Melomaniac (Le Mélomane) by Georges Méliès, 1903. Please enjoy this bit of immaculately timed surrealism from the master of cinema magic.

Progenitors

This weekend I visited the Art Institute of Chicago, and along with revisiting several of my favorite pieces (such as The Praying Jew and the Giacometti sculptures) I took a look at several Futurist paintings.  I am reading a book called Mechanization Takes Command, mentioned in my first post, which details the evolution of innumerable everyday objects, as well as the far-reaching effects mechanization imposed on our day to day lives.  Futurism was a visceral response to studies of motion in the early 1900s, and the images many of those artists created are powerful distillations of turn-of-the-century philosophies about labour management, human potential and scientific advances.

It’s hard to understand today the far-reaching revolution of motion studies, and how they in turn guided “actualities” by the Lumiere Brothers at the dawn of cinema. Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 is such an influential work because it represented scientific explorations in such a provocative and public way, but really all he did was copy the work of Eadweard Muybridge.  As the popular saying goes, it’s better to do something second than it is to do it first.

Mechanization is so pervasive that the idea of a Robotic Librarian is almost banal.  Along with jet packs, flying cars and colonies on Mars the idea almost seems quaint in a retro-futurist sort of way.  In reality, though, the idea is gaining in influence, and several of us after graduation day may need to make the acquaintance of a Robotic Librarian sooner rather than later.  So here are a few posts about automated systems that may be coming to a library near you.

First here is a BBC article about bookish robots developed at the University Jaume I in Spain.  Next up is the Automatic Control Laboratory website which offers robotic storage and access for library materials, citing a study conducted at Chicago State University as evidence of their value.  It also has a short video showing how these robots work.  As a corollary, here is a link to the Chicago State University page showing the benefits of their new robotic friends.  This CSU project has even made its way onto an “exemplary” wikia article about the future of robotics, which highlights numerous innovations that will change the way we live.  This will impact our very chemistry as well, and Pfizer employs several robotic librarians in their warehouse of millions of “druglike chemicals.”  (Mention of the library and the robot messenger is on page 3 of the article)  Not everyone is happy about these systems, however, as seen in this letter to USU about a proposed tuition hike, part of which will be used to fund a “proposed multi-million dollar library.”

There’s an unwieldy amount of material about robotic librarians out there with a minimum of searching, and numerous articles available to Dominican University students through our databases.  In many ways, what Google and other search tools are doing can be seen as the efforts of Robotic Librarians, if one considers the automated aggregating they perform on the scale of billions of units of data per second.  What does all of this mean for us flesh and blood librarians toiling away in the infosphere?  I just don’t know, but it’s thrilling to have the opportunity to try and find out.

Cortometraje de Virgil Widrich

Any fans of animation, especially the more unusual (Svankmajer, Bickford and maybe Karel Zeman) branch of things, may appreciate this distillation of cinema by Virgil Widrich. I just came across this, and it is incredible. I aspire to make collage animations myself, as soon as I can afford a 5 to 7 megapixel monster myself, and this little video is particularly inspiring.

I am an enormous film buff, having watched way too many hours of anything I can get my hands on. I am recently into the dawn of cinema, especially the documentaries by Russian innovator Dziga Vertov. I have a personal goal to watch at least one film from every single year since the dawn of motion pictures, and I think I only have about twenty years left to find films from. (Meaning, since 1893, there are only twenty missed years, mostly from 1903 to 1925, yet somehow I’ve seen nothing from 1953. A genuine mystery…)

Some months it’s just martial arts films, sometimes avant feminist Czech cinema from the 60s and 70s (which, by the way, if you haven’t seen Daisies by Věra Chytilová and are receptive to magisterial, surreal visions a la Buñuel, you should check it out), sometimes just TV shows from around the world on Youtube. So, here it is, Fast Film by Virgil Widrich for your viewing pleasure.

Let me know what you think.