Event Horizon
Looking past traditional cinema into avenues of visual media and other light-related phenomena across the online landscape—and beyond.
It is impossible to imagine the film being made with live actors; if it were, it would lose a crucial source of tension. As so many key conversations in the film swirl around authenticity in artmaking and identity, it’s pointed for the film’s visuals to encourage you to question everything you are watching.
The Candid Camera–style, “gotcha” approach has appealed to a new wave of online predator hunters: streamers who transpose the TCaP framework to YouTube, Facebook, Rumble, and Locals. Many of these shows are hosted by survivors, or people one step removed from them.
Lyrical turnarounds like “Drive boy dive boy / Dirty numb angel boy / In the doorway boy / She was a lipstick boy”—in this surreal context, the sounds of human confusion are not so far away from how a glitching machine might speak. Homer’s version, a synthetic soliloquy.
While watching these world-famous women pantomime Brady fandom, I thought, bizarrely, of people I knew, wrapped up in different fascinations; I wondered about the importance of spectatorship to everyday life.
It has never been as easy to undercut the “truth” of filmed reality, but verifying truth in image-making was never so straightforward.
Its creative interactivity distinguishes TikTok from image-based social networks like Instagram, and also explains its dominance as a short-form video app, a larger trend in China.
Ulman has described herself as an artist “based in airports”: functional travel hubs with a navigable universality, regardless of their actual location.
New logistical work-arounds sought to overcome the difficulties of physically congregating; each decision about tone could trigger dozens of questions. Are the problems we are experiencing self-contained within the pandemic, or perennial?
"A radically new way to watch story and interact with story" conceals the true subversion out there.
This is a contemporary American hellscape, but if Chaplin and Tati were socially aloof within environments of cold modernity, O’Malley’s outcasts can barely communicate as they navigate a world corroded by mediation.