Being John Smith
Joel shared Being John Smith on Le Cinéma Club, I don't know how long it will be there for.
I enjoyed it and found it relatable in many ways, which I suppose was part of the point given how it was about the desire to stand out but all of the things–down to a name–that conspire to keep you grounded. Mostly I liked the pace, thoughtfulness, and vulnerability. Because I didn't scroll down to read the publicity, I also saw it without much framing, rare these days where I am preemptively consuming art, almost to the point of not really needing–or at least having time for–the thing itself.
That mindset reminds me of Google Zero, which I'm not going to write about now, except to say that it's this imagined future where Google search results no longer refer outwards to actual internet sites, but instead those sites are completely digested and reconstituted by AI so that you never leave the search. You're just immersed in a secondary world of loose referentiality and reframing. I guess my point is that these massive technological shifts always turn out to have been underway in our behavior for some time.
The image at the top is just one passing moment in the film, puzzling about how artists can possibly care about posterity when extinction is around the corner. I felt pretty exposed in that moment because I am gathering materials from cloud storage, hard drives and files to put on my homepage, which does feel vain, unnecessary, and given Google's plans to never refer anyone anywhere, utterly pointless. But I am feeling so fragmented, now lugging around the aforementioned hard drives and file storage containers from rental to rental and office to office, I just want to pull it all together into one place so I can finally move on.