Aika & Aine (Time and Matter): A Compilation of Short Films and Documentaries (review)
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
(ProQuest: ... denotes formula omitted.)Aika & Aine (Time and Matter): A Compilation of Short Films and Documentaries (Mika Taanila Finland 1998-2005). Reel 23. Original aspect ratio. PAL all regions. £24.99. Available from www.reel23.com.Roger LuckhurstThe Dutch company Reel 23 are dedicated to releasing experimental material that explores, as their website puts it, 'the twilight between fact and fiction' now that 'truth has become an over-rated commodity'. They declare war on 'objectivity', a familiar if rather rickety avant-garde rhetoric that celebrates the subversive potential of acts of the imagination. These two shorts and three longer documentaries by the Finnish musician, video-artist and filmmaker Mika Taanila join a list with a notably science-fictional tinge. The first release was Jonathan Weiss's uneven pseudo-documentary attempt at J. G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition (US 2000). They have also put out David Cronenberg's early films, Stereo (Canada 1969) and Crimes of the Future (Canada 1970). Taanila's work shares a similar aesthetic of found footage from public information films, science documentaries and news feeds, using documentary and pseudo-documentary modes alongside science-fictional and Gothic devices, all bound together by soundtracks of electronic bleeps and burbles. If this all sounds faintly dated, it is a conscious aesthetic choice, because nostalgia for the vanished futures of 1960s culture and counterculture is Taanila's central concern.Taanila's 'Director's Statement' presents the films as 'kind of speculative time travels to the type of future society we are inevitably headed for'. Yet both 'Futuro - A New Stance for Tomorrow' (1998, 25 mins) and 'Future Is Not What It Used to Be' (2002, 52 mins) explore symptomatic failures of the utopian potentials of technological breakthroughs in the 1960s. Futuro was a portable house designed by Finnish architect Matti Suuronen, made out of new fibreglass and plastic materials, light enough to be quickly constructed, flown by helicopter to new locations and instantly installed on its spindly legs. Crucially, it also looked exactly like a UFO: it was a shiny plastic oval with portholes, populated in publicity photos by Swedish beauties in Mary Quant mini-skirts. The design was presented in Le Corbusier's functionalist language - it was called a 'technical housing machine' - but actually offered a dash of that sexy plastic future coterminous with the camp eroticism of Barbarella (Vadim France/ Italy 1968) or American Pop Art. Futuro echoes the mobile cities designed by Archigram, the radical British architectural practice, or the revolution in cities propounded by the Situationists in their 'Formulary for a New Urbanism'. Yet it was also a commercial project, a capitalist utopianism that had more in common with Buckminster Fuller's plans to populate the world with his portable geodesic domes. Some of the news footage is glorious: Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon looking glacially bored in a tour of 'World Plastics Fortnight' in London, where the shock of the new is domesticated as a 'Futuro Bungalow'. Indeed, the tour of Futuro around global expos in Buenos Aires, Yokohama and in Russia, and the extensive news footage that survives, invokes a world where manufacturing industry had a cultural centrality in the Cold War that has now largely vanished. Expos, for so long presented as slices of futurity inserted into the contemporary, are now closed specialist trade fairs, barely registering in the wider consciousness.Futuro was a post-scarcity design, less a housing solution than an emblem of conspicuous leisure consumption, and was soon marketed as a portable second home that could be lifted onto mountains as a private ski-lodge. With considerable subtlety, the film tracks the shift from democratic hopes to the marketing of Futuro as an object of exclusivity and desire. After the oil crisis and the end of America's uninterrupted years of post-war boom, Futuro went through life as a conceptual art space for happenings in Dusseldorf (wrapped by Christo, visited by Warhol), then a set for 70s futuristic porn shoots, and was also used as a grotto for Santa Claus in a Christmas theme park in America. …
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it