SCREENSHOTS (5-23)
By:
May 31, 2023
SCREENSHOTS is a monthly series of posts via which HILOBROW’s Josh Glenn reviews his most recent screenshots — before deleting them from the over-full Dropbox folder to which they’d been uploaded. Also see the PHOTO DUMP series.
Continuing to gather examples of fine art from c. 1900–1935 that whisper “Radium Age sci-fi” to me. Here’s a detail from Max Ernst’s The Gramineous Bicycle Garnished with Bells the Dappled Fire Damps and the Echinoderms Bending the Spine to Look for Caresses (1921). In May, I used Ernst’s artwork to illustrate a 1929 D.H. Lawrence poem in which he depicts a future in which scientifically created quasi-humans will take the form of violent “squeaky globules.”
HILOBROW friend Colin Dickey has an excellent three-part essay appearing here at HILOBROW next month. Let this screenshot serve as an enticing sneak peek…
Over at HILOBROW’s sister site, SEMIOVOX, we’re continuing to conduct Q&As with commercial semioticians from around the world. We’re now scheduled out through early 2024…
Continuing to research and write further installments in the series MOUSE. This screenshot is from a 1953 Merrie Melodies short directed by Friz Freleng — in which a drunken stork drops an adorable baby mouse off at Sylvester the cat’s house.
Earlier this year, I downloaded a scholarly paper — “Greimas embodied: How kinesthetic opposition grounds the semiotic square” — by Jamin Pelkey, a semiotician at Ryerson University whom I admire. I found it at Academia.edu, which I since learned is a sketchy but very successful for-profit (the “.edu” is bogus) repository of academic articles. They are eager to convert me to a paid membership… so I keep getting these notices. Which make me laugh, hence the screenshots.
I know we’re supposed to be creeped out by AI now, but I’m much more disturbed by Amazon’s new action-adventure series Citadel… every detail of which (actors, settings, wardrobe, the plot itself) is carefully calibrated to maximize profit-taking worldwide. I don’t think there’s ever been anything quite like it. Where’s the Frankfurt School when we need them to theorize?
This notification, more than anything else, felt like the end of a moment.
ALSO SEE: John Hilgart (ed.)’s HERMENAUTIC TAROT series | Josh Glenn’s VIRUS VIGILANTE series | & old-school HILOBROW series like BICYCLE KICK | CECI EST UNE PIPE | CHESS MATCH | EGGHEAD | FILE X | HILOBROW COVERS | LATF HIPSTER | HI-LO AMERICANA | PHRENOLOGY | PLUPERFECT PDA | SKRULLICISM.