When I switched on my computer to write this piece it crashed, or had a mini-crash. It failed to start properly and I saw a brief flash of blue screen and code, some in standard English some in programming language. In that brief moment I misread the word CACHE as CASH and panicked that I had some evil virus that was going to steal my numerous (possibly not numerous enough) password identities. I didn’t. I just had to switch the computer off and on again.

To Crash and to Burn… Two words that now mean something new, again, in the context of digital technology, and particularly in the context of ubiquitous computing. The film above is a clip from the 1990 release of a (terrible by all accounts) SF B-Movie called Crash and Burn (originally titled Robot Jox 2). The plot is the end-of-the-world familiar: an evil corporation with some vague tech-sounding name has all the power. The corporation is called “Unicom” – perhaps uncannily close to the current shorthand for ubiquitous computing, “ubicomp”.

The twist you were all waiting for is that in Crash and Burn it is a robot from the past (the present) that can save the day. The metaphor of the computer crash is made literal and terrifying by its incarnation in corporate form. The robot, technology from a simpler time, is the key to undoing the code. Or, the brute force of the monstrous robot defeats the wily ways of the corporation who reach out through a network of synthetic humans; through crashing and burning (literally) the robot defeats the fear of the other kind of crashing and burning – that is, the fear of what digital violence might beset a future online society.

In the film the world burns, there is an orange glow as backdrop. But ‘burn’ also has a digital trace. To burn a disc. When I burn a disc the interface I see begins looking like this:

I “drag and drop” files and my action with the mouse, or the keyboard, comes to be the action of dragging and dropping – though these words connote a physical exertion I do not undertake. Maybe I think of a laser scorching the surface of the disc. But in any case the main action is, like that of a crash, one of code. The evil corporation in the popular imagination has come to represent the secrecy, and its opposite, the porousness, of information enabled by conversion to digital data. But before mp3s we had cassettes and bootlegging, then we had CDs and ripping and burning. The etymology of these terms has little to do with the reality of their processes but they become conflated in our attempts to describe processes of code that are suppressed for the majority of users behind windows (in this instance perhaps an ironic metaphor, shielding more than showing) and other graphic interfaces.

This is a really brief set of musings on a topic that I’m currently thinking through: the use of metaphor in computing terminology. Digital processes are often described in natural, physical and biological terms. Clearly this is part of the way we adapt language to encompass new objects. But in the instance of digital technology, and with the increasing pervasiveness of certain types of computing, metaphorical terminology seems to gloss as much as familiarise the processes that often shape our thinking and our actions. Whilst this is not necessarily negative, it is problematic; a field for future enquiry – not to mention an excuse to rewatch Hackers…

Zara Dinnen is a PhD candidate at Birkbeck, researching representations of the digital in contemporary American culture; and co-organiser of the Contemporary Fiction Seminar at the Institute of English Studies.

In a sense, film productions are the perfect thing to romanticise in terms of expenditure. But then, the materials and labour that go into them are still real, even if they are expended in the creation of fictions. The crux of this for me is the play between symbolic expenditure, as in the images and narratives on screen, and the real expenditure behind them. The spectacle of expenditure on big budget films might seem to offer an alternative to a strict capitalist system, a glamourous way out of ‘normal’ production. I find that this is a kind of trap that I fall into very easily, particularly when looking at early films, which often seem to me to have a kind of exuberance that acts against the idea of them as industrial products.

In his 1975 book Hollywood Babylon, underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger picked over the sordid debris left from 60 years of notorious hedonism, egotism and extremely lucrative business in Hollywood.  Kenneth Anger started his career as a child star, with his given name, Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer, before eventually becoming infamous underground gay and satanist filmmaker Kenneth Anger.

The ‘Babylon’ of Anger’s title refers to the setting of part of DW Griffith’s 1916 film Intolerance.  Anger employs the Babylonian set as an allegory against the wasteful business of making mainstream films – a system that simultaneously revolts and infatuates him.  Griffith, supposed originator of the ‘Hollywood Film’, is for Anger a sort of fetishised Father figure; director as self-made deity in ‘Illusion City’:

“WHITE ELEPHANTS – the God of Hollywood wanted white elephants, and white elephants he got – eight of ‘em, plaster mammoths perched on mega-mushroom pedestals, lording it over the colossal court of Belshazzer, the pasteboard Babylon built beside the dusty tin-lizzie trail called Sunset Boulevard […] Griffith – the Movie Director as God – was riding high, high as he’d ever go, over Illusion City, whooshing up a hundred-foot-high elevator camera tower.”

The above is an illustration that Anger uses in the introduction to his book, of Griffith’s set as a ruin, after the film was finished.

And here is a production still from the film.  Intolerance shakily spans most of civilisation’s history through four narrative strands, lashed together with the theme of man’s intolerance of man.

It includes a contemporary story and also the life of Christ, but by the far the most famous strand is that of King Belshazzer and his court in ancient Babylon – unaware of its imminent, inevitable destruction.  Richard Schickel, Griffith’s biographer writes

“We are in the presence of an artist who is, as never before or later, simply drunk on the power of his medium and his own powers over it…It is the kind of intoxication that frees one of inhibitions, that gives one a sense of mastery over self and world.”

However, it is the sets that Griffith had built that now overshadow the rest of the film – by far the most ambitious and extravagant structures to have been built for a film at that time.

The court set became the icon of the film; the set that outlived the shoot – all the others having been demolished to accommodate it, and after the release of the film stood for a further four years, romantically mouldering away, cracking and dissolving into a ruin in its own right.

Intolerance as a spectacular and career breaking failure is actually a story written later by Griffith himself.  Schickel portrays Griffith as an incorrigible self-mythologiser and a knowing exploiter of other’s fascination with the tragic figure of the artist fallen from grace:

“Griffith set about converting it from what he had hoped it would be, a turning point in film history, into something it was also not quite, a turning point in his personal history, that moment in his personal mythology at which visionary genius was thwarted by an uncomprehending world.”

In a famous letter to Lillian Gish, his favourite star, subsequently quoted in her autobiography, Griffith apparently describes himself walking through theatres full of empty seats, his creation playing to no audience – “I don’t know where to go or where to turn since my great failure”.

So to return to where we started, Kenneth Anger is just another example of the same idea, merely of a different generation: post-Hollywood, staunchly financially independent but still defined by economics. This image shows him recently, as an appropriately parodic version of an aging Hollywood star, with Lucifer tattooed on his chest.

I’ll end with this image, which is part of Griffith’s set design, immortalised as part of a new shopping mall in Hollywood.

Richard Whitby is an artist and writer based in London.  He runs www.dreck.co.uk

She disapproved strongly of the cars, deciding that she would only appear topless (a fascinating response, it seemed to me at the time).
J.G. Ballard discusses his 1970 exhibition of crashed cars

One of Curt Cloninger’s browser-crashing forum hacks

PLAYLIST

And Babylon shall become heaps, a dwelling place for dragons, an astonishment, and an hissing, without an inhabitant
Jeremiah 51:37

Visions of imminent doom come in many flavours: floods, flu pandemics, meteors, irradiated  reptilia… On this tape alone we’ve Nevil Shute-ish paranoia from Cabaret Voltaire and Kate Bush (‘chips of plutonium / are twinkling in every lung’), prophecies of civil disobedience in Hampshire from L.D. 40 and Luca Miti and advice not to fuck with the Three 6 Mafia from the Three 6 Mafia (from their rollin’ with Lucifer period rather than their winnin’ Academy Awards period). Even the chipper-sounding Can’t Come In turns out to be based on a Biblical parable about being barred from salvation.

Also on a scriptural tip are White Magic, Diamanda Galas and the prophet Jeremiah, perhaps the bleakest of all the Old Testament seers – so bleak, in fact, that he was cited on the sleeve of a Godspeed You Black Emperor! record. Godspeed offshoot The Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band & Choir figure here with their own stab at prognostication, as do Lift to Experience, whose frontman Josh T. Pearson has just emerged, John the Baptist-like, from a decade in the cultural wilderness. Their idiosyncratic spin on the Judaeo-Christian myth system involves Texas being the real Zion (after all, as they point out, ‘the USA is the centre of JerUSAlem’).  Round this out with some wordless but pretty nihilism from Tim Hecker and Camryn Rothenbury, and that’s your lot. Try not to let Babylon fall on you on the way out eh?

He waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept the unconscionably, and there were moments when it showed itself in the glass above the fireplace, a face positively pale in the irritation that has brought him to the point of going without that out of sight. It was at this point, however, that he remained in the place has changed, moving from the shabby sofa to the armchair upholstered in a glazed cloth that particular time – he tried – in the sense of the slippery and sticky…. This whole idea was the worst thing, though – including, in particular as the interview, which she prepared herself and what she had come, but the worst? He tried to be sad not to be angry, but it was angry that he can not be sad. And yet where was the misery, suffering and even beat up the wrong candidate for the fate of the Cretaceous, as a “lot” of a single auction, if you do not merely mean that signs of relentless, dry feeling?

Excerpt from the opening of Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove, translated into Hungarian and back