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aristotels · 5 months

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https://aristotels.tumblr.com/post/739069720012161024/when-you-talk-about-the-protag-in-stardew-valley

Hi, same anon. I was trying to give further evidence of your point (i.e. that SDV lets you literally become a landlord), not sure if that came through, but never mind that. I'd like to ask about 2). You said:

you and feral hobo running a commune and splitting income STILL isnt communism, its just cojoined small business practice. communism requires socialist state to first exist, and it covers a broad political and economical system.

Okay, yeah. But "no it can't exist because the government isn't socialist" feels a bit boring. What if we tried to meet the game where it's at? Which is "Feelgood escapism where your grandfather leaves you a farm in your will and escape your crushing job at Corporate USAmerica and live on that farm in a little town full of simple hard work and community, a town that is almost, but not quite, outside of the grasping hands of the surrounding system".

We've established that SDV's depiction of this fantasy is not meaningfully anti-capitalist in any way, but is there a way to interpret that concept in a way that is meaningfully anti-capitalist without removing the core of this initial contrast/struggle?

Especially when realism isn't strictly speaking a constraint. If the game can get away with "You can become a millionaire overnight by selling turnips", I don't think "the town somehow exists with a totally different political organisation than the country it's in" is that egregious, because it's in keeping with the way the game's setting is kinda in a bubble.

Even if the answer is "no, of course not", or "sure, but only if we do something like how the farm is in a completely different country and the struggle against Jojo Corp is now the struggle against imperialism", I'd like to hear your thoughts on it. I'm not particularly attached to SDV, my enjoyment of it has never hinged on it being somehow "progressive". It's just the kind of conceptual game design challenge that tickles me.

How would you redesign SDV to be meaningfully anti-capitalist while trying to keep its core concept recognizable? Can it be done at all, even slightly? etc etc.

well i mean, the thing is that a little town cant exactly exist in its own political bubble, since socialism requires a large-scale operation.

well, while typing this i just remembered a pretty wholesome story on a small scale - and ive mentioned it before, vlak u snijegu by mato lovrak, and its such a pity it wasnt translated. it shows socialist ideals on a small scale, in a group of kids. ill try to make a summary post when i have time.

idk, personally i dont see a way to make an escapist cozy game anti-capitalist. and tbh, i dont even think its necessary for it to be, as long as it isnt marketed that way! socialism involves collectivism and work (well it is centered around workers isnt it) and i mean... that isnt exactly what we think of when we say "escapism fantasy". in those secret little fantasies we want to be privileged and not deal with injustice or corruption or whatever.

the closest to a socialist fantasy i can get is maljčiki by idoli (the song is a banger btw).

i mean, i dont know if that makes for like, an actually interesting cozy game. tbh when i am looking for guilty-escapism, i read p reactionary stuff; theyre just fantasies, after all. its nice to imagine myself as a noble lady from 18th century getting courted by 5 different rich men or whatever. i just think its important to realize the difference between fantasy and reality.

i mean, theres a reason were talking abt sdv here and not harvest moon. harvest moon was never marketed as anti-capitalist, its just a silly game of owning a farm and then like the goddess makes a girl fall in love with you blabla. nobodys exactly going around and saying how anticapitalistic it is.

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goldtips · 4 years

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guess who is here to shit on babylon again. haha . yes that’s right its me. surprise. there is so much wrong with this anime, holy mother of god. but i specifically wanna talk about the spontaneous philosophical discussion abt morality that takes place in penultimate ep & the problems i had with it:

first of all, this is a political summit. why are we discussing philosophy in the first place.

idk dir. chose to animate the leaders overreacting . assisted suicide laws have existed for a long time and debating them wouldn’t be entirely out of the contrary. also international laws / rulings aren’t 100% binding, national courts are going to have to go through a long process of actualising their plans etc etc so they have no reason to be hasty abt this at all, they still have to face a fuckton of national barriers.

esp lowe who is just on the side making outlandish claims like: england is going to break off ties with all these superpowers and go to war with them if they legalise suicide!! i mean, what the heck lady. you have 0 jurisdiction to be making claims like that - and its not like their national laws would affect the uk at all anyway?? ( on the plus side this is rly relevant to the current political climate ahem brexit so. i guess this is a slide in my books )

okay, so its an anime, right and it has to hype things up. sure. but explain why these leaders are now standing at diff heights against a galaxy background. fucking riveting. it really goes to shows how they wasted all their animation budget on the axe chopping scene.

okay now fr, i’m going to dive into the philo discussions they provide and explain why they don’t actually help the suicide debate uwu:

legal morality

wood makes a point about the subjective content of morality in different legal systems and expresses a desire to found a unified measure of morality for the entire world. idk why they all agreed to doing this honestly. each country has it’s own legal system, affected/shaped by its unique history and political nuances, a discussion of what the “best” moral content of law is super fucking redundant.

for some reason they all quickly agree that laws are value positive when in fact, most of our current legal systems are value neutral in practice, meaning that they don’t seek impose a particular ideal or way of life on people, but serve as a minimum form of social contract to maintain order and prevent chaos within society. for instance, the concept of informed consent in medical law: e.g. in the uk medical practitioners are advised against practising paternalism and have to give their patient all the details of an operation before they decide whether to consent. no decision is being made for them, per se, but gps are obliged to provide them with all the necessary info so that they can make a good choice. in an era where information can be found everywhere, it’s unlikely that moral norms are actually sourced from the law at all - rather, in social norms, the economy, politics, religion, international laws, etc.

it is entirely impossible to do what they’re achieving - to impose a singular ideal of morality on people. it’s something that is perpetuated through cultural identity and the transactions of society. it’s not possible. you can’t make people change their ideas about life and death overnight and it can’t be done through coercion.

also this point is so fucking stupid that i didn’t want to make it, but there is literally 0 consideration of god/religion at play in politics or the law. that would mean that our laws are governed by some ellusive prophetical standard when in fact the law is based on formal rationality, where consistent reasoning is applied to circumstances to decide on a particular judgement. lowe’s point about being virtuous via the law due to a fear or worship of god is entirely wrong. it ties into the overarching biblical theme of the anime, sure, but its so out of the blue and nonsensical that it serves to ruin the immersion (if the myspace-esque galaxy background didn’t already).

trolley problem vs the organ transplant

to compare the two thought experiments as if they’re morally equivalent is so fucked. the trolley problem is constrained by time. there are only two options which make it easy to make the right choice. there are lesser variables, and it makes sense for a decision to be made (saving one life over the five is purely utilitarian).

however, the organ transplant problem is much more complex. first of all, there are an infinite amount possibilities purely because of a lack of time constraint. it isn’t just an binary choice where you pull the lever or don’t. let me bring in some other variables: does how the person is killed matter? even if they’re dragged kicking and screaming to the operating table? even if they are a well-respected and intelligent person that can still contribute to society? what if the people requiring transplants actually receive them from someone else through a deceased donation process? these people still have a chance to be saved without incurring the loss of the donor’s life.

applying kantian theory: if we were to go about murdering healthy people to harvest their organs for the sick, it would entirely defeat the purpose of healthcare in itself. the future implications of this thought experiment are more far-reaching and complex than the split-second decision of whether to save one person’s life or five.

most importantly though, neither of these two main arguments raised during their discussion even served to explain their reasoning for supporting the suicide laws. they literally spent a whole episode talking abt some bullshit but they didn’t resolve the suicide debate at all. the gamer president’s final conclusion that “the meaning of life is the root of good and evil” makes absolute no sense.

#more discourse about babylon because as always this show makes me salty #as a law student and a philosophy / religious studies buff i am Triggered #what a mess #babylon #babylon anime #babylon meta #me being salty the triology #babylon anime philosophy #babylon spoilers #???

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dirtyprojectors · 6 years

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“that’s a lifestyle” video

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the animated video for “that’s a lifestyle” is out today. the director, kitty faingold, and i discussed bringing the song to life as a series of ethereal animated sketches, cronus the greek god, the visual metaphor of broken statues as a vanishing empire and much more . - dave

i feel like i haven’t seen animation like this … maybe ever, definitely since i saw bill plympton’s cartoons when i was a kid! what is your process — how do you make it look like that?

Basically, this animation was hand drawn with an HB pencil onto white paper and then photographed and put onto a timeline on a computer. I drew between six and eight drawings a second, which is not a lot and is why it looks jumpy and choppy - if you want a sleek look you need to draw more per second. But I’ve always liked lo brow & lo fi stuff, where you can see the artist’s hand at work and feel the human presence behind the piece. I like it when things look like they were made with the intense passion of a very dedicated amateur, it denotes enthusiasm, effort, aspiration, dreams. It’s flawed and personable and relatable. Maybe my taste is influenced by having lived in Latin America with it’s magical realism and it’s poetry of the mundane.

what’s the story you’re trying to tell in the video — and how does it relate to the story it seems like i’m trying to tell ?

The story is that we, the audience, are a spectral being hovering above a lake in front of a strange house that has infinite rooms. We float in through a window and decide to take a quick disembodied tour of the house that’s inhabited by a group of enchanted statues which some strange electric life force has animated for all eternity. They are the eerie marble remnants of an extinct civilisation, long annihilated, the silent survivors of a by-gone atomic end time. Like dancing shadows burnt into a wall by a nuclear blast. It’s tragic but also strangely optimistic - something survived, perhaps at the end of the world, human consciousness liberated of its material constraints, spread at light speed throughout the universe, and fuzzy bundles of memory, thought and emotion seeped into inert matter in distant galaxies and parallel universes, creating the world portrayed in this animation.

The video is an imagined outcome of the story that’s sung in the song, which as I interpret it, is about a society at the cusp of destruction, looking out from itself into its past and its future and wondering will we survive? or will the monster eat its young til they’re gone.

do you hate it when people ask you questions like that, because you have this feeling of like, ‘uhhhh, hopefully the work articulates the thing in a way that words cannot — that’s why it’s an animation and not a piece of prose; why are you asking me to bastardize & diminish what i’m doing??’ or do you feel like words / discourse provide a different and useful lens?

Haha! both I guess, most things that I make feel like they come from a place in my mind that doesn’t understand or speak a verbal language, and others are created in harmony with a more intellectually stimulated region of the mind, something with a narrative, a reference to some historical thing, for example. Words themselves can have power that goes beyond the literal meaning and melts into something more emotional. But I do often feel that contemporary art can be overly wordy and rationalised; when you explain or justify what you’ve created with a lengthy text, the piece looses elasticity and ossifies into a concrete message, or as Susan Sontag says “a sensibility is ineffable… a sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system.. has hardened into an idea.” I like this way of thinking about art as sensibility.

Also, when a piece of art or music has a precise explanation, it sort of becomes redundant, it’s just an illustration to accompany that other thing you’re saying. In art, I think, if words are used at all it should be to infuse the work with another layer of poetry, mystery and psychic life.

in this video, did you think much abt correlating image & sound — ie having the visual gestures harmonize with the movements of the music? (i think they go together super well…)

Yes, I wanted the images to resonate with and respond to the sound. On a macro scale, I wanted them to inhabit the same world, to belong together, so the look and feel of the images is enhanced by the sound of the song and vice versa. On a micro scale, the cuts are based on the rhythm of the song, and there are different moments in the story and particular characters and happenings that also relate to the specific moments or moods in the song.

when you’re working in this way, you’re the writer, director, artist and editor. does it feel natural and seamless to be in all these different roles, or do the imperatives of one role sometimes come into conflict with another ? like, does the draftsperson in you occasionally want to take things in a direction that the director simply can’t allow? if so, how do you resolve these conflicts?

That’s an interesting way of looking at it and very true; yes, I definitely had multiple voices in my mind whispering different things throughout the whole process - as an artist you are constantly engaged in an internal dialogue with many different elements of yourself and even with a fictional “other” that pretends to be an outside audience, so it’s challenging work. But this way of working does feel natural to me, I like being in control of as many aspects of my work as possible, so it doesn’t feel like a conflict that needs to be resolved, rather a conversation that’s had.

do you think there’s something special abt using old-school labor/time-intensive practices, even when there are readily available software/digital shortcuts ? like, maybe you value the specific unique feel to the finished work, or maybe you just get something you get from the process itself (eg meditative zen state that comes out of doing the rote repetition by hand?)

Yes, there is definitely something special about labour intensive work and, in this case, using analog rather than digital methods. On one hand, repetition as you say, let’s the mind wander into a meditative state which in a hyper stimulated world feels healthy and grounding. On the other, when you’re working purely in a digital realm you feel a sort of underlying existentialist horror as you are essentially one dimension removed from your work, or else you get a sense of plastic claustrophobia and you just need to run outside and roll around in some prickly grass or something! after a while of being on the computer you desperately need to feel the real material world around you, to feel phenomenologically “in” your body - to embody your reality. I think there is such a thing as a digital malaise akin to cabin fever. So I really enjoyed getting back to paper and pencil.

why roman / greek statuary? in general, where does your imagery come from? has it changed much over time, or from project to project, or do you find that there are leitmotifs and vibes that you return to consistently?

That was mainly based on the imagery that came to mind from the lyrics; words about an empire, a senator, a decaying civilization, violence, power, greed etc. Also when the song talks about a monster eating its children, I thought of Cronus the Greek God. I associate these things with the ancient classical world, and the marble skeleton of it that we have inherited. Also, surrealist works of art, for example by De Chirico, often feature statues and in particular greek/roman ones; there is evidently something about them that resonates with the subconscious mind, they are a meaningful symbol to us, they have a dreamlike and strange quality to them. This video was conjured up mainly by a stream of consciousness, which is a surrealist method for creating images. To the second question I would say both, each project is different as I am a pretty eclectic person and the world is full of new inspirations, but there is a river bed under the passing currents that doesn’t change much, a soil made up of a certain composition of minerals which, in my particular case, has surrealist foundations and an interest in myth, symbolism and the occult, and drawing eyes, people in trances, odd faces and strange places.

w the greek/roman statuary, do you feel like there’s some parallel you’re drawing to an idea of the vast, broken, vanishing empire — and the West today ? or maybe in general do u feel like that’s part of the operative fascination that vaporwave has with that imagery?

I definitely think that a broken statue is a clear visual metaphor for a vanishing empire, which might be why it populates the allegorical world of surrealism and vapourware as its digital extension- maybe for the last hundred years we’ve all felt on some subconscious plane a pending apocalypse, the world that we’ve created on the brink of an extinction level event. It makes sense, after the world wars, the cold war, the atomic/nuclear threats, climate threats, financial threats, etc. everything has seemed to be in a constant state of mortal danger for the past century! even our food is supposedly poisoning us, our clothes, bodies, water, air itself, everything is menacing and threatening and hostile, so it’s little wonder our art would express this sense of doom.

one of the things im kinda thinking out loud abt in the song is this question of, ‘in our insanely interconnected world, is it actually possible to draw our actions into congruence with our beliefs? what would that mean? and what does it mean if/when we can’t?’ sometimes it feels like the chains of production, ownership, causality etc are so deeply enmeshed that it’s impossible to chase down the global implications of our choices as consumers & citizens with any kind of confidence or accuracy … and that makes us feel powerless in the face of hideous injustices … like we’re all frogs in a pot of water slowly rising to a boil. so in the song, even though i don’t have a resolution or conveniently optimistic way of thinking about it, i hope there’s a value in articulating the feeling anyway. my question is, do you feel like art has a responsibility to be political? or do you feel like art is inherently political — and there might be something more human / empathetic / mysterious when art is fluid enough to evade the reduction into easy sloganeering ? for me it’s a question right now, because i’ve often landed in the latter camp, but this song woke up like this .. .

Yeah, it’s a tricky subject, politics and art. I guess that, in my opinion, your only responsibility as an artist is to give your audience your best and most genuine work, whatever that may be. The content of the work will vary hugely from artist to artist. There are many important things in the world, important parts of the experience of being, that don’t include politics at all, and perhaps are even antagonistic to it, so I don’t think that art has to be political. Sometimes it feels gratuitous and disingenuous when an artist injects some politics into their work or their discourse just because it’s in vogue. Lots of artists don’t have a clue about politics, they inhabit a parallel world of emotions, fairytales and daydreams! They might be an outsider, a rebel, or a romantic for example. Others are very passionate about being the voice of their own society, and are deeply entrenched in their cultural surroundings and make of their political ideas their body of work, in the hopes that their message might challenge certain prejudices or else that the audience will identify with the ideas and find expression for their own political thoughts. I don’t think one approach is more valid or moral than the other, as long as it’s genuine. However, on the other hand, anybody that has a visible social platform and access to a certain level of impact could be a useful tool to raise awareness for a number of social causes, but that’s something different.

how long did this video take you ?

Nearly a month! In fact I’d like to take the opportunity to thank Max Mannone who helped me sooooo much to make it in such a short time! he took all the photographs and digitised most of it, as well as giving me creative input. It’s super important to bounce off of someone you respect when you are working alone, because it’s such a self centred process that you can lose all perspective and start to drown in yourself!

do you like to revise a lot, or is it a first-thought-best-thought headspace ?

With a stream of consciousness type method definitely first-thought-best-thought although as I said above, bouncing off somebody else throughout the process is also good.

what kind of music do u like to listen to when you draw?

Well, for this video I listened to a lot of Dirty Projectors :-) I love this song, and instead of growing tired of it which can happen with repetition I grew to like it more and more! it’s definitely alive. I also have lots of synth stuff on my playlist like New Wave songs and Italo disco music. Probably because I came into the world during the eighties so it kind of feels like home. I actually listen to a lot of podcasts when I draw & animate, I like finding undiscovered youtube channels about weird topics particularly about magic, myths and the fascinating shadowy world of the occult which are all sources of inspiration.

thanks so much for this, kitty!! i love the animation a lot, and best of luck with future projects!

Thank you Dave! It was a real pleasure to work on this project, I love the song and hope the video did it justice :-) I'll look forward to hearing the new album!

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