Just like Spam.
It is very simple, some scripts here, a big enough collection of movies, some access to the New York Times, some cut and paste and it is done. It is really no big deal. I mean, from the technical point of view it is not so hard, basically you have to put together the films and start acting as any spammer does.
It works as spam, but certainly it feels very different. Sometimes it hurts very deeply, some others times when you are watching, it can bring some peace, but most of the times it makes you feel like a monster, like we all were monsters.
The most important part for us, is to make the movies and to make them as realistic as possible. We used most of the time doing that and we believe that some how, this may bring some good. For most of the countries, it was easy, most of the material is actual footage from Al Jazira, CNN and BBC.
We tried to use scenes from the common normal life, just before the war, or if there is nothing else available, scenes from the days of the invasion of the aftermath, normally there is a huge amount of footage from those days that no one ever has seen. We focus in one person at the time and tried to make one small film out of it.
For this i came up with these nice scripts, they work very well, the machine looks into tons of footage, scroll trough it and then, when the right pattern is formed, just edit the piece on the fly. I used some pieces of old software that was used to make games in the beggining of the milenium, it works ok, and just when you look closely, you can see the edition where i mix the actual footage of people's faces into landscapes of villages and cities and so on.
The first scripts were primitive and were mainly useful to track the right year, the right country, the right war, the right town and so on. I trust very much the New York Times, around 2013 they started writing in the records the names of the people that died in all these wars, they are there in the web page altough nobody looks at them.
But this is the purpose of this whole thing, that they start looking at them. They will look at them on every corner, of every city, and every town, even now that it doesn't matter anymore.
At some point we tough about printing the photographs on paper and put them into the walls, as posters, in the same way they used to do in the 20th century. We though that using paper in the walls will surprise the people and the old way of doing it could give some kind of historic look.
We drop the idea very quickly, we just don't have the money to buy the paper we want. We tough about stealing it from Luis Vuitton, or Hermes, or Loewe, but it is impossible to steal from them, and now they are the only big sellers of paper. Grandma says that they used to do everything on paper, but many things have changed, many, many things.
As the scripts became more sophisticated i payed more detail to the factual numbers. In the perfect situation, there is a short movie of every person killed in each war, the movie should reflect just a bit about their normal life, if they were teachers, it should have some footage about them giving some lessons, if they were peasant, there should be a movie about them walking into the contry. The landscapes i can do very precisely, pick the data from the satelite, feed it to the rendering engine of the software for games and that's it.
For the people itself is a bit more complicated, whenever is possible the scripts looks for the person in actual footage which is available everywhere. Since the TV networks started to drop tons and tons of small cameras into countries that we invaded at the time we were about to invade, the footage is there and my scripts just scroll trough and try to look some footage of this people.
This part is very hard and most of the time, i do some sort of average. For example, the script finds a record of a thousand casualties in such city, and then look for some faces from the place, find the profesion of the people, if they were family and so on, then the script mix faces, change something from here and there to make a thousand small films. I just try to recover something of each person there, but i just can not do it one by one, the machine does alone, i just try to put together the scripts.
All cities and small towns in America have displays everywhere. When the paper became so expensive, they started to place the displays in the walls, in the malls. Poor people's houses is all made of these cheaps displays, you can see them in the highways, they are everywhere, people just don't pay any attention to them any more, but this is gonna be different.
I can broadcast different material to every city for two years, each films just takes about three minutes. That is a lot.
It is just the spammer way, don't ask permission, just send the message. And it feels like that, information you just did not wanted to see.
Yesterday i went out in the street, some films are beautiful, some others do not have so much quality. One of them i liked very much, it shows a man in a small farm. He's was feeding the pigs, suddenly he stops and picks one small pinky pig. They look to each other, the man smiles, the little pig moves the ears. In the back you can see some mountains with the top covered by snow. There are no clouds.
It looks like a summer day in the mountains.
It works as spam, but certainly it feels very different. Sometimes it hurts very deeply, some others times when you are watching, it can bring some peace, but most of the times it makes you feel like a monster, like we all were monsters.
The most important part for us, is to make the movies and to make them as realistic as possible. We used most of the time doing that and we believe that some how, this may bring some good. For most of the countries, it was easy, most of the material is actual footage from Al Jazira, CNN and BBC.
We tried to use scenes from the common normal life, just before the war, or if there is nothing else available, scenes from the days of the invasion of the aftermath, normally there is a huge amount of footage from those days that no one ever has seen. We focus in one person at the time and tried to make one small film out of it.
For this i came up with these nice scripts, they work very well, the machine looks into tons of footage, scroll trough it and then, when the right pattern is formed, just edit the piece on the fly. I used some pieces of old software that was used to make games in the beggining of the milenium, it works ok, and just when you look closely, you can see the edition where i mix the actual footage of people's faces into landscapes of villages and cities and so on.
The first scripts were primitive and were mainly useful to track the right year, the right country, the right war, the right town and so on. I trust very much the New York Times, around 2013 they started writing in the records the names of the people that died in all these wars, they are there in the web page altough nobody looks at them.
But this is the purpose of this whole thing, that they start looking at them. They will look at them on every corner, of every city, and every town, even now that it doesn't matter anymore.
At some point we tough about printing the photographs on paper and put them into the walls, as posters, in the same way they used to do in the 20th century. We though that using paper in the walls will surprise the people and the old way of doing it could give some kind of historic look.
We drop the idea very quickly, we just don't have the money to buy the paper we want. We tough about stealing it from Luis Vuitton, or Hermes, or Loewe, but it is impossible to steal from them, and now they are the only big sellers of paper. Grandma says that they used to do everything on paper, but many things have changed, many, many things.
As the scripts became more sophisticated i payed more detail to the factual numbers. In the perfect situation, there is a short movie of every person killed in each war, the movie should reflect just a bit about their normal life, if they were teachers, it should have some footage about them giving some lessons, if they were peasant, there should be a movie about them walking into the contry. The landscapes i can do very precisely, pick the data from the satelite, feed it to the rendering engine of the software for games and that's it.
For the people itself is a bit more complicated, whenever is possible the scripts looks for the person in actual footage which is available everywhere. Since the TV networks started to drop tons and tons of small cameras into countries that we invaded at the time we were about to invade, the footage is there and my scripts just scroll trough and try to look some footage of this people.
This part is very hard and most of the time, i do some sort of average. For example, the script finds a record of a thousand casualties in such city, and then look for some faces from the place, find the profesion of the people, if they were family and so on, then the script mix faces, change something from here and there to make a thousand small films. I just try to recover something of each person there, but i just can not do it one by one, the machine does alone, i just try to put together the scripts.
All cities and small towns in America have displays everywhere. When the paper became so expensive, they started to place the displays in the walls, in the malls. Poor people's houses is all made of these cheaps displays, you can see them in the highways, they are everywhere, people just don't pay any attention to them any more, but this is gonna be different.
I can broadcast different material to every city for two years, each films just takes about three minutes. That is a lot.
It is just the spammer way, don't ask permission, just send the message. And it feels like that, information you just did not wanted to see.
Yesterday i went out in the street, some films are beautiful, some others do not have so much quality. One of them i liked very much, it shows a man in a small farm. He's was feeding the pigs, suddenly he stops and picks one small pinky pig. They look to each other, the man smiles, the little pig moves the ears. In the back you can see some mountains with the top covered by snow. There are no clouds.
It looks like a summer day in the mountains.
posted by Camilo Ruiz Mendez at 1:21 PM
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