Web essay with video content on the various permutations of _Laura_ story through multiple media. _Laura_ is discussed as a parable of information exchange, with a focus on how sound is transmitted through and across multiple film texts, repetition and desire, noise and the cosmic.
Laura is a parable of molding information.
-- Anytime information reaches a certain point of saturation, anytime information cannot be contained, it becomes noise. (Just as "information wants to be free" so too does it tend toward noise, before moving onto more ethereal realms)
-- Laura-- intersecting with histories of radio, voice on film, popular song, modernist and postmodernist storytelling, television and the internet-- exists in a liminal area between noise and non-noise, repetition and renewal, information and perception, human and machine.
QuickTime, RealMedia
Content and concept Joe Milutis
Interface design Melissa Scherrer
Every culture has its own word for this nothing. Synonymous with the idea of absolute space and time, the ether is an ancient concept that has continually determined our definition of environment, our relations to each other, and our ideas about technology. It has also instigated our desire to know something irrepressibly beyond all that. In Ether, the histories of mysticism and the unseen merge with discussions of the technology and science of electromagnetism. Joe Milutis explores how the ideas of Anton Mesmer and Isaac Newton have manifested themselves as the inspiration for occult theories and artistic practices from Edgar Allan Poe’s works to today. In doing so, he demonstrates that fading in and out of scientific favor has not prevented the ether, a uniquely immaterial concept, from being a powerful force for material progress. Milutis deftly weaves the origins of electrical science with alchemical lore, nineteenth-century industrialism with yogic science, and network space with dreams of the absolute. Linking the ether to phenomena such as radio noise, space travel, avant-garde film, and the rise of the Internet, he lends it an almost physical presence and currency. From Federico Fellini to Gilles Deleuze, Japanese anime to Italian Futurism, Jean Cocteau to NASA, Shirley Temple to Wilhelm Reich, Ether traverses geographical boundaries, spiritual planes, and the divide between popular and high culture.