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Concept
'CIVILIZATION', a one minnute movie by Scott Becker
BACKGROUND
Civilization, as we have been told, was an outgrowth of an incremental
evolutionary socializing process that took some fifteen thousand years to mature
to our current state of affairs. Advancement being witnessed in an inherently
scientific (Darwinian) 'eye to hand to brain' technological progression from
sticks and stone to steel and silica. This unique animal experience is always
couched in terms of how far we as a species have progressed beyond all other
living life forms. Yet, if one looks about their own immediate surroundings in
a
more viceral 'day to day' functional sense, they might find themselves
essentially
encased within a more significantly Precambrian based kind of substance known
collectively as oil.
This world anthill of ours finds itself based upon the cornerstone of a
petro-culture of fossil fuels directed by a small but immensely powerful cartel
that supervises its preferred use through exclusively controlling discovery and
distribution, and thus indirectly hold sway over all of our lives. We breathe
it,
consume it, live within it, under it and ultimately are both saved by it and die
from it. This most significant artifact / substance so characteristic of
everyday
'modern' life may indeed be the most significant testament on behalf of our era
for many millennium to come, not so much in any unique intrinsic ingenuity
concerning its novel employment or use, but more simply by virtue of a reckless
haphazard propensity to carelessly redistribute such great quantities of it to
too
many unlikely places. All living today may yet find out, in both a very personal
and empahthetic sense within their lifetimes, what significance another once
customarily employed element known as lead ultimately played to the ultimate
fate
our Roman predecessors,
SYNOPSIS
The utopian model of society is represented by a 3D scale representation
accurately based on the design of a once popular toy house 'under construction'
design taken from the early nineteen-fifties. The promise of that time, for the
fulfillment of a modern era yet to come, is frozen in the moment much in the
same
way the post-war American dream of a universally shared prosperity subsequently
remained perpetually incomplete. As with all things technological, the structure
once it is wrested violently from the ground seems to instantaneously congeal
almost miraculously into its final form. The notions of 'instant success' and
'unlimited prosperity' and other forms of social alchemy might be recounted in
instantaneous appearence of this perfectly formed but incongruous apparition.
Those phantom presences standing within the structure ( the popular citizenery )
being characterized as almost passive and fully immune to the implicit danger of
a
very precarious internal position as unexpected 'astronauts' shot out of a
cannon
from the bowels of the earth.
The bilious illusion behind this underlying sense of implicit complacency with
its
correspondingly 'matter of fact' disengagement from the obvious danger posed by
the rancorous inception of this dubious artifact into reality is short-lived.
Its
viability, in terms of any feasible usability and the corresponding
inevitability
of its ultimate discard apparent simultaneously at the exact time of its birth
seems too prophetic of our own materially obsessed time. The prevailing ?modus
operandi? of all thus being etherially present, embodied in spirit but not
physically involved in actual fact, and universally enjoined to tacitly go along
with any subsequent new product or innovative industrial process without ever
questioning any probability of what unexpected sort of impact or fallout might
also be trailing along just behind seems ultimately the point.
THE VERSE
civilization
that rockless happy road
of positive mental attitudes
evident for a moment
but for eternity
[chorus]
petroleum, oil, gas, hydrocarbons, distillates,
polycarbonates, methane, propane, ozone, sulfur dioxide.
{intervening inscriptions]
There was rumored to be a house never finished ?
?begun in the last century it will never be completed?
?or ever be capable of decomposing away.
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
This is a hybrid Macintosh O.S. / Windows 95 - 98 CD-ROM disk. The program is
presented in a, 600 pixel tall by 800 pixel wide, screen format. Please set your
monitors accordingly. The screen resolution will be reset automatically to the
highest value possible as afforded by your display and may have to be returned
to
its lower setting after completion of play.
A Macintosh PPC or Pentium PC in the range of at least 500 MHz and 70 Meg of RAM
is recommended for reasonable speed and performance. Quicktime? version 4.0 will
be required to play the MPEG section.
CONTACT
For any questions or comments concerning the presentation:
Scott Becker - artscb@interaccess.com
All imagery, soundtracks and writings are ©2001 Scott Becker
All Rights Reserved.
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