Filed by Bil at 7:58 pm under Pop Culture, Shameless Plugs, Social Issues, The Arts

Good people of Cyberspace, prithee, look to the right side of thy screen and hark! You’ll notice we are holding an open recording session for actors to read some hatemail for us. Inquire within for more info if you’re interested. It’s from 2 to 5 PM at Trevor’s live-in recording studio (AKA his apartment). There will be coffee.

For those of you who haven’t heard me talk about it a gajillion times already, the premise is this: we get people to send us hatemail intended for someone else (anyone in the world can participate). Then, we get local actors to give them dramatic readings (any actor in town can participate). Once we have recordings, we get local musicians to underscore them (any musician in town can participate). Finally, we get local visual artists to make something pretty/grotesque/interesting for them (any visual artist in town can participate). It’s pretty simple, really.

Now then.

You know those people who claim to have read “1984″ and say that the future Orwell presents is the scariest thing they can think of? I’m gonna go ahead and call bullshit on that one.

The totalitarian distopia is disturbing, sure, but as I read the book, and as I sympathized with Winston Smith on how ridiculous it is, I realized that the reality itself is at best only mildly scary. I would actually describe it as “creepy” before using the word “scary.” The scary part of “1984″ is not the Big Brother setting, but rather the psychological torture of the protagonist as he moves closer and closer toward the climax of the story, and the great tragedy of it all still boils down to one individual character rather than the society at large.

Now, keeping in mind that the horrors of the future in that fictional tale are still a very real possibility, I want to share this video. It’s less than two minutes long, but in this tiny nugget of time, it shows us a super-exaggerated version of everyday life under an uncontrollable river of advertisements. To see the setting of our main character - the owner of the hands in this video - is to gasp for air for fear of drowning in Capitalism. And the fact that the hands are just going about such ordinary, everyday business – just as the people in Orwell’s bleak wasteland of human submission – to see this happen while we, the audience, are powerless to change it…now THAT is terrifying.

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

Why is it, I wonder, that absolute government power worries me less than absolute advertiser power?