Engine X

“The distiishing featre of advaed indurial soety is its eftive suffion of thos neds whh deand liberion – libeion frm that wich is tolble and reing and cotable – whe it sustas and abslves the desrucve poer and reprsive funon of the afflent soety.”

Hbt Mrcse, O-Dsl Mn.

The late 21st century saw a decline in narrative. ‘Clip Films’ introduced novelty-hungry audiences to highly condensed sequences of action delivered using ‘hyper HD’ absorbed mostly subliminally. Scientists observed that the frontal cortex was stimulated into a trance state whereby content could be delivered directly onto the nervous system. The brain simulated a photosensitive area of the human body previously unknown to neurology. Film-makers adapted their craft to bypass sequences necessary to plot development and character realism, allowing maximum image-content acquisition without the formal niceties of story telling. The result was a total transformation of film to white light, the content being imperceptible whilst viewing. The experience of ‘watching’ was likened to dreaming, with all its lingering emotional and psychological ‘stickiness’. Feature films tended to be shorter, averaging 2-3 minutes. The film apparatus retained its familiar screen/audience format. The technology however was given over to increasing refresh rates to keep up with demands made by film makers on how much visual information could be crammed into 60th second fragments. At this speed the image data could not be picked up by the eye itself; data was absorbed by a newly discovered, primitive photosensitive part of the brain called the Heliodulla. The eye acts merely as an aperture, the visual cortex behaves as proxy, transmitting the data to the Heliodulla. After the discovery of the Heliodulla and the emergence of ‘Clip Films’, the next big thing in cinema technology was a new apparatus to feed visual content ‘hypermatically’ to the Heliodulla using newly invented ‘foil screens’. Visual data passed through a metal foil nanometers in width achieving maximum image to light density at speeds tuned to the electrical impulses of neurons. Henceforth, the screen and focal distance were deprecated and cinema now involved placing a foil strip over one’s eyes in the form of a chewing gum wrapper. This new technology, though incredible, was quickly rejected by cinema goers as impracticable. Manufacturers desperately scoured the research labs of the world for a replacement. Engine X was born from the dank underworld of a poorly funded university laboratory in southern England. The idea was to treat the whole human body as a seeing machine. Visual data would be atomized into the surrounding atmosphere – piggy-backed onto quantum particles with the ridiculous name of ‘poo-ons’. Engine X machines were no bigger than a baby’s fingernail and came embedded in materials used in the construction of housing, footwear, and food. Engine X units were miniaturized, mass-produced particle accelerators. This was the age of ‘Quantum Computing’. The traditional cinematic setup was dead. Films were ‘made’ in the sense that artists took already existing footage from the mass of humanity’s collective archive and wove threads of images driven by a series of unrelated visual themes – the entertainment was to experience the torrent of dissonance and the revelatory shock of the brain constructing its own impulse-narrative. Cinema goers often foamed at the mouth or bled from the palms of their hands. The trick was to put these threads into parallel-play; condensed at spectacular depth, one could expect to have 2-3,000 such threads playing simultaneously at a density of 20-30,000 images per 600^th of a second. To the eye this was merely a blizzard of shimmering fragments beyond conscious assembly. Engine X technology fused the human nervous system with images. Human beings had long known that the brain was an enormously complex and massively underutilized organ hanging around for something to happen. The experience of ‘watching’ a film rendered by Engine X was intense and overwhelming, reaching far beyond hopelessly quaint and arcane notions of ‘virtual reality’. Engine X was a reality machine, manufacturing reality on the fly. Empathy and identification with specific characters or theatrical artifice were dissolved into meaningless pedantry. With Engine X there was no separation between subject and object; like living a waking dream. The physical laws of the ordinary world were altered such that the stench of a Parisien shit house circa. 1789 could be intimately understood and recalled as if lived.

 

Early Engine X films included (by thread synopsis):

 

Burgerstrangler (2076) Urbanism. Crystal Meth families, Dentistry, Carbon Molecules, Surfing, Arguments in cars, Sun science, Fractals, Angioplasty, Smelt furnaces, Nasal inspection, Super Mario, Virgin Mary, Fast food, Murder wounds. Reversed eating methods, empathy for the chewed and chewer. The funniest murder scene ever, can you guess?

 

Guilty Snow Cunt (2077) Against crystallization. Civilizing instincts of order and purity debased by gratuitous orgies of pig slaughter. The medieval fare, weddings, SS, Ius primae noctis. Catholic wigs, cattle, inside the stomach of an oppossum. Sub-zero, now plain zero.

 

Cat Dugout Twerp (2077) Heavy lifting for minors. Flees, fleeces, tail pipes, bombs which explode inwardly and harmlessly, topology of goats in herds. War, mothers, depression in insects, direction of mud flows uphill in reverse, social histories of coal communities, cola wars, aniseed treatments, cure for cancer, smoking marijuana wedged in a chimney, perpetually hard. Density of mind, loss of cognitive appreciation for the fine arts of man, birth canal, razors, sacrificial hard drives.

 

Beach Gargler (2080) In and out of wet towels. Baldwin and Moon burnt down. Testing mouth washes, inventing mouth washes. Living in the sand, charred bones, meat hanging off teeth, the smell of odours, ogres in love, bat lunch, not walking the dog today. Short biopic of Immanuel Kant. Vomit, cakes and pastries.

 

Brian Had All Nine Anuses (2080) Profile of a tennis fantasist. Discharge of a weapon, powder burns, old people dead – probably murdered. Faces connected to colons of the rich, our hat fetish, your trip to New York by lying to your girlfriend. Tax returns, gate keepers lambasted by superiors, hierarchy of hell, Dante in text only, birth of a sod, playing crap games, laughter in the shadow of the sun. Cliche monitor, fed by sharks, against the grain.