Holy new-media installation, Batman — is Christopher Nolan, director of the recent film The Dark Knight, a fan of artists Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin?
Without going into too much detail about The Dark Knight, there’s a sequence toward the climax (well, the most lengthy of its several climaxes — this is a summer blockbuster) that features a room-spanning grid of small screens that will be familiar to anyone who has ever experienced Hansen and Rubin’s work titled “Listening Post” (I’ve mentioned it on several occasions here at disquiet.com).
The following description of “Listening Post” will certainly sound familiar to anyone who’s seen The Dark Knight. The Hansen/Rubin work is a matrix of small rectangular screens, connected to each other by a two-dimensional matrix of small wires to form a wall, or skrim, of choreographed data. That data is all pulled from the Internet and filtered through various algorithms, such as searching for four-letter words or for phrases that begin with the words “I am” or “I love.” Here’s a picture, courtesy of Rubin’s Earstudio (earstudio.com):
In The Dark Knight, Batman employs a similar if hyper-realized version, several times the size of the Hansen/Rubin contraption and tapped into a narrower but more data-intensive realm of realtime information. (I’d say more, but might spoil the movie, and Dark Knight is really worth seeing, even if its truest act of super-heroism is to threaten Titanic‘s record for highest-grossing motion picture.)
It’s especially surprising that Manhola Dargis of the New York Times didn’t mention this information-overload similarity in her movie review, since Rubin and Hansen devised a “Listening Post”-like installation, titled “Moveable Type,” for the lobby of the newspaper’s building in midtown Manhattan (more at disquiet.com). Also, just a handful of days before Dark Knight debuted, the Times ran a story by Mia Fineman about awkward resemblances between advertising and contemporary art, including an Apple ad that looks a lot like a Christian Marclay piece (nytimes.com). Director Nolan is certainly not shy about homage; he’s told entertainment reporters that the opening sequence to The Dark Knight is a conscious nod to Michael Mann‘s Heat.
As for the Dark Knight/”Listening Post” comparison, I’m not the first to ask: mikearauz.com, joshspear.com, flickr.com/photos/fenchurch, subjunctive.net.
Sellars even produced a “muxtape,” featuring Noel Coward, Foetus, Kode9 and the Spaceape, and a rendition of “Teddy Bear’s Picnic”: ballardian.muxtape.com. Me being American, I find the latter creepier than Sellars does, because I only really know it from its association with Dennis Potter‘s TV mini-series The Singing Detective.