Robots in the Garden

Tonight I watched the film adaptation of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, and it was honestly a pretty poor movie. I like the book and everything, but something about the movie just made everyone seem so robotic and dispassionate (not to mention pitiful. It was, perhaps, this that got me thinking first about robots. I guess I kind of pictured robots sitting around chatting to one another and dropping really corny lines, and then I thought about the good lines and the interesting ideas from the movie, and I wanted to share them in a creative way. So, I've been working on making a kinetic typography video that would incorporate some ideas on the nature of creativity and on the paradigm shift that is going on in terms of how we create, share, and consume media (most specifically literature). Anyway, I ended up with the above picture, a bunch of robotic audio clips, and a master sheet for the first part of my quotes but which I'm unable to finish until Adobe will decide to let its downloader actually download After Effects, the program that I was going to use to put together the typography animation. It's kind of a first try at all this for me, so I'm just chucking some of what I've done up here, in addition to a number of movie quotes that I've tweaked slightly so that they would correspond to writing rather than architecture. Really, the overall message of this and the focus of my study of The Fountainhead will be the idea of departing from old ways and embracing the new ways of digital media, stretching and cultivating our minds in order to understand and grow from the wonders of the modern digital age. Another primary focus will be the power of the word and, more specifically, the power for good or for bad of a single person when armed with the word.

"Words, the greatest expressive invention of man. Yet they made them into essays... Research papers and mongrels of every ancient style they could borrow... just because others had done it... the form of a literary work must follow its function... new materials demand new forms...."

--"It's the ingenuity of your writing that sold us on the work. But its appearance is not of any known style. The public wouldn't like it. It'd shock people. It's too different, too original. Originality is fine, but why go to extremes? There's always the middle course. So we want to preserve your beautiful design... but just soften it with a touch of classical dignity. And we must always compromise with the general taste. You understand that... We can't depart from the popular forms of writing.

--Why not?

--Because everybody's accepted them... surely you're not in favor of so-called modern media? It's worthless!...it's merely the work of a few unbridled individualists. Artistic value is achieved collectively... by each man subordinating himself to the standards of the majority."

"Do you want to stand ALONE against the whole world? There's no place for originality in writing. Nobody can improve on the literature of the past. One can only learn to copy it... You insist on creating works that look like nothing ever written before...You can't hope to survive unless you learn how to compromise. You hold to your own ideas and you'll starve."