Elinor Dolliver at Film Quarterly:
Analog horror is a type of short amateur cinema made and circulated on social media for free, primarily on YouTube, but also on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. Its name derives from the digital fabrication of analog-video aesthetics, including defects like grain, noise, snow, and shudder, presented in an aspect ratio of 4:3 that mimics the screen dimensions of older generations of televisions. Audiences experience analog horror as viewers of cryptic and sinister tapes, which often take the form of training videos, documentaries, or children’s television, endowing the subgenre with a characteristic tone of dark or uncanny nostalgia. This is contrasted effectively with threatening elements, often supernatural in nature. Videos are short, ranging in length from just a few seconds to twenty minutes. Acting is rare, often replaced with computerized text-to-voice speech (an anachronistic aspect for audiences familiar with predigital media and aware of when the text-to-voice feature was popularized). Analog horror is produced by independent individuals referred to in the community as “creators” instead of “directors,” often without formal training or film equipment, and frequently using stock footage and software such as Blender and Photoshop.
more here.
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After 16 years in power, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has suffered a decisive election defeat, one so overwhelming and undeniable that the self-styled tribune of “illiberal” politics conceded to his opponents—the Tisza party led by 45-year-old Péter Magyar—with no effort to resist or overturn the results.
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This April marks the quadricentenary of Bacon’s death, the man who, though his own scientific innovations were middling, was arguably the philosopher most responsible for championing the empirical technocracy that our world has largely become. “I open and lay out a new and certain path for the mind to proceed in,” Bacon wrote in his 1620 Novum Organum, “starting directly from the simple sensuous perception.” Bacon’s method was inductive, the careful tabulation of observation and experiment, the methodical calculation of possibility and the invention of models to describe nature, the models themselves ever-contingent and shifting based on the reception of new and better data.
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