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Inception - The Fractal Movie

dream_doorsI waited several weeks to write about Inception because I needed distance from the visual event. The publicity surrounding this film had prepared me for the unorthodox, but I had no idea how closely it relates to the fractal interface I’ve been theorizing. No spoiler alerts, just caveat emptor if you haven’t seen it yet.

Certainly, the cinematography was excellent, albeit susceptible to cynical interpretation. A few of my more intellectual friends professed to find the whole thing boring. Shifting landscapes, people walking up walls, scenes folding back upon themselves. But that was the whole point, to provide a three-dimensional reference to an abstract framework. Dreams within dreams? Dream architects? “Kicks” to jolt you out of a dream state? These were essential props, metaphorical signposts planted by the director.

That’s the key to the fractal interface. Navigation through the planes of an experience, device-dependent by circumstance, not limitation. Inception spawned dreams within dreams, narratives expanding and collapsing within other narratives, emotions threatening to shatter them, or consign them to the oblivion of confused thought. All these are metaphors for the film experience, the consumption of narrative elements writ large on a dynamic interface.

Arguably, this is one of those films that play best in the theater, or on the giant flat screen at home. Like the best of the genre - the Jurassics, the Empires, the Raiders - it’s an outsized piece of entertainment. Perhaps someone will create a mashup for mobile devices, a rotating cube of  scenes, a stack of folding images, but it won’t touch the original.

What’s brilliant about Inception, and I did use the term in a Facebook post, is that it provides hooks for the pre- and post-viewing experience. Before I saw it, I imagined it might resemble Altered States, the wonderful precursor directed by Ken Russell that will probably seem outdated if I ever see it again. While I was watching Inception, the physical and psychological action pulled me along. Yes, there was a flat spot in the action, past the halfway point, when the exposition could have been parsed a bit better. The effect was to take me out of the dream for a moment, only to become absorbed once again, perhaps at a higher level. Now that I think about it, that might have been a “kick” for the film audience.

I’ve always been easy prey for tearjerkers. Katharine Hepburn’s scene at the end of Stage Door, the Calla Lily speech? Pure water works. The end of E.T.? Of course. And many others. So I wasn’t surprised at my reaction when the two children turn around at the end of Inception. But it was a truncated moment. The release I should have felt became ambiguous when I saw the rotating token. Was it all a dream?

Fractal Distribution Points - Part 1

elevatorEvery workday morning, I enter a midtown Manhattan office building and take the elevator. Having walked to the subway, taken a downtown local and crosstown shuttle, and walked through heavy human traffic to the building, I’m ready to plug into my virtual workspace. But before I reach the office and start my laptop, I can look up in the upper left corner of the elevator and see a small display of video and rotating graphics. Captivate Networks owns this space, and they have my undivided attention for about fifteen seconds. I can read news bursts, see the weather in different cities, and make a brief to a virtual community. Almost every day, there’s a statistic and an invitation to comment. The invitation leads to deskchatter.com.

It’s all an obvious attempt to drive traffic, and guess what? It’s successful. For all my immersion in digital media, I’ve become so jaded that I rarely venture out of my predictable cocoon: NYTimes, MSNBC, Facebook, LinkedIn. Lately, I’ve even taken a break from Twitter, though Foursquare seems to have taken up the slack. I read Mashable, and several other digital publications, though now more through following links from my main sources. The pace and flow of Manhattan life have pared the indulgent streams of discretionary data, conflating all the digital, visual and organic signals into one mashed pulse.

So what’s the appeal of Captivate? Well, the name does have Orwellian connotations. As a once-again New Yorker, though, I can go with that. From the fractal interface point of view, it’s inevitable. If they can put displays like this over urinals in finer restaurants, as happened in my small Bay area town some years ago, then the elevator’s a no-brainer. Some passengers don’t look up because they’re texting. I can see an opt-in feature that would print part of the display on their device, a customized readout of localized data. It’s too short a ride to customize the elevator display, not too mention insecure if you want to print proprietary data (”Jones from Acme Widget waiting for you in the lobby and he’s pissed.”) But the potential is there. Captivate didn’t put the screen there for warm and fuzzies. They saw a fractal opportunity and made the most of it.