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still Towers Open Fire (Antony Balch & William Burroughs, GB/FR 1963)

Media Junkies

Underground: Media Junkies

Modern humans are addicted: without our daily dose of news and entertainment, we start going cold turkey. Film scholar Amir Vudka focuses on the work of David Cronenberg, William Burroughs and Marshall McLuhan: their films, books and studies pushed back the frontiers of knowledge.

poster Underground: Media Junkies

In his lecture, Vudka explores the analogy of media and drugs in David Cronenberg's films, examining the pharmacological implications of media on the social, mental, and bodily conditions of its (ab)users.

Cronenberg's sci-fi and body horror films often center on technology and media, whether it's television (in Videodrome, 1983), cars (in Crash, 1996), or virtual reality (in eXistenZ, 1999). In Cronenberg's work, media exhibit strong pharmacological effects on the human user. For instance, in Videodrome, television functions as a drug that induces acute hallucinations and addiction, anticipating contemporary media pathologies associated with smartphones and virtual reality.

Prescient view

American writer William S. Burroughs, himself a long-term opiate addict, explicitly likened media to ‘junk’ (a slang term for opium and its synthetic derivatives): the images disseminated by the mass media addict us to the news cycle and act as a control mechanism.

Anthony Balch’s 7-minute Towers Open Fire (1966), an attempt to adapt Burrough’s work for film included by Vudka in his lecture, examines a number of Burrough’s ideas on addiction and control (‘the algebra of need’). Burroughs anticipated the rise of 24/7 communication channels and the algorithmic feedback loops of social media: a capitalist logic of addiction and exploitation, Vudka argues, that transforms consumers from media users into media junkies.

Shut the thing off

But to kick the image habit – to “Shut the whole thing right off [...] Don’t answer the machine – Shut it off”, as Burroughs urges us to do in Naked Lunch – turns out not to be so easy.

Amir Vudka is an assistant professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Beyond academia, he is the artistic director of the Sounds of Silence Festival and the Altered States Festival in The Hague.

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Production year

2024

Length

90 min.

Event language

English

Country

NL

Part of

Underground

This autumn, Eye Filmmuseum highlights the American avant-garde cinema of the 1960s. The exhibition and film programme feature both iconic and lesser-known works, showcasing the era's vibrant experimental spirit. Highlights include films by pivotal avant-garde figures such as Jonas Mekas, Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage, as well as contributions from prominent visual artists like Bruce Conner, Yayoi Kusama, Yoko Ono, and Andy Warhol. This exploration of cinematic innovation is set against the backdrop of a changing society.

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campaign image Underground – American Avant-Garde Film in the 1960s
still Mind Game (Masaaki Yuasa & Kôji Morimoto, JP 2004)
still Naked Lunch (David Cronenberg, GB/CA 1991)
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Current exhibition

  • 13 October 2024 — 5 January 2025

    Underground

    American Avant-Garde Film in the 1960s

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