Mark Richardson

Been thinking to look for this on YouTube for a while; it’s a scene from Richard Linklater’s 1991 film Slacker. Something about YouTube in general, from the first time I heard about it, makes me think about this scene. This guy is trying to harness the power of the moving image but obviously technology hasn’t caught up with him so he has 50 TVs and VCRs and piles of video tapes in this one room. There was information out there and people pointed cameras at the information but it was very hard to get the images in front of people who might be interested. That’s not true anymore. Also, this guy’s fixation on the recorded image over the real-life image seems prescient: “A video image is much more powerful and useful than an actual event.” I knew some people sort of like this guy in the early 90s.

Posted at 4:52pm and tagged with: Slacker,.