Or more to the point, what are we inventing and to what end? Do we really need all of this shit?

My nieces were playing an Eye-Toy game recently which involved cleaning windows. You had to clean the windows really quickly in order to score. I asked why they don’t clean the real windows instead, and they all just looked at me like I was the oldest thing they’d ever seen.

Eye-toy and Wii sound like cool ideas for kids toys, but Adult applications conjure up all sorts of horrible possibilities. I have as much pervert in me as the next person, but this virtual life industry is really beyond the pale, particularly the plastic sex industry.

Teledildonics is where we are headed. Dildonics are electronic sex toys; the Tele- is added for the remote or Cyber use and control of them. It’s fake sex, Virtual sex and I guess it illustrates that one who needs them has only a Virtual Life.

I wrote about Real Dolls recently after seeing a documentary about men who prefer “Synthetic Women” to “Organic Women”. These Real Dolls are inert lumps of skilfully moulded plastic. They all resemble porn stars and Pamela Anderson (same thing?!?) and just lie there whilst these geeks treat them in ways I don’t care to imagine.

As a result of seeing the program “Love Me, Love My Doll”, I decided to research Real Dolls and one of the individuals in the show, a lonely soul named Davecat. Like many people Davecat has a Blog, and he shares it with his Synthetic lover, pictures of whom appear on the site in various states of undress and activity.

Davecat recently saw an article that I also saw, regarding robotic breakthroughs in Japan. Imagine the possibilities. These robots can talk and respond to commands almost replicating human behaviour. Facial expressions, voices and movements are all very lifelike, but still spooky.

Combine this with Real Dolls and Hondas latest robotic breakthroughs around robot mobility and you have a walking (running), talking, rooting, machine. Who needs to get out there and meet people when you can order one online?

As all of this stuff takes over, are we all going to turn into Davecat? He seems a perfectly nice enough person, but he has grown used to not dealing with real people. We can all do so much now without dealing with real individuals that we forget how to behave. This can turn quickly into fear and dread, until we long for solitude and a virtual word in which we are the controller.

I find the real world pretty scary as it is. Meeting people is hard and sex is a minefield, but surely a world with no skin is even scarier.

Teledildonics

Teledildonics on Wiki

Researchers move ever closer to making mechanical versions of us.

Honda’s robot is now faster, friendlier

I don’t think I’ve ever posted within the ‘art’ category - art’s not really my scene. I can appreciate how great the masters were, but it just doesn’t inspire me to get off my couch and go to a gallery. Now I have a reason.

As I kid, I grew up watching anime shows like Robotech, Gatchaman (Battle of the Planets) and Astroboy, which is where Tezuka Osamu comes into the picture. Long regarded as the Godfather of Manga, Tezuka was one of the pioneers in the anime scene emerging from post-war Japan. It was Tezuka who introduced the cinematic feel of page layout (frames of different sizes organised to provide flow along a single page) that has been the norm in both Japanese manga and Western comic books for the last fifty years.

Until January 28th next year, the NGV International (what used to be the NGV, right next to the Arts Centre) will be hosting an exhibition of Tezuka’s lifetime of works including favourites such as Astroboy, Kimba the White Lion and Blackjack. In conjunction with the exhibition, the Australian Centre for Moving Image (Federation Square) from December 7th will host a collection of Tezuka’s anime. Check the ACMI website here for a complete list of films on offer (believe me when I say there are heaps). And just for the gaming nerds out there, the ACMI will also be hosting an exhibition based on Atroboy games from SEGA (begins December 13th, ending Sunday 25th of February).

Quite simply - if you want to see the most creative movie of the last decade, you have to see “SCIENCE OF SLEEP“.

It’s Michel Gondry’s (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) newest film about a young man who mixes up his dreams with reality (basically a hommage to his own work and life thus far). It’s full of crazy ideas, a car chase with cardboard cars, toy horses made out of material which come to life, cities made of cardboard, time machines made of plastic etc, etc, etc.

It is wild! It makes everything else you have seen, which claims to be creative, look like a piece of work made from someone out of the movie “1984″! Seriously, it is outrageous! It is funny, actually hilarious, loveable and so very daring!

Go see it! Tell everyone! Enjoy!!!!!