Monty's Gaming and Wireless Outlook - Issue 155

It was interesting to note Adam Singer refer to 1915 silent film ‘classic’ Birth of a Nation in his keynote speech to the Edinburgh Interactive Entertainment Festival last week. Whatever Singer’s intentions were, and they were surely well meaning, D. W. Griffith’s film deserves no such credit and should be locked away with the trash of Albert Speer and other racist propagandists.

Last month, at the NFT IMAX cinema in London, DJ Spooky, an African-American artist, highlighted the shortcomings of that film when he showcased his live soundtrack of mangled Robert Johnson samples over a screening of the film.

The film depicts the American Civil War through the eyes of a family and for the first hour or so it’s quite interesting. Then it goes mental. The blacks get the vote in the South, they take over Parliament, they get drunk and eat chicken while in Parliament, the whities get lynched, a white woman is raped, but the American nation is saved when the scion of the family decides to set up the Klu Klux Klan. Hurrah, hurrah, the world’s first hoodies are invented.

What a load of old sh*t and yeah, yeah, yeah, it was a different generation, but it’s always hugely refreshing when an artist does his or her job properly and opens less gifted people’s eyes to a truth they may have missed. But change your name, mate. DJ Spooky sounds like a dodgy chatroom alias.

Seeing old technology such as analogue film diverge into a live, digital music experience underlines how technology can go off in weird, but positive, directions. One of the niche areas in mobile phone usage is its popularity among deaf people.

While this seems a contradiction, text messaging and the vibrating element of a mobile phone mean this is a perfect medium for the hard of hearing. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but according to Mike Short of the Mobile Data Association, some visionaries at Nokia and the like did think that far in advance. Deaf people are now provided with tailored tarrifs where they don’t pay for voice and are only charged for the features they use.

Nice one, but every action has an opposite reaction and some mobile phones can interfere with nearby hearing aids within a one-metre radius, so it seems technology will forever be an ongoing battle between positive and negative. It’s just a shame there were (probably) no deaf people at the NFT IMAX last month. That's one particular production that words or vibration couldn't describe.