Bücher von Richard L. Anderson

For over a century, motion pictures have entertained us, occasionally educated us, and even served a few specialized fields of study. Now, however, with the precipitous drop in prices and increase in image quality, motion pictures are as widespread as paperback books and postcards once were. Yet, theories and practices of analysis for particular genres and analytical stances, definitions, concepts, and tools that span platforms have been wanting. Therefore, we developed a suite of tools to enable close structural analysis of the time-varying signal set of a movie. We take an information-theoretic approach (message is a signal set) generated (coded) under various antecedents (sent over some channel) decoded under some other set of antecedents. Cultural, technical, and personal antecedents might favor certain message-making systems over others. The same holds true at the recipient end-yet, the signal set remains the signal set. In order to discover how movies work-their structure and meaning-we honed ways to provide pixel level analysis, forms of clustering, and precise descriptions of what parts of a signal influence viewer behavior. We assert that analysis of the signal set across the evolution of film-from Edison to Hollywood to Brakhage to cats on social media-yields a common ontology with instantiations (responses to changes in coding and decoding antecedents).

In this epic historical adventure, Orlando de Bolonia reaches the steamy coast of Vera Cruz, New Spain, ten years after the Conquest as a relatively innocent Franciscan friar. He has come to the Americas to seek the meaning of a troubling vision he once had of a sacrifice in front of a crimson pyramid. Orlando does gain converts to the Faith, but because of his sensual nature and restless curiosity, his own transformation is even more radical: He takes an Indian lover, Itzel; and he samples sinicuichi, the hallucinogenic "sun opener" tea. The Inquisition imprisons Orlando for supporting the Indians in their struggles against powerful Spanish landholders at the time of the Mixtón Rebellion. After his release Orlando quits the Franciscan Order to grow chilis on a flower-covered mountain overlooking Lake Chapala. Peace still eludes him, though, because his Indian friends require a sacrifice to save their world. The secret to helping them lies with Black Tezcatlipoca, the god of the Smoking Mirror.