Artifacts

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of pictoscribe.

Man, is the scientist's log that's been produced as a limited tie-in to 9, the Shane Acker-Tim Burton-Timur Bekmambetov dystopian fantasia arriving in theaters on September 9, gorgeous. It also represents a kind of promotion that I like a lot, the creation of artifacts, especially those that leach into our daily lives. I liked the District 9 segregation signs that popped up at bus stops and movie theaters, and I particularly appreciate the creation of something that purports to be a fragment or a remnant of the world a movie is set in, and that arrive without an acknowledgement that they're the creations of commercial concerns.

It's not just that art or promotions like that extend the artistic experience beyond the theater or the period of time it takes to read a book. They allow for alternate interpretations of familiar things a la Motel of the Mysteries. And they give artists, be they directors, authors, illustrators, etc., permission to leave things unexplained. One of the things I liked most about District 9, and I liked a lot of things about it, was the fact that a lot of alien science was left unclear, both for the scientists of MNU and for us. The movie was bold enough to draw us in, and then to create a conspiracy of ignorance between us and some of the main characters, to require us to simply experience the world it created, rather than letting us understand and rationalize it entirely.

Fragmenting and artifact creation are hardly new phenomena. Both The Canterbury Tales and The Faerie Queene are artificially fragmented to create the impression that they have a longer lineage, and their authors were actually their discoverers. Today, we have the ability to create even more detailed, multifaceted fragments and artifacts, to deceive and draw ourselves in to new worlds in even more exciting ways. Those artifacts, even if they're meant to sell movie tickets and books, can help us immerse ourselves more fully in new worlds, and in new experiences of art by making us willing to accept that some things will simply be unfamiliar.