Events
WAX : Or the Discovery of Television Among the BeesScreening July 12, 3 PM
New Media Room
David Blair’s 1991 full-length film WAX : Or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees was created over 6 years with 3D military VR footage, live footage shot at actual US nuclear testing facilities and archival materials.
Featuring a cameo by William S. Burroughs, WAX is the first independent feature film to have been edited on a digital non-linear system. It is also the first film (independent or otherwise) to have been re-formatted as hypertext and posted on the Internet. The New York Times recognized the accomplishment, and ran the article "Cult Film is First on the Internet" in its May 23, 1993 business section. The result is an obsessive, artificial history, which has been fastidiously detailed with fragments of real and imagined facts.
The film’s convoluted storyline concerns a beekeeper’s transformation upon discovering that his bees communicate between the living and the dead. The beekeeper protagonist (played by Blair) experiences hallucinations via the bee’s television, and is finally lead by the bees to their subterranean home: an enormous cave below the Alamagordo desert. In the cave it is revealed to him that he must actually become a Desert Storm-era weapon and destroy his "target" in Iraq, before rebirth as a fragmented soul in several bodies, including that of a Middle Eastern woman.
The intricacy and scope of the film allows questions as to the collective and individual value of life to be raised.
The City is Dreaming
(ongoing)
