Tom Bissell: When I worked my way through the earlier Grand Theft Autos, I marveled at the freedom they allowed and the astonishing vastidity of their worlds. When I played GTA V, I mostly wondered how the traffic flowed so convincingly. The more technically mindful of video games I've become, the more conscious I am of their innumerable moving parts, the more miraculous and impressive they seem -- and the more impossible it feels to vanish inside one.
J. Hoberman: To watch Gravity on the huge IMAX screen to appreciate the power of illusion -- what AndrĂ© Bazin described as "total cinema." The movie is a virtual reality predicated on the plenitude of absence, the being of nothingness. In an act of technological prestidigitation, Alfonso CuarĂ³n has created a sense of unlimited space where the mind knows that none actually exists.
Michiru Hoshino: Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!
Matthew Battles: The network that was supposed to abolish space ended up moving to abolish time instead. Although we once dreamt of cyberspace as a frictionless grid, the network we ended up with needs the x, y, z of realspace. It reminds us of it constantly; it wants to reside in the spaces we inhabit, rather than the other way round. Space is the network's chief uncanny affordance, lending it a kind of cultural potential energy, a latency of meaning. We find that everywhere we look, the internet makes light of time. Time is the internet's too-cheap-to-meter cultural resource, and it's only just begun burning through it, generating a storm of atemporal media traces that pile up before us as our wings beat furiously.
Ali Dhux: A man tries hard to help you find your lost camels. He works more tirelessly than even you, But in truth he does not want you to find them, ever.
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