Framing The Conversation
As far as 3D movie experiences go, The Avengers was good, not great. But while Hulk was swinging wildly this way and that, busting out of his small shirt and the big screen, protecting New York City from a spectacular, alien, airborne invasion, it was also good to think about 3D itself, or, at least, the attempt to break out of the rectangular dimensions of the screen. Or the frame. Or the page. Or just think about breaking out. Ted Nelson wrote what the editors of The New Media Reader call "the most important book in the history of new media," Computer Lib/Dream Machines . They write: "He believed the importance of computers lay not in their capacity for calculation, but in the fact they would enable new generations of media." (p. 301) At the beginning of a Youtube video about a project called Xanadu, Nelson shows his resistance colours as he finds insufficient the page itself. "It seemed to me that paper was a prison. Four walls, right? ...