31.5.16 Self Driving Lumiere

I was admiring the similar framing of these two videos when I was putting together my talk for LIFT way back at the beginning of the year. It's been on the to-do list for ages to a side-by-side so here it is.  The first is the Lumiere brothers' famous 1895 film Arrival of The Mail Train. Which is renowned largely for the urban legend that on seeing it, people thought a train was coming towards them out of the screen. This is use apocryphally as a reference to how technologies take time to be culturally assimilated and reading protocols to be established. The second follows a similar chain of reasoning, a video that came out last year showing some folk testing out a Volvo's auto-stopping feature. They demonstrate total faith in what the technology claims to be and that it will stop, despite the obvious outcome.

Anyway, there's a poetry in their framing which I enjoy.