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Today the titan video artist  Harun Farocki would've been 74 years old. When Farocki passed away in 2014, it was a major loss in the moving image critical studies arena and in the world of digital new wave filmmaking. Farocki was not only a filmmaker, lecturer, thinker and documentarian, he was another embodiment what Chris Marker etched out when he began appropriating moving images and questioning what they really mean decades ago. In the years since, Marker's contemporary Jean Luc-Godard has managed to stay in a more public spotlight (most recently playing a diabolical role in the nonfiction film Faces Places ) but Farocki has always been a figure who was more celebrated among his peers, students and in targeted circles of academia. His side-by-side imagery of panels, screens and moving frames are an obvious influence on the many video essays on cinema that I've created over the last six or so years. Therefore, I wanted to celebrate Farocki by sharing one of his mo...

Chicago sure makes a gorgeous backdrop for sci-fi fare ( Divergent , Jupiter Ascending ) and big action spectacles from Hollywood ( The Dark Knight , Transformers: Dark of the Moon ), so it's no wonder that (arguably) the current biggest movie star in the world Dwayne Johnson has set his next sure-to-be blockbuster in the Windy City as well. Johnson's latest special effects extravaganza Rampage is based on the 1986 arcade game of the same name from Bally Midway . The game itself has gone through revamps over the years, appearing on platforms such as Atari and Sega Master System. As I watched the first trailer for this live action adaptation, I marveled at how striking my beloved home city looked in several shots, but then I began to have a stasis of image association in my head. The flat 2D look of the original "Rampage" game struggled to surface in my conscience. So I did what I do best and I worked with the moving images in my latest video essay and rendered t...