Thirty years in, South by Southwest still keeps it weird and wonderful

Nathan Mattise

AUSTIN, Texas—We at Ars have woken from a taco-and-barbecued induced haze and managed to survive our largest outing to date at the annual South by Southwest conference. The event wraps this weekend after 10 packed days (loosely) defined by tech, policy, film, gaming, and entertainment. If you haven't attended recently, it's a radically different event even from a few years ago.

On the conference's 30th anniversary, in fact, SXSW CPO Hugh Forrest kicked everything off by showing the event's original program from 1987. Want a microcosm of the festival's evolution? Forrest planned (and designed that pamphlet) all on his Mac+. Today, he says it now takes nine months of planning/prep so the conference can both function and add new wrinkles, like its app chatbot, Abby.

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The design philosophies behind some of our favorite movie aliens

Stranger Things wanted its music to be “something people talked about”

This will be familiar for many an Ars reader.

Warning: This post contains minor spoilers for Stranger Things' first season.

AUSTIN, Texas—If you close your eyes and think about Netflix's hit, Stranger Things, what immediately comes to mind?

Chances are, it's the 54 seconds of pulsing synthesizer embedded above. That's the handiwork of Austin musicians Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein, half of the all-synth band S U R V I V E and composers for the show.

The Stranger Things sound has become such a phenomenon that the original soundtrack landed on the Village Voice's annual Pazz + Jop poll of music critics for 2016. So when the duo sat down to record a live podcast with Spotify during South by Southwest, the question was simple: how does it feel?

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Wowing and washable: Google’s smart jacket wears and works well at first glance

AUSTIN, Texas—"The tech couldn't be seen as slapped on the garment," Ivan Poupyrev, technical program lead at Google’s Advanced Technology And Products (ATAP) group, told the crowd during his weekend South by Southwest panel. "So we started from the core—the yarn—we built starting there and went from the ground up. The first yarn we brought, I remember Levi’s looked at us funny and said, 'you know that’s going to break right?'"

"It's called singing denim," responded Paul Dillinger, vice president for global innovation at Levi's. "You expose the cloth to an open flame which burns excess cotton. So we said, 'You have this great tech, but you understand we’re going to blow torch this right? We’re going to do this to an open flame.' Frankly, I was doing it to scare them off, but then Ivan's response was 'what’s the fuel source for this flame?' He wanted to learn how to solve this problem."

You read that correctly: at SXSW this weekend, Google visionaries sat hobnobbing with style icons from Levi's as they discussed thread and production techniques. That's because this fall, the companies will release what can crudely be referred to as a smart jacket. Named Project Jacquard, this is by no means a new entity. Google first announced its intentions to make smart textiles back at Google I/O 2015, and last year the idea of debuting the technology in a commuter jacket form factor became public. But with Jacquard inching closer to an actual release, SXSW gave these two collaborators another opportunity to explain. More importantly, the event presented these companies with the first high-profile opportunity to let the attending public reach out and wear the thing.

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Tech’s political impact? “14 people watch me on C-SPAN… 1M on Facebook”

Insert coin, drive home car

Video produced by Nathan Mattise. (video link)

AUSTIN, Texas—"Vending machines" don't usually conjure up excitement. At most, we've all fist-pumped when a second Hershey's bar falls down or perhaps snickered when a dive bar still sells cigarettes next to the Twix. But a new, modernistic addition to I-35 South's Motor Mile looks nothing like the neighboring car-stocked dealerships or various chain restaurants. Apparently, it's a "vending machine"—it just contains cars, not candy.

Used-car startup Carvana invited Ars out to its Austin facility this week to check out the company's recently opened "car vending machine." We profiled Carvana last year when looking at startups hoping to find alternative solutions to car buying. In short, the company sells used cars by purchasing its stock outright and selling directly to customers online. Vehicles go through a thorough 100-point inspection and get photographed before being listed. Customers in 20-plus markets can purchase cars for delivery.

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“We aren’t born woke, something wakes us up“—maybe it’s Twitter, says activist

The Texas Tribune kicked off its weekend symposium by interviewing activist DeRay Mckesson. (credit: Texas Tribune)

AUSTIN, Texas—“We aren't born woke, something wakes us up."

By now, everyone's experienced a newsfeed full of #NoDAPL or long Twitter threads explaining some proposed legislation that threatens a certain cause. With years of social media experience behind us, it's easy for this stuff to feel like white noise. But the next time someone shrugs off any of these posts in the name of social justice as useless, tell them DeRay Mckesson begs to differ. All of it has the ability to help others get "woke," to newly realize there's a problem and a need to combat it. So during his keynote Q&A at the Texas Tribune's weekend symposium on race and policy, the Black Lives Matter activist encouraged everyone to fight toward “equity, justice, and fairness” in the way that works best for them... even if starts as small as a tweet.

For Mckesson, in fact, social media initially proved to be the way of getting involved. Back in August 2014 after the tragic police shooting of unarmed, black teenager Michael Brown, he wanted to go to Ferguson, Missouri, and merely participate in the peaceful response for a weekend. He had no grand plans of country-wide organizing at the time; then the protests spanned 300 days: “I drove nine hours for a weekend, but I guess it's been a long weekend,” Mckesson said of his work since.

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Ford: We’re canceling $1.6B Mexico facility, investing in electric and US plant

Domain review: The Internet can be worse than humanity-ravaging epidemics

Trailer for Domain

Domain, an indie sci-fi thriller borrowing Truman Show themes and Alien aesthetics, starts with a premise near and dear to the genre fan's heart: a deadly virus (here called the Saharan flu) is wiping out most of humanity. But while Domain may initially appear to be just another pandemic parable, it has a decidedly 2016 idea at its core.

For starters, Saharan flu has already killed 5,000 in Germany, Italy, and Egypt, and doctors fear it's spreading beyond their containment abilities. "The World Health Organization says it's potentially civilization-threatening," public broadcasts declare within the film's opening minutes.

Luckily, the WHO has a plan to save some of humanity: the organization has built 500,000 bunkers across the globe. Any healthy person fortunate enough to avoid the virus and win a worldwide lottery needs to immediately get in and stay there while the virus runs its course on the surface. Because no one knows how long that will take, the bunkers have been constructed to last 70 years—these aren't your average doomsday concrete fortresses. Some 30-feet-underground, they have technology to recycle water, maintain air quality, and mimic lighting to distinguish day from night. Each holds only a single human being in order to prevent the spread of any disease. The bunkers have 70 years-worth of freeze dried food and work off power solely generated by a single row-machine.

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Mondo’s collectible figures place infinite details onto your desktop

Nathan Mattise

AUSTIN, Texas—Making action figures—even those with only a vague, 80s-style resemblance—is hard. So as you might expect, making the intricate, high art collectibles offered by Mondo is quite a bit harder.

At last month's MondoCon 2016, the company held a panel to give attendees a peek at its process. Like everything at Mondo, it starts with the posters. The company strives to put as much energy and vision into their collectibles as they do with their trademark prints. For his Harley Quinn poster, for instance, artist Matt Taylor was involved with initial sketching and modeling. However, working toward a collectible instead of a print soon presented Taylor with a much different challenge: limitations via the physical world. "When you draw, you don't think about accurate perspective," he says. "You don't worry if a foot is bent the wrong way or that an arm would be six feet long."

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Zoology review: A tail of individuality in oppressive Russia

Zoology trailer

AUSTIN, Texas—At the genre mecca that is Fantastic Fest, a film about a half-human, half-animal hybrid isn't unusual (see Nova Seed for one example). But Ivan Tverdovsky's Zoology is not straightforward sci-fi. This Russian feature mashes together hyper-realism, a totalitarian society, and midlife self-discovery into a strangely appealing bizarro version of How Stella Got Her Groove Back. If the premise sounds as odd as Anne Hathaway's kaiju movie, it is. But this festival award winner ("Next Wave" Features, first place) is every bit as fun and surprising as Colossal.

If I had a tail...

Natasha works a seemingly routine job in acquisitions at a Russian zoo. At 55-years-old, she's settled into a comfortable routine that she isn't interesting in changing. Keeping in line with the customs of her coastal town, Natasha lives with her aging mother, wears ankle-length skirts and skin-covering sweaters, and generally speaks only when spoken to (which appears to only happen in work meetings and over dinner with Mom).

One day at the office, Natasha faints. Soon after, she's shown (rather artfully) vomiting in the bathroom. Doctors initially give Natasha painkillers for asthenia (extreme physical weakness), but they want to do some follow-ups. Not even office gossip can put a finger on the issue. "Maybe she's pregnant?" one woman suggests over lunch. "Who's the father, then?" says another. "I've never seen her with a man."

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Disaster, magic realism, and post-apocalyptic action get animated at Fantastic Fest

Nathan Mattise

AUSTIN, Texas—Not only do genres run the gamut at Fantastic Fest, the ways they are presented do, too. It's common to see mashups (like Anne Hathaway + kaiju = Colossal) or films with the same basic premise ("documentary about movie posters and artists" executed in totally different ways.

So it should come as no surprise that Fantastic Fest's animated films also embrace this ethos—these aren't your typical Disney-style, kid-friendly cartoons. Three in particular stood out among what we saw: The Red Turtle, Nova Seed, and My Entire High School Sinking Into The Sea. And the only thing these films seem to have in common is their choice to eschew live-action.

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With Mr. Robot’s Joanna Wellick at her meanest, luckily the cast could laugh

The last episode of Decrypted, our Mr. Robot podcast, for S2. (video link)

Warning: This piece contains spoilers for the recent season finale of Mr. Robot as well as the show's entire second season.

Continuing the trend of S2 at large, Mr. Robot's recent season finale may have provided more questions than answers for the series moving forward. However, this latest episode did include one extremely satisfying pay-off: the calculating Joanna Wellick finally revealed her long game.

Wellick's season-spanning arc full of security henchmen, younger DJs, and odd encounters with Elliot finally made sense after her latest encounter with E-Corp CTO Scott Knowles. If you recall, Wellick's husband (Tyrell) killed Knowles' wife (Sharon) towards the end of S1 before disappearing after the 5/9 hacks. And to clear her husband of all charges, Wellick essentially identified the DJ from that night, seduced him over several months, confronted Knowles and coaxed him into attacking her, and then used her bruises as leverage with the DJ to request that he testify to the cops about seeing Knowles fleeing the crime scene.

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Fantastic Fest 2016 documentaries: Fine art, but through movie posters

AUSTIN, Texas—Shocking, I know. But at a hardcore film nerd event like Fantastic Fest—Austin's, if not the US's, premier genre film festival—documentary subjects run the gamut. This year's slate includes big names like Morgan Spurlock (Rats) and Werner Herzog (Salt and Fire, the director's return to South America 35 years after Fitzcarraldo solidified his stature). Other documentaries touched on everything from material wealth at all costs (Fraud) to Stanley Kubrick's chauffeur-turned-personal assistant (S is for Stanley).

Local film critic (and Internet radio legend) Matt Shiverdecker told me that the beauty of Fantastic Fest is that one viewer's least favorite film is inevitably someone else's perfect-10. So at a movie-obsessed festival in a movie-obsessed town (seriously, have you tried a Drafthouse yet?), the two docs that stood out most were, well, movie-obsessed. 24x36 and Original Copy nominally share a singular focus—film posters—but seeing the two docs in tandem highlights the festival's diverse programming. Here, stories suited for the History Channel can immediately follow one more apt for the Sundance-owned IFC.

24x36

Clear some wall space

When Canadian poster collector-turned-director Kevin Burke embarked on his shooting trip to Austin, border patrol stopped him. (After all, here's this dude traveling with an unusual amount of film equipment.) Burke stayed calmed and explained his intent—production work for his documentary 24x36, a "movie about movie posters."

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Colossal review: Everyone has a monster, most aren’t this fun

Isolate him for half a season, but Elliot is still what makes Mr. Robot go

Three generations of Trek fandom (and non-fandom) in the family

Mr. Robot’s tech guru: “My job is to outsmart this hive of geniuses”