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Timothy Leary: How to operate your brains - Anil

One thing about I have come to realize about video contents online is that - there is too much and it is confusing and there is hardly a way to pick the best of what the web has to offer in the vast sea of web videos. It feels like a trap once you are in it and you get misled because it is so hard to focus on one thing. It leads you on and on. Either I am too weak or the web is more powerful!

While in a quest for something to critique on I stumbled unto Leary while reading Cyberia. When one reads about Timothy Leary for the first time, it is impossible to not be curious about him. So I googled his video and pop - there he was talking to humanity about how to operate the brain. The piece was fairly long, around twenty-nine minutes. But as far as the content goes it is definitely in the wrong space for viewing! My critique -

Once you know about this person and what his dying aspirations were, you kind of want to expect certain things of his videos. If you view this video
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7315741545239440953
online it immediately fails to give you just that. It is definitely interesting but fails to entertain - not so much because the content is boring but because any content of this nature needs to be absolutely immersive, both through sight and sound. The laptop totally fails to offer that kind of an experience. On the other hand I could safely assume that some hard-core fans of Tim couldn't care less about the experiences where-ever it may be given their high levels of drug induced state-of-mind!

This video in particular fails to take advantage online merely because of its hopeless quality and succeeds in Tims' promotion. A video like this has to be pleasing to the sight and sound senses to experience it in its full glory. Maybe because of the nature of its content, which is kind of repetitive, I found it quite tedious to sit through the whole 29 minutes. I think 29 minutes of this video on an IMAX would be a riot and absolutely soul-stirring even for those not on drugs. Something like this on TV would not be fun if watched on a 21" screen either. For it to be immersive a big flat screen or on one of those huge TVs would probably do justice. I could also probably see something like this being used by a VJ at a dance club or something.

The only way I felt that this piece of work took advantage of the medium was that it was available there to satisfy my curiosity about Timothy Leary. It did nothing more than that. I would only be entertained by something like this if it were a larger than life experience. In conclusion however, the goods that came out of this video was that I was able to immediately find a lot of other trippy videos of Tim and other similar categories. Also realizing that maybe not everything in the Web is to be taken at face-value, after all most of what is there is "fast-food" entertainment and it is sometimes there because someone simply put it there with no real attention to "how-the-experience-should-be" and all that kind of thought. He put it because he could.Period.