... You're going to need it."

M dot Strange’s YouTube trailer for his film “We are the Strange” doesn't use cute kittens falling asleep or lonely people talking to their cameras. Instead, a collision of images (anime, dolls, video games) and sound (music, voice over, noise) introduce us to his cryptic fairy tale. It is, at first watch, jarring, frenetic, and verging on the ridiculous, the tagline reading: "Monster's Inc! meets the Nightmare Before Christmas inside of a retro Japanese video game!" The Jan. 22 New York Times article “M dot Strange Finds a Way at Sundance” proposes that an increasing number of virtual outlets are allowing filmmakers like Michael Belmont (M dot Strange’s real “handle”) to reach audiences otherwise nonexistent, to challenge "the traditional models of film production, distribution and animation.”

Opportunities to “screen” films on sites such as YouTube and Second Life are enabling filmmakers and audiences to talk to one another in what appear to be free and open exchanges. Perhaps creating a virtual universe wherein communities emerge that allow and support these kinds of endeavors is a way to poke at traditional definitions of the “global” or the “international.” When our virtually real lives begin to appear in real reality, what happens? Even though Sundance and the rest of us may not be ready for “We are the Strange,” as Lynn Hershman Leeson, filmmaker and artist, says in the article, “We have two streams [Sundance and Second Life] that we hope will eventually become many. And that’s really exciting.”

Exciting, yes—but scary, too. There is a constructed sense of community and belonging that's at once alluring and misleading. As we increasingly depend on the virtual to supplant or (even so far as to) entirely replace the actual, technology more and more seems to promise the real, the actual, the truth. Now, we are more dependent on what (e.g. TV, mobile phones, the Internet) French theorist Paul Virilio has called “simulators of proximity ,” pushing us more and more toward a world where the lines of real/nonreal are disappearing. The trailer of "We are the Strange" says this of our protagonist: "He's always lived in dreams. Now reality is trying to wake him up." Maybe it's the same for us and we have to ask what happens when we turn the computer, the television, the telephones off and wake up from these dreams.

I am a senior double concentrator in International Relations (Global Security) and Modern Culture & Media. My studies have been primarily focused on the transformation of warfare—for better and for worse—and how this has and continues to affect the ways in which we conceptualize the enemy. I am also interested in how media and technology are involved with these shifts in perception. Being IR and MCM, I have spent many long nights reading media/visual, culture, critical and international relations theory and know that my experience in both fields can add to the seminar’s “dialogical” exchanges and I hope to be a part of what M dot Strange would call a "mega hella awesome" seminar.