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Monday, December 25, 2017

Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1992)


Film by David Blair. It's the first independent feature film to have been edited on a digital non-linear system. It is also the first film (independent or otherwise) to have been re-formatted as hypertext and posted on the internet.
"Wax: Or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees," had to be reduced from full color to a blurry black and white. And true, the spotty audio occasionally went silent. But coming as companies in the cable TV, telephone and computer industries are hot on the trail of 500-channel, all-digital TV, let history record that Saturday night marked the first baby steps in that direction.
The movie, an 85-minute feature by David Blair about a beekeeper who ends up being kept by the bees, has attracted a cult following since its release in 1992. Mr. Blair transmitted it Saturday night from a film production studio in midtown Manhattan. He played it on a VCR and fed it into a computer that converted it into digital form and fed it into the Internet. Promises, Promises
Mr. Blair's effort demonstrated that while information industry giants like Tele-Communications Inc., A.T.& T. and Time Warner are tantalizing the nation with promises of hundreds of channels of ultra-high-resolution interactive pictures transmitted via fiber-optic superhighways, the technology is still in its infancy.
Indeed, it was not until halfway through the digital network premier of "Wax" that the engineers gathered at an office of Sun Microsystems Inc. in Mountain View, Calif., were even able to find the movie signal in the Internet datastream and direct it to play on their color work stations. -  New York Times

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