Shane Acker's 9

My Books

I was Assistant Editor on Paul D. Miller a.k.a DJ Spooky's Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture, about which Laurie Anderson said, "What a marvelous collection! I love this book!"

My first book, Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes, is an anthology of interviews with all kinds of minds. Disinformation named it "among the most important books published in 2007," and Erik Davis called it "a crisp and substantial remix of the major memes of the last decade or so."

I have a little piece in Disinformation's first book, You Are Being Lied To, a compendium of dissent, which also includes essays by Noam Chomsky, Howard Bloom, Douglas Rushkoff, Howard Zinn, Richard Metzger, Alex Burns, and Mark Pesce, among many others.

Shane Acker’s 9

September 19th, 2009 | No Comment | Category: Marginalia, Videos

Shane Acker’s computer-animated feature 9 (2009) stitches several well-worn themes into a unique commentary on agency and afterlife.

Crispin Glover as 6

9 is set in a post-apocalyptic dystopia where a world war between humans and machines has left the earth decimated and dreary. The “stitchpunks” (1 through 9) and “The Beast” (a dog-like machine-thing) are the only signs of life, until 9 inadvertently awakens a maniacal mechanical monster. Each of the numbers seem to have his or her own way to deal with the dangers of the world they find themselves in, but cooperation seems to be the only way to avert imminent doom. 1 (Christopher Plummer) rules the reluctant with fear and the brute strength of 8 (Fred Tatasciore), 6 (the inimitable Crispin Glover, pictured above) is the “crazy” seer, 2 (Martin Landau) is the industrious explorer, 5 (John C. Reilly) is the fearful follower, 3 and 4 (who are voiceless) are the researching, collecting archivists, 7 (Jennifer Connelly) is the warrior, and 9 (Elijah Wood) is the level-headed logician with a heart to boot.

Without giving anymore away (see below for that), I just wanted to give props to Acker and company for taking what could have been cliché and making it fun and fresh.

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Here’s Shane Acker’s original short film, 9 (2005) [runtime: 10:38]:

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I marshal the middle between Mathers and McLuhan.

My main interests are figurative language use and the social impacts of technology. My main goal as a writer is to entertain and as a scientist is to find novelty. I’m more of the former than the latter and more of a fan than a critic.

I'm currently a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Communication at The University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as a doctoral student in Communication Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. I'm also working on a book called The Medium Picture, which is under contract with Zer0 Books and will be out in the near future. This site is where I think aloud about all of the above. Read on »