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If you like PKD, Burroughs, or Vonnegut then you should be reading Séb Doubinsky

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At the end of March, the writer Séb Doubinsky should have been traveling across America giving readings from his latest novel The Invisible. Picture him in a busy, crammed bookshop wearing a plaid shirt, leather jacket with steel-rimmed glasses and neatly-trimmed beard. He sits at a table with a pile of books to his left, a glass of water to his right, the audience in front. Some sit in chairs, some stand around the edges with arms folded, heads tilted, all listening to Doubinsky’s strong, clear voice. There are questions then a long-line of bright-eyed readers waiting to shake his hand, take pictures, and get their copies signed.

In another reality this all happened. Turn the page, there’s someone at the back, leaning against shelves laden with bright, clean paperbacks asking:

What is your earliest memory?

Sébastien Doubinsky: My earliest memory is actually a patchwork of scenes from my childhood in America, between 1966 and 1968. I can see myself playing with my favorite toys, which were rubber Mattel astronauts, watching black-and-white Spiderman cartoons sitting upside down on the sofa, riding in my father’s dark blue huge station-wagon, going to Space Needle’s fun park and having a blast… Very vivid memories, in color, which have certainly influenced the very way I write, like Pop Art—or rather Anti-Pop Art, as Rosenquist called it—and Punk well, much later.

But a virus stopped all this. Doubinsky is in lockdown at his home in Denmark. If anyone could have seen such a deadly pandemic coming then it was him. He had already written about a similar outbreak in Absinth—the story of the Apocalypse with ancient Gods attempting a new order, the publishing of a new gospel according to Jesus (“Burn all churches”), and an outbreak of Ebola that claims the lives of the President and the Vice-President. There’s hope for us yet! Doubinsky saw it coming.

What the Corona crisis taught us: all useful people are underpaid and all useless people are overpaid and decide who will live or die.

Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider that gave him, in some unfathomable way, arachnid powers of strength and agility to jump great heights, climb walls, and have a tingling spider sense that alerted him to danger. At some point, most kids want to be Peter Parker, but then they give up on their imagination and subscribe to another’s imposed order.

August 1963, copies of The Amazing Spider-Man #3 were in bookshop carousels when Sébastien Doubinsky was born at a Parisian cinema. Spidey was fighting a new enemy the “grotesque Dr. Octopus.” Doubinsky’s parents had been watching a Hollywood western. They never saw the end of it. Celebrating the birth of a son was more important. Arriving at a hospital, Mother and child were doing fine. Father then found some work in America. Doubinsky spent his early years growing-up in the States watching TV and marveling at the unchanging blue sky. What’s your earliest memory? “I already answered that.”

Back in Paris, Doubinsky discovered a copy of William S. Burroughs’ The Ticket That Exploded while visiting his Aunt’s apartment on the Avenue René Coty. It was a weird looking book with a weird sounding title. Doubinsky sat down and read it. He was blown away. He might not have understood it but he knew he loved it. He had discovered his superpowers.

When did you first think seriously about becoming a writer and why?

SD: It’s rather a difficult question to answer, as there were many stages in this decision—at least until it became a rationally formulated one. I come from a very intellectual background, culturally mixed (Jewish and Catholic, but both my parents were leftists and radical atheists) and extremely open to other cultures. What’s more, both sides of my family had been very active in the French Résistance during World War Two, and I therefore inherited quite a strong human-rights ethic. All this to say that literature was not a passive element of my upbringing, but was seen as a powerful object that could serve the best or the worst causes, and that it was important.

Growing up I loved poetry, and for a long time wanted to be a poet (but also a painter, until I discovered I was colorblind…) but little by little, prose seeped in and took more and more space. I began to write some short stories in my late teenage years, but still not really considering dedicating myself seriously. The tragedy that sealed my writer’s fate was the suicide of my beloved cousin Bruno, then, like me, 20 years old. He had introduced me to punk and New Wave—especially The Cure, Bauhaus and all the darker stuff—and in his last note, he told me I should carry on writing “my great stuff.” That’s when the weight of words and the responsibility attached to writing hit me like a runaway train. That’s the day I really became, in my eyes, a “writer.”
 
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More from Sébastien Doubinsky, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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05.21.2020
08:25 am
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The Future’s watching You: ‘Gaitkeeper,’ more dystopian animation from John Butler
01.01.2020
07:08 am
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New Year, new you? Maybe. You can change the way you live and what you want to do. You can change your looks, your attitude, your friends, your hair. But there are some things you can’t change and the state knows that.

When Robert De Niro was de-aged for Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman he might have looked years younger but his bodily movements identified him as old. The idea that our body movements can identify our age, sex, and to an extent exactly who we are has led governments (like China) to use body motion technologies to keep tabs on its population.

Filmmaker John Butler has just released a short animation highlighting this new form of state surveillance. Called Gaitkeeper, a nice little play on words, Butler’s latest film aims to expose how governments are using body motion technology to control their citizens. I caught up with Butler this morning and asked about Gaitkeeper.

What inspired your new animation?

John Butler: Lots of artists have been doing things on facial recognition, and how to thwart/evade it, and it’s a well worn theme. My aim is to look at the new science of ‘gait recognition’, which is being tested as part of China’s social credit system. I’m sure you know about that, it’s the techtalitarian system of assigning each citizen a score for good behaviour, which relies heavily on digital surveillance tools such as facial recognition.

In a ‘solid state’, purchasing nappies is good, and buying alcohol is bad. A cashless system makes every transaction visible, so nosey journalists can often find themselves unable to book flights or even access the web.

Gait Recognition works on the assumption that your walk is as individual as your face or fingerprint, and I would agree. It allows identification from a distance and in cases where the face is obscured.

And you’ve used motion capture for this film?

JB Since motion capture is central to my art, I thought it was an obvious thing to do, especially since getting my own smartsuit. It is also a blatant attempt to be first in the field!

I was interested in the spat between Scorsese and Marvel, which you’ll know all about. In particular, he has used all of Marvel’s pioneering ageing/de-ageing tech to make The Irishman. One review praised how well it was done, but mentions the fact that De Niro “walks like a 70 year old…”

I think this backs up the theory that we are not images, but a compendium of behaviors. In the first Ant Man, they de-aged Michael Douglas, but he still has his older voice.

Another example is from Final Fantasy in 2000. This was the first attempt at a mocap film, and was a box office bomb. What surprised me was how James Woods, one of the most distinctive actors around, sounded like anyone else, when put into a synthetic character. I conclude that James Woods cannot be split into components. You need the hyper kinetic body language, the shifty look, the narrow face etc….

Our movement, motion, is as distinctive as our faces, and this will soon be captured and interned. Gaitkeeper is a biometric control suite designed to counter the challenge of “Locomotive Camouflage.”

Is that how you think we can counter governments using motion capture against us?

JB: Yes, with Gaitkeeper I’m imagining a time when performance artists and dance specialists will be in demand to train civic insurgents in the art of Locomotive Camouflage. It’s also “The Ministry of Silly Walks,” for the age of surveillance.

Gaitkeeper depicts a training and deployment phase, and a carivalesque riot inspired by the umbrellas of Hong Kong.
 

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
John Butler: Changing the world one animation at a time
A song of praise to the future: John Butler’s new speculative animation ‘Acrohym’
‘The Ethical Governor’ and the Genius of John Butler

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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01.01.2020
07:08 am
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High Anxiety: The surreal & disturbingly dreamlike paintings of George Tooker
10.09.2017
12:44 am
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‘Children and Spastics’ (1946).
 
Looking at George Tooker’s painting “Subway” (1950), with its central figure of a woman (possibly pregnant) walking among the clean, cold, and slightly dehumanizing landscape of an underground station with its suspicious looking men in trench coats and hats, reminded me of the opening lines to Dante’s Inferno:

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.

So bitter is it, death is little more;
But of the good to treat, which there I found,
Speak will I of the other things I saw there.

I cannot well repeat how there I entered,
So full was I of slumber at the moment
In which I had abandoned the true way.

The words seemed to fit. Mainly because of the feelings Tooker’s painting engenders. It’s hardly an original thought to say we’ve all felt, at some point, lost, alone, or alienated from our environment—our actions curtailed by extraneous forces or expectations. But it’s one that is still, nevertheless, true.

The idea that Tooker’s work connects in some immediate, non-verbal way with its audience has led critics to align him with Surrealism, Magical Realism, Social Realism, and even Photorealism. Tooker was never happy with any of these descriptions as they limited, pigeon-holed, and gave a glib answer to a far more complex question. Tooker described himself as a figurative painter who considered paintings as “an attempt to come to terms with life.” Where there are “as many solutions as there are human beings.”

Born in 1920, Tooker came from a middle-class Brooklyn family. In the 1930s, his parents relocated the family to Bellport, NY, where Tooker spent part of youth wandering around the exhibits at the local art museums getting hip to the work of Renaissance and Dutch artists. To ensure he had a good qualification, he studied English at Harvard. He then enlisted in the Marine Corps during the Second World War but was discharged on health grounds. With a degree to fall back on and no expectations to fight in the war, Tooker returned to Brooklyn where he chased his primary ambition to become an artist. He enrolled at the Art Students League of New York and mixed and met with the various teachers and contemporaries who were to shape his thinking about art and help develop his style as an artist. Chief among these were Paul Cadmus (who was briefly Tooker’s lover) and Jared French (who was Cadmus’s lover). These artists were figurative painters who had adopted the Renaissance technique of using tempera —a fast-drying painting medium utilizing colored pigment and egg yolk or a similar binder. Tooker similarly painted in tempera. But unlike Cadmus and French, whose work has a homo-erotic subtext, Tooker painted an impression of the world that was as emotionally powerful and as vivid as dreams.

I am after painting reality impressed on the mind so hard that it returns as a dream, but I am not after painting dreams as such, or fantasy.

In his early painting Children and Spastics (1946), a group of children intimidates three gay men in an alien and austere landscape. The men adopt poses as the children assault them with broomsticks and verbal abuse. Their response is defensive, ironic, and one that is expected by society (their tormentors). This painting set a style through which Tooker depicted the world as alienating and oppressive yet sometimes often comforting to the figures who inhabited it (Supermarket, Bathers, Waiting Room).

In the early 1950s, Tooker and all the other figurative artists were eclipsed by the arrival of Abstract Expressionism which critics claimed better reflected the angst of the atomic age. Unfazed by the fickle tastes of critics and art markets, Tooker continued painting his succinct critiques of modern life, producing some of his most powerful work (Highway, Government Bureau, Lunch, Landscape with Figures, and Ward) in the succeeding years.

Tooker’s artwork defies easy categorization. In a way, his paintings tell a history of modern America, its hopes, fears, and moral complexities, from 1950 onwards. This content has a timeless quality and an immediacy that keeps it as relevant today as when first painted.
 
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‘Dance’ (1946).
 
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‘Subway’ (1950).
 
See more of Tooker’s compelling work, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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10.09.2017
12:44 am
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Dreamy sci-fi paintings show the world after an alien invasion
07.22.2016
09:30 am
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While science fiction is a rich genre for both film and literature, the visual art it inspires—most frequently relegated to the covers of bad paperbacks—is very often astoundingly corny, regardless of how good the book it’s interpreting might actually be. Really good sci-fi art is really hard to come by, another reason why Simon Stålenhag is so singular; his post-invasion landscapes are dreamy, intense, and mysterious—completely devoid of the heavy-handed cheese one normally associates with paintings of robots and/or aliens taking over the earth.

Stålenhag has complied his work into two high-concept art books, Tales from the Loop and the sequel Things from the Flood, which comes out in November but is available for pre-order now. Ground Zero for Stålenhag’s dystopia is an alternative Sweden from his own ’80s and ’90s childhood, where experiments with a massive particle accelerator—“The Loop”—go terribly wrong. Despite the disaster, Stålenhag likes to focus on the quiet and the mundane countryside, now irrevocably altered by mysterious invaders. Still, there is an intimacy to his work, with special attention to the domestic lives, childhoods and romances of the people living in this chaotic new world.
 

 

 
Much more of Simon Stålenhag’s work after the jump…

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Posted by Amber Frost
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07.22.2016
09:30 am
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Dystopia is boring: Creepy images of our vaguely Orwellian lives
08.05.2015
12:12 pm
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Mark Fisher is a lecturer at Goldsmiths at the University of London, working in the Department of Visual Cultures. He specializes in “the voice and horror; the relationship between 90s cyber-theory, speculative realism and contemporary materialism; and music and attention.”

If I have my facts correct—parsing Facebook always requires some degree of guesswork—Fisher started a “Community” on Facebook dedicated to documenting the pervasive feeling of unease and discontent, often including an aspect of bland social control, in the form of mildly “coercive” signs that you might see at the airport, but sometimes simply showing processes and buildings in a state of disrepair.

A few weeks ago he upgraded it to a “Public Group,” mainly to allow his fellow dystopia documenters to upload pictures freely. All of the images on this page come from that second thing, the Public Group.

The “About” page of the first entity is admirable in its brevity and lack of pomp. All it says is, “Neoliberal England is a boring dystopia. Here’s why.” After all, if the images don’t communicate it, then no amount of rhetoric will make the group one worth visiting. There is little partisan emphasis on Labour vs. Tories as the source of any of this, which makes the critique somewhat more potent, and it’s the case that the images almost uniformly derive from the U.K.—this group is not about documenting the U.S. culture of “IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING.” No, the great elders of dystopia, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, both happened to be British, and this project feels most of all like a tempered, less hyperbolic presentation of the IngSoc of Airstrip One, for those who remember the setting of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Paul Bareham, who runs the blog called Island of Terror where I first learned of this page (and who has contributed to the group), coins the clever phrase “The Evil of Banality” and comments astutely,
 

This dystopia is held in place by neglect, by apathy, by a lack of resources, by a lack of interest. Everything is falling apart, but we lack the money and energy to make it right. …

Local authorities and other central civil organisations are not instrumental in the boring dystopia, they are subsumed by it, just like everybody else. Lacking money, resources and motivation, their interventions are confined to putting up signs, or erecting fences and barriers to keep members of the public away from areas that they already have no interest in.

 
My favorite aspects are (as often, for me) the texty bits, the bland, over-reaching signs, which attempt to placate the reader into submission. Whether the tone is one of literally impossible friendliness, manipulative assurances of competence, or bald-faced directives to obey, the persistent tone of (at best) benign, incompetent control is maintained.

Here is a selection of “Boring Dystopia” images. In all cases you can click on the image to see a better view.
 

 

 
Many, many more of these fascinating pictures after the jump…..
 

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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08.05.2015
12:12 pm
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Yacht: From Utopia to Dystopia via ‘Shangri-La’
07.26.2011
11:15 am
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Fans of forward thinking pop music and alternative/electonica, here’s something that’s definitely worth checking out - it’s the new video (and album Shangri-La) from DFA’s Yacht.

A little bit arty, a little bit metrosexual, Yacht have been round in some form or other for nearly a decade, so while their aesthetic might seem achingly hip and oh-so-now, it helps to remember that they’ve been doing it longer than most. Centred around the core duo of Jona Bechtolot and Claire Evans (Evans joining Brechtolot in what was previously a solo act in 2008), their live show expands the ranks to become a fuller five piece band.

Although having released albums on smaller independent labels in the past, Yacht are now part of the DFA stable, and fit very neatly into that label’s bracket of electronic rock, wearing those particular disco-meets-punk and electronica influences on their sleeve. Their recent live shows have seen them cover both the B-52’s “Mesopotamia” and Judas Priest’s “Breaking The Law” both of which make sense for different reasons. I gotta admit that I was not much of a fan of Yacht in the past, but this new album has taken me by surprise. It’s pretty damn good, and contains a few really cracking tunes, such as “Love In The Dark”, “Beam Me Up” and “Tripped And Fell In Love”. 

Worthy of particular mention though are the album’s two opening tracks, “Utopia” and “Dystopia (The Earth Is On Fire)”, which lay out Shangri-La‘s themes of dualism from the get go. Although they are two separate tracks, they have been both comped into one video, which is quite the novel idea and makes me wonder if it has been done before? Either way the video is great and definitely worth a watch - it may be cheap but it is very well done. However, if you are not a fan of triangles, you might want to look away…

Yacht - “Utopia” / “Dystopia (The Earth Is On Fire)”
 

 
Yacht - “Love In The Dark”
 

 
Yacht - “Tripped And Fell in Love”
 

 
Shangri-La is available to buy here.

Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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07.26.2011
11:15 am
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Top 10 books Americans tried to ban last year

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You’d think that people who actually go to the effort of visiting libraries, taking books from them, and then reading said books, would be a little more enlightened as to the harm posed to society by banning books. Alas no, as yesterday the American Library Association published its list of the ten books library patrons tried to have banned last year, known as the “Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2010”. I’m not familiar with a lot of work on this list, as I don’t tend to read “young adult”-type fiction, but there are some surprising choices on here: 

1. And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson
Reasons: Homosexuality, religious viewpoint, unsuited to age group

2. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
Reasons: Offensive language, racism, sex education, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group, violence

3. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Reasons: Insensitivity, offensive language, racism, sexually explicit

4. Crank by Ellen Hopkins
Reasons: Drugs, offensive language, sexually explicit

5. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Reasons: Sexually explicit, unsuited to age group, violence

6. Lush by Natasha Friend
Reasons: Drugs, offensive language, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group

7. What My Mother Doesn’t Know by Sonya Sones
Reasons: Sexism, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group

8. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America by Barbara Ehrenreich
Reasons: Drugs, inaccurate, offensive language, political viewpoint, religious viewpoint

9. Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology edited by Amy Sonnie
Reasons: Homosexuality, sexually explicit

10. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
Reasons: Religious viewpoint, violence

Brave New World? Are they serious?! A dystopian critique set in a future world where books are banned, and they want to ban the book? Then again maybe the pro-ban lobby are actually really progressive, as surely I am not the only who has though that Huxley’s future of mood controlling drugs and casual sex is actually kind of appealing. But I can think of much heavier dystopian work that would seem more suitable for banning. I guess it’s just the sex that’s offensive.

Barbara Jones of the ALA has made a statement about the banning of books, included here in a section from the Guardian’s article on the list:

There were 348 reports of efforts to remove books from America’s shelves in 2010, down from 460 the previous year. But the ALA believes the majority of challenges go unreported, and called on Americans to “protect one of the most precious of our fundamental rights – the freedom to read”.

“While we firmly support the right of every reader to choose or reject a book for themselves or their families, those objecting to a particular book should not be given the power to restrict other readers’ right to access and read that book,” said Barbara Jones, director of the ALA’s office for intellectual freedom. “As members of a pluralistic and complex society, we must have free access to a diverse range of viewpoints on the human condition in order to foster critical thinking and understanding.”

 

Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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04.13.2011
09:22 am
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Top 10 books Americans tried to ban last year
Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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04.13.2011
08:32 am
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21-87: How Arthur Lipsett Influenced George Lucas’s Career

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By the time Montreal-born filmmaker Arthur Lipsett made his nine-and-a-half-minute long dystopian short 21-87 in 1963, he was well-aware of the power of abstract collage film. His short from two years earlier, Very Nice, Very Nice was a dizzying flood of black & white images accompanied by bits of audio he’d collected from the trash cans of the National Film Board while he was working there. And wildly enough, it got nominated for a Best Short Subject Oscar in 1962.

But with 21-87, the then-27-year-old Lipsett was not only using moving images, he was also refining his use of sound. And it got the attention of the young USC film student George Lucas, who’d fallen in love with abstract film while going to Canyon Cinema events in the San Francisco Bay area. 21-87’s random and unsettling visions of humans in a mechanistic society accompanied by bits of strangely therapeutic or metaphysical dialogue, freaky old-time music, and weird sound effects, affected Lucas profoundly, according to Steve Silberman in Wired magazine:

’When George saw 21-87, a lightbulb went off,’ says Walter Murch, who created the densely layered soundscapes in [Lucas’s 1967 student short] THX 1138 and collaborated with Lucas on American Graffiti. ‘One of the things we clearly wanted to do in THX-1138 was to make a film where the sound and the pictures were free-floating. Occasionally, they would link up in a literal way, but there would also be long sections where the two of them would wander off, and it would stretch the audience’s mind to try to figure out the connection.’

Famously, Lucas would later use 21-87 as the number Princess Leia’s cell in Star Wars. But although his success allowed him freedom at the NFB, Lipsett’s psychological problems would lead him to commit suicide in 1986, two weeks before he turned 50.
 

 
After the jump, compare with Lucas’s equally bewildering short Electronic Labyrinth: THX-1138 4EB!
 

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Posted by Ron Nachmann
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07.24.2010
02:02 am
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