Yes, that's Bill Gates at right, tossing a floppy disk into the air.On Tuesday, September 18, at 7:30 PM, the Writers House will feature film-maker Sarah J. Christman and her film Dear Bill Gates.
The 16 mm film is 17 minutes long and was made in 2006. It's described this way: "A simple correspondence evolves into a poetic visual essay exploring the ownership of our visual history and culture. Combining original and archival film, video and images from the internet, Dear Bill Gates draws unexpected connections among mining, memory and Microsoft." More here.
Sarah Christman is a Philadelphia based independent media producer whose films have screened internationally. She has edited for both television and independent film, including the High Definition media arts channel Moovlab. Sarah received her MFA in Film & Media Arts at Temple University. She is the co-founder of Memory Bank Media, a post-production studio that specializes in the digital preservation of home movies and photographs.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
