LYCOS RETRIEVER
George Segal
built 647 days ago
The title character, played by George Segal, is a brilliant computer programmer who suffers from epileptic seizures and Acute Disinhibitory Lesion (ADL) syndrome. He has begun experiencing blackouts, and he's gotten in trouble with the law because of violent beatings he's inflicted on people while his cerebral cortex was out to lunch. Looking to help the poor guy out, doctors implant electrodes in his brain and hook them up to a miniature computer implanted in his neck. All this is meant to control his seizures and help prevent him from behaving violently, but Segal goes off his meds, the computer malfunctions, and the next thing you know, he's a misfiring killing machine, lurching about the city laying waste to people and waterbeds, and driven even crazier by his "delusion" that computers are taking over the world and waging war on the human race, a species of paranoia for which he himself could now serve as Exhibit A. After The Terminal Man was released, its message about the dangers of computers was taken to heart by everyone who saw it, the U.S. government banned any further development of computer technology, and Steve Jobs became a street musician. You are reading this on one of those new-fangled text-messaging abacuses.
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George Segal is an American actor, producer, and musician. From a young age George knew he wanted be some sort of a performer. Segal enrolled in Columbia University while playing banjo in a band called the Imperial Jazz. In 1956 he married Marion Sobel. He was soon drafted into the military. Where he served three years and then went back to New York in 1959.
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Bill (George Segal) doesn't have much to lose; he's recently single and will soon be unemployed. He meets his pal Charlie (Elliott Gould) in an LA card house, and the two pair up when they find they make an excellent gambling team. The two embark on a breakneck gambling spree, beginning at Charlie'...
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In 1958, George Segal gladly hung up his pitchfork and converted his chicken coops into a series of studios. That same year, his farm served as the setting of the first "happening" organized by Allan Kaprow. The ensuing multimedia events likely influenced Segal, who, from this time on, began making life-size sculptures of people out of crude materials he was familiar with as a farmer: chicken wire, burlap and plaster. In 1961, using a new type of medical bandage designed to set fractures, Segal began casting his human figures directly from live models, capturing their essential traits, without worrying about details. Plastered white, frozen in stereotypical poses and installed in a realistic environment made even more real by the addition of ready-made props evoking the urban decor, Segal's figures, which convey his keen sense of observation, serve as symbols of a humanity that is dominated by social and material contingencies. His works, which juxtapose individuals and their surroundings, emanate an eerie feeling of alienation.
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Street Crossing, a sculpture George Segal made in 1992, shows a scattering of figures in the act of moving through a fictional crossroads. Caught in an ambiguous psychological terrain, the seven figures seem blind to one another and to their surroundings. Segal had a particular ability to elevate mundane day-to-day activities into a lyrical or elegiac display, depicting his subjects with their guard down and in a naturalistic stance. In the early 1960s, he became known for making works in plaster, which he created by covering his subjects entirely in dry plaster bandages. He began working in bronze in the 1970s, and his works in this medium, including Street Crossing, retain the rough-hewn texture of his familiar plaster cast technique.
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George Segal (1924-2000) was born in New York and raised during the Great Depression on a poultry farm in New Jersey. Educated in New York (at Stuyvesant High School, Pratt, Cooper Union, and finally New York University), he joined the 10th Street scene as a young artist but ... bought his own chicken farm with his wife Helen in the late 1940s. In 1956, Allan Kaprow chose the Segal farm as the site for his first Happening. It was in the late 1950s that Segal began to experiment with sculpture, ultimately casting his own body with plaster bandages. Though known as part of the Pop Art movement, Segal stayed close to the personal and human throughout his career. His work is in major museum collections throughout the United States and abroad.
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