Sophocles once said, 'nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse,' and this couldn't be more true of technology. Programmer's Note: We're pleased to welcome Tiffany Shlain back to the Sundance Film Festival with her new short "Yelp (With Apologies to Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl')." Shlain's previous short films—"Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness" and "The Tribe" screened at the 2003 and 2006 Sundance Film Festivals. Riffing on Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl," "Yelp" is the result of Shlain and her cowriter/husband Ken Goldberg reflecting on their dependency on technology. As Shlain puts it, "I was really feeling like I needed to take one day of the week off from technology. Recently addicted to Twitter, I became the kind of person I hated—the one pulling out her iPhone while actually talking to someone, sneaking e-mail fixes in bathroom stalls. It was getting ugly. Clearly, I needed a technology Shabbat." This year Shlain is the only filmmaker in the Festival with both a short and a feature film—her documentary Connected: An Autoblogography about Love, Death and Technology is screening in the U.S. Documentary Competition.

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