Nieman Storyboard

I write about storytelling and technology for Harvard's Nieman Storyboard.

See my essays at Nieman Storyboard

What's the Buzz?

Monkeying with Story in the Hive Mind

The idea of the hive is both terrifying and compelling — terrifying in that we don't want to lose our individuality, yet compelling in that we often yearn to be a part of something larger than ourselves. These contradictory desires are both old and deep in us. Different eras may have striven for one over the other, or have had different levels of awareness about the pushes and pulls, but the struggle predates the biological metaphors we use to explain it, and it certainly predates any informational metaphors we've come up with since.

I don't think the hive is minded. I've sat in enough meetings to know that fruitful collaboration is the exception, not the rule. But — something is happening; something is different about our era, and that something hinges directly on our technologies of storytelling.

Continued on Nieman Storyboard

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Flow

Cellphones and the etiquette of the expanded self

Nothing prepares you for your first time.

You're out with someone, maybe a date, maybe just friends, everything's fine, and then he whips it out, right in front of you—at a restaurant, on the street, anywhere. You try not to look at it, you try to look absolutely anywhere else—finally he finishes and puts it away and continues on with the conversation, just like nothing happened. Or maybe he airs it out for awhile, or even—casually—holds onto it, in case it vibrates.

You know, the phone.

Continued on Nieman Storyboard

Short Attention Span Theater

What vaudeville has to teach us about the benefits of multitasking.

Consider a book, back in the day when we had time for them. What may be absorption and focus from one angle could be irresponsible escapism from another. What are you doing with yourself while reading that book? Hiding from your surroundings, spending hours of time alone and immobile, emerging to measure real things in your life by the imaginary story? Replace "book" with "Internet" and this looks a lot like addiction.

Continued on Nieman Storyboard

There's No App for That

CB Radio versus Twitter

Everything is moving too fast, and there’s too much of it. No one has time for anything except the "app": that little predigested package with soft rounded corners, popping up with a factoid, and then disappearing again with a click. What the app is meant to do or say almost doesn't matter, as long as it's fast. That's our working assumption; it's common sense, it's understood: everything's too much, everything's too trivial, everything's too fast. We're stranded in the shallows and are gasping for depth. Yes, that's how our world is. Yes, those are our problems.

But what if it isn't? And what if they aren't?

Continued on Nieman Storyboard

HiLobrow

I write about art and the virtual life for HiLobrow.com, where I was also their first virtual Artist-in-Residence (December 2009).

See all my essays at HiLobrow.com

Our Amelia

Amelia Earhart's last flight, from her perspective

You want to know what happened? I'll tell you what happened. The very first thing that happened was, we crashed.

Continued on HiLobrow

Pop-Up Apotheosis

At play in the fields of the word

But despite the long gestation, the instantiation of the pop-up had been implicit in the printed word. Even before advent of the codex, which eventually supplied the necessary mechanism in its binding and opening, the z-axis is essential to any kind of reading along a plane. Your eyes are not down there in Flatland, wrestling As and Bs as you bogsnorkle through them to Z. Your eyes are above the reading plane, triangulating the copy into comprehension and communication.

Continued on HiLobrow

Trailing Vortices

If we lived underwater, our stars would be frozen points of light

For we live at the bottom of a vast sea of fluid, our homeomorphic ball swimming in atmospheres of varying viscosity and still-mysterious mechanism, punctuated — perhaps — by proofs and possibilities.

Continued on HiLobrow

The ABCs of Data-War

Wikileaks versus the silence of the bees

This was not even a test. If this had been a real data-war, the signal would have gone silent; and you might have, as well.

Continued on HiLobrow

A Cyborg Manifest(ed)

Does the cyborg wish to be free?

The popular image is of cyborg as supermodel: a streamlined, metallic mannequin, the flexibility of flesh reinforced with the precision of steel and circuitry; a robot of symmetrical form and shimmering mechanism; an ikon of immortality, flickering agelessly through mechanical reproduction. We are these things, yes. And have been in metaphor, well before any rude augmentation was imagined, or attempted. But this model, super- or otherwise, is not the best image of the cyborg.

Continued on HiLobrow

Pascal's Endgame

Using animals to augment our epistemology, in a deadly race between perception and perfection

And what are we doing? When we are not overfishing, paving, clearcutting, drilling, emitting, genetically engineering, etc.? We are measuring. We are using the narwhals to gather data. We are recording the absence of amphibians, we are dissecting any bee bodies we can find, looking for microscopic clues. We are checking caves off a list, and mapping the closures. Worldwide it is business as usual, while we wait for all the facts to come in.

Continued on HiLobrow

Of Age

At the close of the Heroic Age dawns the Age of the Commute

The great discovery of our Age is: it's not what we can discover, it's what we can make of it. And this making-of is an open-source, democratic creativity. The playfulness is necessary to get us thinking outside of boundaries long etched in our assumptions. And in the play of imagination and the redrafting of boundaries, we might create new worlds. The ones the next Age might discover.

Continued on HiLobrow

Spacetime Bandits

Where you are depends on when you are

There’s a fascinating recent trend in art about place that takes an almost fractalized approach to size. By scaling the work down—way, way down—it turns out that it has as much potential for complexity and meaning as the previous era's scaled-up offerings. One might call it locative art, or walking tours, but the trend encompasses more than text and audio, and involves more than virtual incursions into physical environments, or GPS. And it turns as much on time as it does space.

Continued on HiLobrow

Mood Indigo

Fiction: The Ministry of Love reimagined as a lifestyle marketing agency

Who wouldn't want to be improved, better? That's what all the advertising is about, after all. And the advertising is right.

Continued on HiLobrow

Testing the Turing Test

We know you're artificial. But are you intelligent? Take this helpful quiz!

Because between the steroids and the silicon and the Prozac and the prosthetics and the Apps and the internet and the pesticides and the petroglyphs and the memes and the synthgenes and the kittenball entanglements of text and 3G, we augment always and everywhere.

Take the quiz on HiLobrow

Top Kill Fail

Fiction: a new mythology for the Age of Oil

Not all underground rivers are the Styx. But each boasts its own personal Cerberus, waiting patiently on the far bank. Perhaps you have wondered what you would say, if confronted with the beast? Would you whisper him well, lull him with song, prove to the Lord of the Underworld that you could best his pet? Perhaps; perhaps not. An idle thought for an idle moment; the era of the ancients is long past. You have no wish to make such a journey. You are content to live within time, to surrender your claim on mythology. No matter—it will come to you.

Continued on HiLobrow

Freudian Slip

Just what the Herr Doktor ordered

Freud showed us how we construct, and reconstruct, the self in language. No other architect has given us such freedom at the same time as such structure—if you've tried, you know how hard it is to really change. And if you’ve tried hard enough, you also know it can be done. You seek alteration? To alteration find, you must tell different stories; and they must be convincing, not just for you, but for everyone. Because the storied self is not a solitary affair, it is a group effort—it resonates in him that gives, and him that takes.

Continued on HiLobrow

Mercerism

Fiction: a telepath on Twitter

When I woke up my eyes had darkened from blue to green, and I could hear everything. Read minds I mean. It sounds shocking but it wasn't; thoughts are soft, like air or rain. A constant murmur. People think more quietly than they speak, that's for sure! I heard them well before I actually woke up, and thought I was either dreaming or they were actual voices, fading in and out. Luckily by this time I was 14 and knew better than to say anything. It would be open season, me "trying to act special," again. None of us were special. I knew that.

Continued on HiLobrow

The Buzz

Cocktail Recipe

Shake all ingredients except cayenne with ice long and hard to completely emulsify the egg. Strain into a lowball glass without ice, and top with a pinch of cayenne, for the sting. Serve with a little dance that indicates how to get back to the bar.

Ingredients on HiLobrow

Ghost Townies

Ghost towns—once inhabited, now wild and empty. Or are they...?

You might think such a detailed, almost photojournalistic overview would provide a perfect narrative frame—or better, game; a treasure hunt for a protagonist. The residue of a quest or a life, the intersections of action and adventure, are known to the present and the future alike only by their more substantial, slower-to-decay artifacts. Detail shots present baroque yet spare dioramas, with room for technology’s inevitable embeds and immersions. Imagine: the woman is walking, here. The man will look, there. The child drops the toy, then becomes distracted by a plane out the window: a frame, a "still," and we project the quickening and the reeling forth.

Continued on HiLobrow

I, Avatar

We're all mutants. And that's good!

We have always had virtual selves, from the minute we imagined anything not in the immediate vicinity, or the other minute when we remembered the location of the winter cave. The minute the future and the past arrived, the minute we drew an arrow or a hand with three fingers on a wall, the minute we spoke, or otherwise communicated to, another being, was the minute we became virtual. I don't mean the mind/body problem. I mean the mind is the body's problem, the virtual is literally, physically, real. And we manipulate both when we manipulate one.

Continued on HiLobrow

Eloi and Morlocks

The artist versus the day job

Hey! I bet you're wondering how an artist makes a living, especially when I don't make anythings. I have a day job of course. I design patterns in software to enhance emotional reactions, which in turn enable businesses to run more like machines. I get paid to build utopia—but not for you. Or for me: for them. I work in IT.

Continued on HiLobrow

Brattle Theater Film Notes

Blogging film theory for the Brattle Theater, Cambridge, MA

Capra, Bogart, Welles, Nicholson, Bresson, sci-fi, westerns, country music, war, Japan, and more.

See all my essays at Brattle Theater Film Notes

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

It turns out that there are more than two unreliable narrators in the tale, and the twists and turns become so tightly interwoven yet messily realistic that some viewers might want to see the film twice to sort it all out. Love is a probability cloud of many possible states and orbits. And while stories may trace their trajectories through time, we yearn to stop and touch. Happily ever after, or ever after at all, will be up to Joel and Clementine, or what you imagine them to be. The film stops where stories should: reality, after all, requires more than a rhetorical flourish.

Continued on Brattle Theater Film Notes

Grizzly Man

Werner Herzog is uniquely positioned to tell this tale. Throughout his prolific career Herzog has been fascinated with extremes—of man, of nature, of the lengths to which we will go to find meaning, substance, wonder, or the fabled far edges of the earth. By mapping the negative spaces of extremity, Herzog has shown us in ever-sharper outline what it means to be human, what it means to be wild, and what it might mean to be free. And as well he has an eye for the absurd, for in the seeming contradictions of our behavior and beliefs often lies the key, not to what we make of it all, but what we all might make of each other.

Continued on Brattle Theater Film Notes

Fight Club

Culture-jamming is often, although not necessarily, political. But the culture-jamming of Fight Club is most definitely political. A hard-nosed socio-economic critique wrapped in a mystery inside a comedy, the implications will stay with you long after you leave the theater. The critique reaches both "out," to the financial system and the culture at large, and "in," to what you feel, why you act, and who you think you are.

Continued on Brattle Theater Film Notes

The Magnificent Ambersons

Life is not about "out with the old, in with the new." It's not necessarily about love, or money. It's not even about finding yourself or having adventures. It's about the relationships you end up having, or that end up having you. Those stories may not fit into a top-ten list of themes and plots, but they are rich, and unpredictable, and worth telling, and may reveal more about what it all means than happily ever after, after all.

Continued on Brattle Theater Film Notes

It's A Wonderful Life

The film tells the story of George Bailey of Bedford Falls, a stand-up guy played by incomparable everyman Jimmy Stewart, who has devoted his entire life to his family, his business, and doing the right thing, to the exclusion of his own ambitious (and perhaps unrealistic) dreams. How's that working out? As the story opens he's 40 and about to throw himself off the town bridge.

Continued on Brattle Theater Film Notes

Five Easy Pieces

The most famous scene is of Bobby ordering toast in the diner. Toast is not on the menu. So Bobby tries to order a chicken salad sandwich, hold the mayo, hold the lettuce, hold the chicken... he does not get his toast. That he doesn't get his toast is only further confirmation of the fact that he has not found a place in either high- or lowbrow culture. It is not on the menu.

Continued on Brattle Theater Film Notes

Pickpocket

So if Pickpocket is not about emotions, what is it about? It is about daily life, about the details of going about one's business, legal and otherwise. It is about the power of an idea, and how that can work in a very material way for good or evil in someone's life. And it is about beauty, stunning, breathtaking, visual beauty. Beauty not only of the actors—Michel with his hooded, feline grace, and Jeanne as his proletarian Bardot—but in the chase scenes of Michel's craft. Bresson lays out the technologies of pickpocketing almost musically, with a glissando of hands, pockets, transfers and gestures, a high/lowbrow ballet of currency and craft.

Continued on Brattle Theater Film Notes

OtherZine

Blogging experimental film, video and performance

Companion film journal to Other Cinema, a venue for experimental film, video and performance in San Francisco run by filmmaker Craig Baldwin.

See all my essays at OtherZine

Lars and the Real Gif

Animated gifs are back

Pratfalls and abrupt motions are the result, not of a graceful animal, but of a crude robot unable to adjust quickly enough to a change in its environment; in other words, us. Slapstick is us acting like a machine; we laugh at the gaps and the hapless repetition. The embedded humor of the animated gif points to the features and limitations of our technologies of art-making, and suggests that those features and limitations may be, ultimately, the same thing.

Continued on OtherZine

Deus ex Machinima

Making movies in game-space: a review of fanfilm, machinima, and the ultimate high score.

But there is something more at work here, especially so with virtual world machinima. Building a world, by film or other means, seems to be not only about individual or group expression, but about this strange impulse we have to copy everything. Our art so often involves duplicating aspects of our world: novels, realistic painting, photography, film, virtual worlds, video games. An enormous amount of time and energy is spent on making things more realistic; visually, physically and psychologically. What is the impulse for these ever more elaborate copies? What do we get out of them? And where might they be leading?

Continued on OtherZine

Who is Bozo Texino: An Interview with Bill Daniel

The secret history of hobo graffiti

So, on the surface of it, we have a few clues. A name, perhaps a face. A few lines, sketched on the side of a moving train. It goes by fast, but you have to look closely to see them: a different set of answers, to a different set of questions. Get ready as it passes through your station, not stopping, but slowing enough for you to jump aboard, into a strange past that's not present, a strange present that's not passed.

Continued on OtherZine

Pragmatic Utopias: Bata-ville

Sartorial standards for utopian tour guides

Let's design the perfect society. Why not? It will be a place where we will live in peace and harmony, where our work will be fulfilling and our leisure frequent, where an examination of our lives will reveal that they were in fact well-lived. A place where we will be able to declare our highest ideals and actually bring them into being without sullying their names. But, there are some practical things to take care of first, things like, where are we going to live, who are we going to invite, what are we going to wear?

In other words, we need to talk about shoes.

Continued on OtherZine

Lars von Trier

Unwrapping the enigma

Jack Stevenson is your cool older brother who has been all over the world, seen people and places you could only imagine, or couldn't even imagine, and has come back to tell you about it. If it's difficult, obscure, or just plain weird, have no fear, Jack will explain it all to you. Today's topic is all three and more: allow me to introduce Jack Stevenson on Lars von Trier.

Continued on OtherZine

An Interview with Keith Sanborn

Experiments in found footage cinema

"You know it's interesting, even the Shroud of Turin has been examined directly, but the original of the Zapruder film has almost never been examined directly. Everyone is working from copies of it. Of course you don't want to damage it, but there are a number of issues, like there's this extra splice in there that nobody really talks about. There are actually two splices, one of them is more or less credited to a Life magazine technician who was making stills, but the other one, well, I've never seen it mentioned. Both splices are around the area of the sign. You wonder, 'OK, where did the footage go?' "

Continued on OtherZine

An Interview with Douglas Rushkoff

Life, Inc.: Following the money

Media ecologist and author Douglas Rushkoff tells the story of how the corporation has made us over into its own image, how we have altered our reality to serve its needs, and how we can take it back. In this conversation, Rushkoff illuminates the Dark Ages, reveals why there's a God on our money, and explains what we're really buying into when we buy that mortgage. We have the code to open-source everything, he says. Time to go to work!

Continued on Reality Sandwich