Shooting Wide Open

Remember this extra feature from Stop Making Sense? I came upon it while watching David Byrne interview someone else, and all I could hear was the memory of this thing. Thank god for Youtube, on which everything lives…

Reminds me of Charlie Rose interviews Charlie Rose.

I’ve got tech on the brain recently. Consider this a prelude to geekiness to come. It made the rounds right quick:

Some days …no, actually, every day, I wish I was more adept at actually building things, creating objects.

Click through these two presentations and you get a pretty good sense of the web today. First, the first five slides of this article on the weak spots of tech giants pretty much sum up the tech world today in a few sentences. As for the first assertion that Google doesn’t get social networking, I’d add that the reason Google doesn’t get social is that Google doesn’t get user interface. Changing settings in Gmail or Docs or any of the apps is painfully Web 1.0. C’mon Google, what’s with the ugly unintuitive interfaces?

Then there’s that Netflix internal presentation about the future of the company, its competitors, and different content delivery systems – streaming vs ad-based free (ie Hulu), etc. Most presentations are boring, but this one is a page turner.

Content distro

A couple of interesting little details are buried in there – apparently they are in favor of a 3-strikes type law against piracy, but at the same time, want to push for net neutrality to ensure the best broadband speeds for every potential customer. Ah, complicated corporate motivations. But more importantly, now that they’ve gotten big into the back catalog streaming business and have their eyes set on mobile users, they consider all sorts of content providers to be competitors. Interesting how Google, Hulu, Apple, Amazon and Netflix all seem to have similar designs on dominating the selling of content, but the social apps are relatively unchallenged still. It’s been Twitter and Facebook for a while now, with no hint of anything changing.

The difference seems to be that the content these companies are wrangling for is for the most part top-down type content. Produced, polished, and with some significant financial backing, while the content on social networks is user-generated and personal. Hence Zuckerberg’s big privacy fiasco.

User-generated

So where does user-generated public content stand? There are venues to host this type of content aside from Youtube or Vimeo, Flickr or blogs and the like? Netflix certainly doesn’t think that content separate from these large hub-like stores has a chance, even with big budget movies like Avatar. Is the divide really that entrenched? You’ve made something that’s not meant to be purely personal, yet you’re either drowning in a mass of bad Youtube videos or you plug into a Big Player to distribute. At the moment, viral videos aside, there’s no getting around the fact that as always, we want some sort of filter for quality control, not to mention there’s a social benefit to watching popular content – you can talk about it with other people. If everyone climbed into their own little niche, the only place we’d find a community of likeminded people who’ve seen what we’ve seen would be the net.

More uniform web standards (a la Apple’s attempt with HTML5) is one step toward standardizing pooled content for all platforms, but that seems to only help with the problem of making content look palatable, not with finding viewers once it is. Or is it? Perhaps I’m just a bit too short-sighted to see where this can go. Tantalizing as they are, mobile content-consumption devices like the iPad don’t necessarily change where we we get our content from. I want a way to browse a collection like Youtube and filter for subject as well as aesthetic taste or quality standards without resorting to deference to the Big Players. For example, with graduation on the horizon for some of my peers, how might I be able to find short films made by MFA documentary film students all over the country without having to know of and search for each director individually?

Where’s the Hub?

This goes back to some of the ideas and questions raised in our collaborative blogging endeavor about the future of photobooks – how will distro work and how will artists monetize in the land of self-publishing? It’s that same debate about the indies vs the gatekeepers. I’m afraid that at least in the near future, the only way to make a living as a content-producer is still to distribute via a Big Player, at least until you are fairly (very) well-established. I’ve mixed feelings about the whole thing. On the one hand, putting your content in other people’s hands is risky (albeit, let’s face it, relatively low risk for most), but on the other hand, I know people who keep their “serious” stuff off Flickr and I’m not sure what to think since for us, it is more likely to be seen on Flickr than when it’s sequestered in the “safe” cave of the website of a relative unknown, where you no longer have the Flickr community to tap into. Seems like a shame.

Furthermore, how do we prevent Big Players from trawling little pools of creativity and siphoning off the cream to use for their own profit? There seems to be no defense for someone more high profile reworking an idea put forth initially by an unestablished individual. But I suppose that has always been the case, and it’s why people tend not to think out ideas or works in progress publicly. It’s less of an issue when you debut a completed work, more of an issue when you are working through ideas. It’s too bad, but on that point I am willing to cede defeat. Human nature, you win.

Semantic isn’t enough

The more general question is about the processes we employ to find “good” content. Where are the filtering and sorting tools that allow me to connect with individuals whose existence I’m completely ignorant of? When, essentially, do we get a real live working semantic web in which I can search for pure content and not just keywords or abstractions?

But we also need more than just the semantic web. For the most part we seem pretty unable to get away from a linear greatest hits/top ten/best of mentality, and the more I think about it, the more it seems influenced by the structure and weighting of search results. Does it matter that there are 423,985,239 results if nobody goes past the 3rd or 4th page? Google’s algorithm may have been groundbreaking years ago, but now that the semantic web is starting to circle for landing, it’s looking a bit old. I’m not sure that we can utilize a super content-aware web optimally without new ways of displaying organizing and thinking about search results. Why don’t we have more cloud-like results where spacing and size matter, and transparency, layering or toggling screens a la Spaces plays a role? There’s a lot of room for design at this table – visual literacy applied to information and data? This does seem like a problem that devices like the iPad can help solve.

(Thanks to Todd Walker for the links to many of these things.)

Ralph Gibson

Ralph Gibson’s color is a little tamer than his black and whites, but there is something about a few of them that I love. But phew, his black and whites are so much more stylized and distinct though.

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I’m tired of photographer interviews. The thing I start missing when people talk about photography and especially many of the more documentary oriented projects that I’m attracted to is any discussion of their creative process in terms of affect. So I’ve been reading interviews with PJ Harvey, and in this one with Pitchfork, she says something about process and lulls in creativity that I find reassuring and true:

I’ve never thought of it as writers’ block, but I definitely have periods of greater or lesser activity. I think that’s pretty natural. The key is not to panic when you’re in one of the troughs of creativity. Because that’s so valuable, there’s so much learning to be done in that. In the moment, I feel like I’m in that space. It’s not resting, it’s almost like treading water and gathering information and trusting that it will come around again, and it will. I see it on a greater scale with projects, really. I think that’s completely natural. Sometimes you see artists burning very brightly, and they’ll have three or four projects in a row that are absolutely incredible. But I think it’s very hard for anyone to sustain that time after time after time. Some people do, but they burn out quite quickly. Or they die or something. [laughs] But in lots of artists that I admire, I see the peaks and troughs that [they] move through.

The first time that I felt bereft of any inspiration I may have panicked, but when you’ve been writing for 15 or 16 years, like I have, I trust in it now, I know that whatever it is that comes through me– this desire to make the work that I do, it’s there, it will be there no matter what. Even if I tried to beat it off with a shovel, it would still come back. I don’t worry at those times. I just know that it will be back.

It becomes something that I trust will be there, and all I have to do is let it be there. There’s no separation, really, between living and creativity. I don’t think there is. Sometimes people will say “Where do get your ideas from?” and it’s just life, it’s just breathing. The key is being open to that moment, and then there’s a wealth of inspiration.

In an interview with Laura Hird, what she says about dark music not necessarily being indicative of a dark personal attitude mirrors what she says in the PF interview about the work not necessarily reflecting on the creator’s personal life. For me that’s exactly what I want – some emotive impact without the bleeding heart exhibitionism. Much of art is translation of experience, sometimes alien or extreme experience, isn’t it? (I have David Lewis’ bat example on the brain for some reason – the problem of other bat minds?)

I really like that push and pull you get between the dark subject matter and the beautiful melodies that are flying around in there, which are quite uplifting, so I never feel particularly dragged down by the record. I always feel quite uplifted really, quite comforted.

One doesn’t have to be suffering to show suffering, you can orchestrate that. And I think in some ways when you’re not suffering yourself, you can present it in a much clearer way because you have that perspective, stepping back and looking at it. A lot of the people I find funniest to be around are people whose work can be very dark. It doesn’t mean that they’re dark people at all, it just means they have a certain sensitivity or a certain insight in being able to present that.

I read a wonderful quote by Leonard Cohen not long ago where he was talking about how sad songs mean so much to people because everybody suffers defeat in their lives in some way, whether it’s they didn’t get the job they wanted, or when you’re younger you imagine all these things about how your life’s going to turn out and ultimately that doesn’t happen to anybody, and so a sad song is incredibly touching because it connects us all to that sense of loss in some way.

I took a short 3D imaging workshop, and I’m keen on getting a stereo Holga. I’ve never been a fan of the Holga aesthetic but there’s something so sharp and delineated about most of my work that it’s frustratingly devoid of emotion in some way. I suppose lo-fi is an easy way out, but sometimes all you can hope for is a starting point.

I think particularly with instruments that I’m unfamiliar with, I can’t use my intellect to play that instrument because I don’t know how to apply it. And so it does all become about emotional response, and that’s often very naïve and child-like, and I use that to my advantage. I’ll often purposefully go to instruments that I don’t know anything about just to access that place.