Humping The (new) Media Landscape

Innovation After Internet

 

Last night I saw Joi Ito, current Director of the MIT Media Lab (I have been obsessed with that place since forever!) and renown venture capitalist, give the keynote for the Ideas City conference.

He explained how he sees the world as BI (before internet) and AI (after internet) because the Internet presented such a radically different production system.

Here are things he believes are needed to thrive in the AI world, with my own loose paraphrasing of what they mean. They are great statements, to which anyone can draw on, apply their own examples, meanings and critiques.

Practice over Theory

Innovation = now. Do something now and if it works go back and develop the theory. The cost of innovation is low, so you can afford to work this way. The theory first method is a necessity of the BI system in which it was very expensive to take such chances.

An obsession with measuring, is a sign that you might be out of touch, because it means you have a probably have a theory to prove, which means you feel you are smarter than the person in the trenches doing the practice.

Systems over Objects

Focus on making the system work and the rest falls into place.

Disobedience over Compliance

 “You don’t win a nobel prize for doing what you are told”.

In BI production, you need people to function as part of the machine being out of sync or otherwise different would cause break down of the entire system would break. With computers doing most of the menial labor in the workplace you now need everyone to be a creative worker.

 Emergence over Authority

 This is another way of saying grass-roots or bottom up instead of top down.

Risk over Safety

Remember, the cost of innovation is low financially. You can try lots of things fairly cheaply now. The only risk is fear of personal failures. Get over it!

If you plan everything you are not leaving room for the serendipity crucial to innovation.

Over-mitigating risk has a major downside, it limits learning and doesn’t build resilience.

Resilience over Strength

Developing an ability to keep going after set backs and perceived failures is what allows you to learn and develop the confidence to do new, bold, brilliant things.

Pull over Push

Work to draw what you need/want towards you don’t push yourself into it.

Compasses over Maps

It is more important for everyone on a team have the same general vision than be forced along the same path to get there. And also another way of implying that the map is not the destination.

If you are too focused and do not consider the periphery you will not be open to the pattern-recognition necessary for break-through thinking (or mushroom hunting!)

 Learning over Education

“Learning is something you do for yourself, education is what is done to you.”

 Encouraging people to be passionate and creative and discover things for themselves should be simple because is in our nature, all you have to do is NOT stamp it out.

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What excited me most about this list is that what it ultimately outlines is the creative practice. And it echoes exactly the leadership through arts, approach we use at  ALT Speakers . What is needed to be successful today and in the future? A creative practice, something everyone has the ability to develop and put to use in their personal and professional lives.

Of War and Ballet

This week I got choked up over the Village Voice's cover article, a truely moving story about the power of the arts. Written in the first-person by Roman Baca, an Iraq war veteran who re-ignited his passion for dance to help heal from PTSD and connect to others damaged by the experience of war.

His company Exit12 began by addressing issues close to home, like his mother's anxiety but has now extended to work with children in Iraq.

Their mission is to "inspire conversations about worldly differences and the lasting effects of violence and conflict on communities, families, and individuals. Through movement, we educate audiences about the reality of war, advocate diversity and mutual understanding through cultural exchange, and champion the humanity and dignity of all persons."

Link to read the article.

What he said!

A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop.

-Robert Hughes

What she said!

It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science. It is that which feels & discovers what is, the real which we see not, which exists not for our senses. Those who have learned to walk the threshold of the unknown worlds… may then with the fair white wings of Imagination hope to soar further into the unexplored amidst which we live.

- Ada Lovelace on imagination

What he said!

 

As dreams that were momentus by night seem simply silly in the light of day, so the poet and prophet can find themselves playing the idiot before a jury of sober eyes.

-Joseph Campbell

What he said!

Let your mind become a moving prism, catching light from as many angles as possible.

C. Wright Mills
 

What can you learn from artists about engagement?

 

 

Touch lights by paperJAM

 

"In these challenging economic times, it is important that artists devise new ways to create, share, think, and dream about what is possible."  -  FIGMENT website

Figment, an anual event held in NYC (and several other cities across the country), is a festival of art that is interactive and participatory. "You touch it, smell it, write on it, talk to it, dance with it, play with it, learn from it. Interactive art creates a dynamic collaboration between the artist, the audience and their environment." (via figment.com)

What you end up is a pretty wild, and I mean untamed. Works range from whimsical or silly to amazing and even, quite possibly dangerous. But ultimately, it offers visitors a chance to consider the idea of engagement from a lot of perspectives.

 

A colorful, splashy enterance to an oversized tree house is a fun invitiation to investigate. Others presented a pathway or a mysterious opening encouraging curiousity. Still others ask a question or leave a mad-lib a fill in the blank to say "what's missing here? YOU!"

Anyone involved in communications, marketing, media etc. can learn a lot from artists who are experimenting with such interactivity.

 

Live! by Asha Ganpat

 

 

 

Face of Liberty by Zaq Landsberg

 

 

 

 

What He Said!

American creative energy has always teetered on the brink of insanity

George Saunders

The Craftsman notes pt. 2

Because Sennett focuses much of his writing on the historical idea of craft  we may be prone to limiting our discussion to too narrow an approach, and thereby limiting how we are applying these ideas to our work as contemporary media makers. This is why I really appreciate how you are enlarging the idea of "articulate" from literally referring to ability to speak well to what is means to be articulate in our current environment. I feel very strongly that media makers, be they craftsperson or artist (or both), are tasked with the job of telling universal stories in the language of their time (and place, for that matter).  As media makers within a contemporary global media environment, for us to be articulate with mere spoken words is not enough for effective communication.

If we choose not to, and fall prey to technophobia, we allow ourselves to become impotent communicators. I am not suggesting that all media makers must work with new technologies, certainly those who work in a traditional craft form are doing something important by maintaining that history but they are still working in a contemporary environment. I am advocating that whatever the form your work takes you must be aware of how any new technologies relate to your craft and may effect your work. It is our job to understand them and not be fearful of a future filled with new tools and machines that will replace us. The way we make ourselves irreplaceable by understanding these tools, building upon them and finding new uses for them or deconstructing them articulately in our own work.

I enjoyed reading The Craftsman but found myself feeling somewhat removed from the text. With some consideration, I realized that this is because I have fundamentally different ideas about being a craftsperson and my own relationship with the tools I have used for creative communication. I refer to McLuhan’s description of media as “the extensions of man” and any craftsperson can attest to this on a metaphorical and literal level in regards to their tools: just ask a painter to describe brushes, a tap dancer about shoes, a filmmaker about a lens, a cook about their All-Clad pots and so on. As humans we make tools to physically extend our abilities to interact with the world.

Because of this I find it difficult to devote too much analysis to a tool or machine separate from the fact that it was created by a human to be ultimately controlled by a human. As an artist, I felt that in creating art works I was creating tools for myself and my viewers. Despite the fact that I have changed the form of my work and process I still feel strongly that media objects themselves are also tools. The works of art that had the most profound effect on me I realized were served as guides that enlarged my understanding of the world. Ultimately such tools can empower us by eradicating fears that keep us from acting honestly and compassionately.

notes On Intellectual Craftsmanship

Reading On Intellectual Craftsmanship, by Sociologist C. Wright Mills (wikipedia), was very helpful for me as I am in the process of determining what I am in graduate school to accomplish. In this piece, Mills sets out to document and explain in a simple and inspiring manner his own working process. There are several points that I found especially compelling and relevant to my own work.

Life=Work Idea of a "social scientist" ones life and work are deeply interconnected

bringing together personal experience with intellectual pursuits.

Surround yourself with your subject (and those interested in your subject). Doing things in your life  that will lead to thinking well along the lines of your work.

Keeping a file to conserve energy and capture fringe thoughts, and small snippets of ideas that once noted may lead to systematic understandings.  Keeping my own "intellectual enterprise organized and under control" has been a major task and exploration for me the past decade. I am looking to school to help me make something of it that is greater than the sum of its parts.I used to keep actual paper files in college but then moved so many times that the file cabinet was more cumbersome than helpful so I turned to the internet for that purpose.

Being overwhelmed by so many ideas - yes, all the time!

Creating a work/research/life processes to help deal with this issue and make meaning from mania.

To trust and utilize ones experience while also being skeptical of how it colors your own perceptions - building an "ambiguous confidence" which can then be justified through the documentation/file.

The file is a way of developing self reflexive habits

To engage in "controlled experience" - Love this!

Inviting Imagination

"Sociological Imagination consists largely of capacity to shift from one perspective to another..in the process building up an adequate view of total society and its components"

A technician is often too precisely trained to see outside of their practice. A social scientist is one unafraid to combine the seemingly disparate or random, with a playfulness of mind and a fierce drive to make sense of the world. "to a technician, new ways may sen loose or sloppy but the social scientist must cling to such vague images and notions, if they are yours, and you must work them out. For it is in such forms that original ideas, if any almost always appear"

Not becoming to rigidly committed to one plan from the start. re-arranging your file to find new connections. having a playfulness towards language. considering extremes. "Let your mind become a moving prism, catching light from as many angles as possible."

Voice

Mills warns against alienating yourself or clouding the meaning of your work in academic prose. Not to fear being considered pedantic or journalistic in style. Write to be readable and tell a story. Focus on your audience and voice. Avoid fetishism of technique.

In closing, he reminds the aspiring social scientist to keep perspective, not to study one milieu after another but to look at the social structures in which all of these milieu are organized.