Keynoting at the SF Film Festival
I don't often get to speak at a public venue in my home turf, so I am alerting readers to an upcoming event. This Sunday I am doing the State of Cinema talk at the San Francisco Film Festival. I plan on speaking about the future that is "beyond moving pictures." That's a clumsy way to say I'll be making some wild half-baked speculations about where film, video, technology, photography, text and digital hoo-ha will all converge at some unspecified time in the future. If you'd like to see me make a fool of myself, the talk will be at 1pm at the Clay Theater on Fillmore. I think tickets are $20. Details here.
The Triumph of Experience
Here's an insight I find useful:
If you want to buy happiness you are much better off buying an experience rather than a thing. That's because a thing like a car, new clothes, or cool gadget will always wear down, break down over time, while an experience, like going to the Galapagos, or a great concert, will only improve over time. You'll always have it (Paris, bunjee jumping, that meal) forever. In the long term an experience delivers more happiness per dollar.
Oh, and warm puppies (and children) are experiences, not things.
That wisdom is my phrasing of Daniel Gilbert, of "Stumbling on Happiness", interviewed by the Times, pointed to via Mark Hurst at, naturally enough, Good Experience.
1000 Journals Written By Us
1000 Journals is the antithesis of mass-market publishing. In 2000 Someguy (that's his name) designed a series of beautiful covers to glue onto blank journal books. He sent these empty but tempting books out into the world for others to fill up with their own original and personal art, hoping a few books would make their way back to him. You could sign up on his website to be the next person to receive a book, and in that way the book's travels could be monitored. Sort of.
Someguy also asked his designer friends and design heroes to create covers for blank journals and soon he sent out a total of 1000 stunning hand-crafted journals into the wilds (at his own expense). Only one book has returned completed, even though online you can follow the path of many others on their way.
I first wrote about the 1000 Journals Project in 2002 in the Whole Earth Review. Because of that article I was invited to write the forward for an anthology which collected some hundreds of pages reproduced from dozens of the 1000 journals whose whereabouts were known. This energetic tome, "1000 Journals Project", was recently published by Chronicle Books, and is almost a work of art itself, with occasional pages sewn with stitches, or glued-in artwork.
In the intro to this anthology celebrating the 1000 journals I said in part:
Some folks worry that the digitization of our daily lives will make us disembodied ghosts. They fear that we’ll become fat lumps of tissue plugged into some giant machine and that our souls and minds will migrate to cyberspace, where our egos will drift as mere whiffs of electrons. We’ll work, play, shop and live online, and the real world – the physical world and all its pleasures – will rot.
Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact technology is steadily moving us toward a future in which the intangible bits of digital information are more and more embedded into our very physical world, and the physical world pervaded with ubiquitous digital bits. The world of atoms (of bodies) and the world of bits (minds) are converging. Ahead: every object made will have a tiny bit of mind in it, and our intellectual lives will intersect with almost everything made.
A prime example of this confluence of mind and body is Someguy’s 1000 Journals project.
The 1000 Journals project takes three vast networks and weaves them together. It begins with the oldest peer-to-peer network we have – face to face exchanges, and then adds the second oldest network -- the postal system -- which is cheap, truly global, and able to move tangible, very physical artifacts like books to anywhere in the world. Someguy leaves blank journals in random places, or else mails them to strangers, with the instructions to create personal pages inside them and pass them on to yet other strangers. That’s a great recipe for wonderful serendipity. But on top on these two robust networks of one thousand moving journals, Someguy added the new global network of the web, which is able to track, schedule, and enliven the digital ghosts of the traveling books.
These hand-crafted works of art now have both a body and mind. They are deeply rooted in the sensual materials used to create them: paper, ink, found objects. But they also live the life of a mind as they are queued, monitored, and set loose into the collective conscious.
In a very real way, these books are written and drawn by “us” – no individual, but rather the hive mind. No individual artist chooses who works on a book; rather the choice emerges out of the crowd. But unlike previous collective art projects, with this new web network, we can watch the hive mind at work. We can watch the collective think out loud and assemble the sequence within a book and among books. We can watch it remember and watch it forget, as it abandons thoughts and books and then later recalls them.
I was later filmed for the 1000 Journal documentary. I don' t know if I made the cut because I have not seen it yet, and it is not on DVD. But the doc will be shown at the San Francisco Film Festival this week. Here is a trailer for the documentary, which is billed like this:
1000 blank journals are passed from hand to hand throughout the world, collecting stories, pictures, collages -- slices of the lives they touch. One came back, filled. Where are the other 999? 1000 Journals investigates their worldwide journeys, and chronicles the self-governed collaboration of thousands of random people who added to this global "message in a bottle.
Because of the demand to participate in this intensely physical network, and the rarity of actually getting near one of the original books, Someguy started 1001 Journals, which is a web mechanism that allows anyone to start a crowd-sourced journal or find one to join. There are now an additional 1300 journals traveling the world looking for passionate and creative contributions.
Handy Tips
A few months ago I spoke at the EG conference, held at the Getty Museum, and organized by Mike Hawley and Ricky Wurman, of TED fame. Instead of following the usual procedure and handing out swag to the speakers, Hawley came up with the clever idea of producing a stack of custom trading cards which both audience and speakers could swap.
The cards would have entertaining colorful cartoon portraits of each speaker on one side, and a "gift" on the other. Attendees would swap the cards to get swag they wanted. The cartoon portraits were happy mimics of Roy Lichtenstein-style pop-art comic-book masterpieces, produced by the artists at the online service AllPopArt. They started with a digital photograph and Photoshopped it in into pop art, as seen below. (Check out the other styles on their website. It's not a bad gift for the perfect someone.)
On the other side of the card, some speakers offered a coupon for a recent book, or a free sample of their goods,etc. Being new-book-less at the moment I offered a short list of handy tips. In case you can't read them, here they are:
HANDY TIPS
To get a human at Amazon call their unlisted number 800-201-7575.
Always pour acid into water, never the other way round.
To move your library, stack your books up and wrap them in plastic wrap. No boxes needed.
Plan on $1 of repairs for every $1 of gas you put into your car.
For financially happiness, live below your means.
With bolts and screws remember: Righty tighty, lefty loosey.
A laminated color copy of your passport will work for most non-border purposes.
When playing Monopolopy always buy Railroads, never buy Utilities.
Get a sheet of shower tile board from the lumber yard for a cheap, huge whiteboard.
Protect your sabbaticals (from your work, diet, routine, or discipline) religiously.
When bargaining on the street, aim for 50% of the asking price.
Keep flattery and requests separate.
This I Believe
Every year I send out a year-end letter and a small gift to my Christmas list. The gift is something creative, maybe a self-published book I made in the past year, or a photo, or sometime personal. This year the gift was a letter that got out of hand. I got going while writing a few thoughts prompted by a book assignment and the missive got long. Once it grew, I added a few of my own photographs. The story wanted to be small in the hand, sort of miniature. It needed a design so I fired up InDesign. It wanted to be printed. Then it needed a few staples. The next thing I new it was a small 16-page booklet. I mailed it out.
Lots of folks sent back kind words. Jay Allison, independent producer, co-founder of Transom, and a friend in the radio business thought it should be on the radio, and the next thing I know, I am in the studios of KQED reading a 500-word excerpt of the letter on a show called This I Believe.
NPR sent notice that this 5-minute rant will air in the Bay Area on Sunday, February 3 on KALW (91.7FM) between 3:30 and 4pm, a fairly safe time when no one will be listening. But you can listen to it (streaming), or download it (at least for two weeks) from here, or on iTunes.
As part of the show, they asked if they could post the letter in full, and I said okay. So a very handsome web version of the letter lives here on the NPR site. I will also put up a PDF version of the letter soon, just because I had it and might as well round out the media choices.
The Two Percent Perspective
Last Christmas morning you were probably not listening to the radio as you opened presents. I know we weren't. But that is when Morning Edition broadcast a short interview with me on the subject of progress. I guess in the spirit of things cosmic and joyful, they let me rant about the reason I am an optimist. You can listen to the segment here, but I can sum the story by saying that I am optimistic because I think that while disease, illness, stupidity, wickedness, problems, and evil fill 49% of the world, health, wisdom, light and goodness fill 51% -- and that tiny 2% difference compounded over time is what makes civilization and cultural.
More audio details at "Weighing the Good and Bad at Christmastime", NPR Morning Edition, Christmas Day 2007.
Entertaining Gathering
Two weeks ago at the Getty Museum in LA, I gave a talk at EG, the Entertainment Gathering, hosted by Michael Hawley, formerly of the Media Lab. In addition to my presentation there were some 65 other talks in 48 hours. Each presentation was 18-20 minutes, which I find is the perfect length for something new. It was a marathon learning adventure. I may have been the only one to sit through all 65 talks. Whew! My favorites: Magician Jamy Swiss teaching a magic trick, Ian Dunbar on how to train a puppy, A.J. Jacobs on his year living Biblically.
Matt Mullenweg, of PhotoMatt, blogged the conference. His fair summary of my talk is posted here.
Sounding Good on NPR
I was interviewed by Madeleine Brand on NPR's Day to Day today. They wanted to know about my Countdown Clock. Here is the streaming audio. What was interesting to me was that they sent a sound recordist to my home to record my end of the conversation on digital tape because the sound quality on our typical phone line (and call-in show) is so bad. While I was in my desk chair on the phone to Madeleine in LA, the sound recordist was sitting in my office pointing a huge boom mike at my face. She then uploads the file to NPR's ftp site and then the engineers there merge my side with Madeleine's side of the conversation. Mucho work. Isn't it odd that in 2007, when we can download movies to our home we can't have a high-fidelity phone line? Does anyone know how feasible it is to create or hack a hi-def home phone line? We have DSL; it should not be that hard.