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Month: January 2009

Pungent Gestures

Published January 11, 2009 by cgerrish

I’ve finally worked my way through last Sunday’s newspapers in time for this Sunday’s to fill up the in-basket. Of particular note was Peter Aspden’s column in the Weekend Financial Times. He picks up on a number of themes that have been surfacing in recent conversations. Aspden observes that culture and economies run in cycles, and that a down economy may signal a return of a more pungent cultural scene.

In a high economy, capital replaces labor in the machinery of cultural production. Works are primarily created as commercial ventures; they have a business plan, an expected return on investment, and a polished level of disconnected technical professionalism.

Aspden identifies the trends he’ll be looking for in the new year:

  • Cultural Promiscuity (global silk-road type connectivity and mashups)
  • Pungent Pop Culture, a return to seriousness
  • Profundity and complexity welcomed once again
  • The return of Art Cinema (and a farewell to cinematic infantilism)
  • Art Galleries returning to the sterner business of moving hearts and minds

In a down economy, labor replaces capital in the cultural work product. The industrial pop culture complex will turn to high glamor / high gloss products as they did during the great depression. It’s a formula that depends on owning the means of production, large concentrated audiences, low prices and controlled distribution.

Price of Movie Tickets
1940     $0.24
1939     $0.23
1936     $0.25
1935     $0.24
1934     $0.23
1929     $0.35
1924     $0.25
1910     $0.07

As means of production has gone digital, and the distribution networks have gone open, the old formulas are harder to pull off. The studios will have to depend on more and more on special effects and simulated realities to generate the requisite buzz– machines replacing humans. The return to a pungent culture is a cyclical event– the classic example for me was Jerzy Grotowski’s Poor Theater.

Theater should not, because it could not, compete against the overwhelming spectacle of film and should instead focus on the very root of the act of theater: actors in front of spectators.

However this move to the digital appears to be a more foundational change, the very axis of the cycle has been radically shifted. While the high end can go ever higher, the field of play has been opened for a new generation of artists. High and low have lost their polar relationship; real connection can happen across the Network through multiple endpoints. The cost of producing high quality digital output continues to go down, while the talent required to produce high quality digital output remains ever the same.

While a film on a large screen in a movie theater isn’t the same as watching on an iPhone or a laptop; nor is a film the same a grand opera at its best. New media will breed new forms– new methods of reading and writing. As the technology falls away in favor of the performance, perhaps we’ll see some of Aspden’s predictions come true. It could be as simple as a camera, some light, three people dancing and some narration– A Band of Outsiders.

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Talk Show

Published January 7, 2009 by cgerrish

I missed most of it because it was on too late. School nights, you know. But on Friday nights, I could stay up late and watch The Dick Cavett Show. For me, it’s the canonical example of the talk show.

There were only three television networks back then, and no way to time shift. While popular culture didn’t have the diversity we experience today, there was a tremendous concentration of audience. The limited number of outlets meant there was some obligation to represent the variety of our culture. Cavett faced the impossible task of going up against Carson for 90 minutes five nights a week. His audience was around 3.4 million to Carson’s 7.7 million. These shows were large hubs, connectors, big distributors of cultural information.

When the new currents of the rock culture made an appearance on mainstream television, more than show biz chat was communicated. The strangeness is palpable, and you can see the bold strokes of something new emerging.

And while we think of the coverage of our culture unfolding in real time: in 1969, the day after the three day concert called Woodstock, Cavett had a number of the musicians on his show. I’m trying to imagine if there could be an equivalent today. Stephen Stills still had mud on his jeans.

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Speed Kills

Published January 6, 2009 by cgerrish

Keef

The natural reaction to the acceleration of our daily lives is to yearn for simpler days, simpler times. This is a train of thought inspired by reading John Thackara’s In The Bubble, Designing in a Complex World mixed with listening to Steve Gillmor’s NewsGang Live. In the 1960s there were a number of movements organized to try and get back to the land. Even as the guitar solos became faster and more electric, there was a countervailing movement toward ecology, natural foods and dropping out of the rat race.

As the conversation jumps from the Network’s current supersonic speed to a discussion of real time, there’s an understandable backlash against the idea of always on, always connected and being flooded with information in real time. The naysayers moan that increasing the speed of information to real time will only make things worse. As it is, no one has enough time to sort through the things crying for our attention.

When we talk about the speed of daily life, we’re talking about the number of tasks that need to be completed in a day. By doing these tasks faster, and by finding shorter tasks, we can cram more and more into each day. As more things become available to consume and sort through, we’ll need to get even faster just to keep up.

We’ve become hunter/gatherers filtering the incoming streams looking for nutritious information. But the idea that there’s an infinite number of valuable things waiting for your consumption has always been true. Decisions and priorities have always been the key. It just seems like it’s easier to turn on the fire hose of information these days. A well-stocked library probably has the same potential– each book is a stream of words printed into a folio.

There’s another way to look at the idea of real time. We’ve been thinking of it as a faster sort of clock time; clocks are the basis of speed. But real time also connects to event time, the flow of things that happen during a day. Real time is the time in which a conversation unfolds. We tend to think of the emergency uses of real time — a cry for help and a response of aid. Emergencies are one kind of event, but there are many ways of conversing. Real time can be quite slow… the thoughtful pause before an answer; the interlude of laughter for a well-timed joke; a silence that washes over us as our conversation sinks in and resonates.

Perhaps we don’t notice that the speedy machines of the Network don’t move at the speed of life. They don’t have a sense of the fluidity of time. And the speed we want, is not an acceleration of the heartbeats we have remaining, but rather a speed that results in efficiency and spending less time at our chores. When you imagine the real time web, take a moment and think: what’s the music playing in your head?

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Good Money To Sing Into A Can

Published January 5, 2009 by cgerrish

Orpheus plays to the Muses

Often we like to look to the logic of an innovation to determine whether or not it will succeed. Perhaps instead, we should look to the music of an innovation. In the story below, ideas are transformed into tones to shelter them from the rough transit into the flow of time. Nietzsche’s Innovator seeks first to reach the ear and the heart, not the brain. The determining factor of survival is not truth or error, open or closed, logical or nonsensical— but whether a seedling can be planted and survive the rigors of natural selection. The Innovator speaking of his creation says: “…a seedling can only be destroyed– not refuted.”

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection.
– Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

By welcoming “storms, doubts, worms, and nastiness,” the Innovator embraces change and the possibility of failure. It’s not enough for an innovation to be spun into the friction-less space of the mind, it must be planted in the soil and given the chance to grow.

Music and innovation are mixed together in the practice of design thinking. Imagine Apple’s products without the music of their design. Although music should not be confused with beauty. As the economy tightens, standing next to the next generation of innovative products, we’ll be on the look out for the Music Man, the Pied Piper and the next singer-songwriter.

The Gay Science
Book Two, Paragraph 106
Friedrich Nietzsche

Music as an advocate

“I am thirsting for a composer,” said an innovator to his disciple, “who would learn my ideas from me and transpose them into his language; that way, I should reach men’s ears and hearts far better. With music one can seduce men to every error and every truth: who could refute a tone?” “Then you would like to be considered irrefutable?” said his disciple.

The innovator replied: “I wish for the seedling to become a tree. For doctrine to become a tree, it has to be believed for a good while; for it to be believed, it has to be considered irrefutable. The tree needs storms, doubts, worms, and nastiness to reveal the nature and strength of the seedling; let it break if it is not strong enough. But a seedling can only be destroyed– not refuted.

When he had said that, his disciple cried impetuously: “But I believe in your cause and consider it so strong that I shall say everything, everything that I still have in my mind against it.”

The innovator laughed in his heart and wagged a finger at him. “This kind of discipleship,” he said then, ” is the best; but it is also the most dangerous, and not every kind of doctrine can endure it.”

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