It takes every ounce of self-control for me to zip my lips, but I think I know who the song was written about, and it isn't ANY of the usual suspects.
I've loved "You're So Vain," since I was little. It's one of my mother's favorite sing-along songs, and we sang it more times than I can remember. Back then, I had no idea about the mystery surrounding the subject of the song, but nevertheless, the character Carly created is extremely distinct. An apricot scarf, a "strategically dipped" hat.
Sure, that could be Cat Stevens, Mick Jagger or any of the other rock stars on the short list. But none among them are yachtsmen, though I'm sure they've had their fun on boats, and none can really properly be considered "vain," at least, as far as I see it, not by a poet of Carly's calibre who has a range of nuanced adjectives at her disposal. Most telling, perhaps, is that none are known for their Saratoga winning streaks.
But I know someone who fits the bill. Years ago, quite coincidentally, I learned from an affiliated third party that this person and Carly Simon had, in fact, had a relationship in their youth, "many years ago" when she was still "quite naive," as the song indicates. I searched on their names together on the internet and couldn't find anything that would indicate that their relationship was public knowledge. Further, her name does not appear in the celebrity-laden index of a book that he wrote about his own life (I own a signed copy, given to me by the author).
It isn't that this person isn't famous. He is, but he's just not a household-name celebrity. He's also talented, played a significant role in one of the most important celebrity events that ever took place in the United States, and on top of all that, he was more dashing in his youth than almost any other person on the list, right up there with Warren Beatty (who reportedly does think that the song is about him).
The British Council's Martin Rose, who heads their "Our Shared Europe" project, has a new blog post about the London debut of Our Shared Europe, which has been in quiet development over the past year. The project unveiled itself last night to a London audience with an event that posited the motion that "Europe is Failing Its Muslims."
Martin reports:
The debate starts with opening statements and it becomes clear that in one sense at least everyone supports the motion. We’re all liberals, even when we’re not. Flemming in particular, whom some expected to see with horns and a forked tail, was a gentle liberal, persuasive and articulate, pressing the values of an equal society in which government did justice to its minorities by resisting block-thinking, and supporting the rights of those communities’ dissidents. Tariq and Petra undermine their own case, for the motion, by glimpsing strong hopes of change – optimism is good, but confusing. The vote, almost even at the beginning, with the pro-the-motions ahead by 20 or 30, swings to very much the opposite – a convincing win for the antis. But I think not everyone is quite sure what they are voting for, and I hear much equivocation. Flemming and Douglas seem rather surprised.
The event will be re-broadcast by the BBC World News on March 6 and 7. I'm digging around to see if US audiences can watch it.
For those not familiar with Martin Rose, as we are, Martin has written a powerful must-read essay called "A Shared Past for a Shared Future: European Muslims and History-making." The following graf from the essay captures eloquently the challenges (and opportunities) we face in doing meaningful cultural relations work. Both Rita J. King and I have been hugely inspired by the essay:
"I’m not going to dwell for long on these two geopolitical fables of ‘us’ and ‘them’. They are important because they are believed, not because they are true, though both of course contain bits of fact and elements of truth, mixed with fiction and wishful thinking and jumbled together purposefully to prove a pre-determined conclusion. They provide interpretative frameworks for people who have already made up their minds. Worse, they provide glib justifications for behaviour at a personal level which only substantiates the fables. And worse still, they both provide easy tools for manipulating impressionable minds."
Josh Asen, CEO and Co-Founder of Hip Hop Diplomacy is a guestblogger and collaborator on The Imagination Age.
Mazzi & Sneakas perform at the Nuyorican Cafe. All videos copyright Josh Asen.
Having just completed my last post about the Arab-Israeli film "Ajami", I felt it only right to brave the (second) blizzard of aught-ten to go see Mazzi & Sneakas, your favorite rapper's favorite Arab-Israeli rap duo, at the world-famous Nuyorican Poets Café. The pair were performing alongside their spoken word sisters, the veiled Palestinian poetess, Tahani Salah, and the 'Jewish Mamita', Vanessa Hidary, as part of the Tug of War Tour, a project they describe on Facebook as a "thought-provoking and multi-dimensional artistic endeavor that explores narratives of conflict and co-existence between Muslims and Jews".
After seeing the show last night, I am prepared to cosign that description. The rappers' lyrics and the women's words relayed stories that made me think, laugh, and then think some more about the state of co-existence between Muslims and Jews the world over. Indeed, it is laughably and tragically poor.
And yet, witnessing performances like this one keeps me stocked with confidence that my generation, the Hip Hop generation, has the power to change the narrative, nay, is already changing it. I saw this last week in "Ajami", imagining the young co-directors, one Arab Christian, the other Israeli Jew, working together for 7 years to realize a vision of storytelling in the Middle East that noone had realized (or perhaps even had) before. And I saw it last night, as four New Yorkers, two male, two female, two Jews, two Muslims, took to the stage in a display of artistic solidarity that was neither corny nor cheesy, but completely genuine, proving that concepts like 'collaboration', 'cooperation' and 'coexistence' do not have to be cynical punchlines or pie-in-the-sky dreamings, but real goals that we can strive for in life as in art. The above video is one highlight from Mazzi & Sneakas' set, where the two pair off in a cultural rap battle that could only happen in Jew York Medina. As Sneakas puts it, "We're all Jews, we're all Arabs, we're all the same, yada, yada, yada."
Tahani Salah and Vanessa Hidary
The next clip is of the two ladies, Tahani Salah and Vanessa Hidary, prefacing their presentation as not another tired rant about the Arab-Israeli conflict, nor a fuzzy "Muslim-Jewish lovefest," but rather an honest retelling of their awkward first encounter, and the prejudiced expectations that were quickly overcome by their mutual curiosity. In fact, they got so caught up in their exchange, at Starbucks no less, that they forgot "there's a war going on!"
And, for your pan-global, multi-cultural, Hip Hop dessert. a tasty drum solo from the legendary Swiss Chris, our Euro-Caucasian rhythmic genius (rockin the Obama t-shirt, gotta love it!).
About Joshua Asen, Co-Founder/CEO, Hip Hop Diplomacy
After graduating from Brown University, Joshua made the first of several trips across the Atlantic to promote Hip Hop abroad. This first crossing was on behalf of storied Hip Hop label, Rocafella Records, for whom he created the label's first international promotions campaign in Paris. Later, Joshua ventured further south to Morocco, earning a Fulbright grant to study Hip Hop in an Arab/Muslim context. Joshua immediately expanded his project into a documentary film and became the first American to interview the leading Hip Hop groups in Morocco. Responding to their need for more performance opportunities, Joshua began developing plans for the country’s first Hip Hop festival, which he convinced the American Embassy and the Coca-Cola Company to co-sponsor. The 3-city concert tour was attended by over 36,000 young Moroccans and reached thousands more, across the globe, in screenings of the eponymous documentary film (www.ilovehiphopinmorocco.com).
Joshua has since gone on to produce independent films and video content, and continues to develop the Hip Hop Diplomacy brand, encompassing a number of cultural diplomacy and youth outreach campaigns, with varied public- and private-sector partners, as well as an online journal of global Hip Hop and geopolitics, www.hiphopdiplomacy.org.
In which the ghost of Medea, Jason and the Argonauts is invoked to plant the seed for a future trip to remote island in Greece to begin creating a new mythology in the Imagination Age. That's me there in the bottom left corner, Skyping from New York with Andre Blas in Sao Paulo.
And then I rezzed a prim in Second Life and dragged this post onto it and watched the video with Grady Booch (Alem Theas). AMAZING NEW VIEWER!
This isn't just a new viewer, in the sense that it yields a new view and organizational framework on a pre-existing platform, but rather a massive extension of exciting new capabilities within the platform itself.
Second Life has never been more poised for mainstream success. This milestone has been a long time coming, but I've always believed that the day would arrive. I don't view the new viewer as a Second Life for Second Life, because from my perspective, the space has been vibrant from the start and has only become more remarkable and impressive over time. But this is a new dimension.
The new viewer feels akin to seeing that first glimpse of the earth from the moon. Not necessarily the way an astronaut feels it, from space, but from the perspective of a human being who nevertheless shares in the mixed media gathered over time and gains immeasurably from the new visions it creates when shared and experienced. The ability to embed mixed media within the basic fundamental building blocks of user-created content, known as prims, is revolutionary. Among other benefits, that's the new viewer's major headline.
Story is the beam that unifies people during a particular time and place and gives our collective symbols meaning. The new viewer is a door that opens into a deeper form of storytelling, one that contains the possibility of successful collaboration in the face of looming global transformation. Story is at the core of every strong brand, movement and life.
Immersion within such environments will create unprecedented opportunities for the development of business and education as training and simulation expand significantly into the medium--for real world benefit.
Thank you, Linden lab, for developing this amazing new capacity to collaborate, create, document and innovate in an entirely new dimension!
I can't wait for Thursday to finally get here! My friend Debra Hampton, artist of the beautiful, has an opening for her spectacular Twenty Paces.
From the official announcement:
Priska C. Juschka Fine Art is pleased to present Twenty Paces, Debra Hampton’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. With reference to the practice of pistol dueling, and the distance at which craftsmen once tested the impregnability of bodily armor, Twenty Paces reflects on identity formation—the protective guard and the multiple layers of gender-based persona, shaped by social perception amid a disparaging world of distress, desire and consumption.
Hampton guides us into a universe, inhabited by seemingly fragmentized, luxurious creatures, using magazine cut-outs to collage complexly woven female figures created equally by mechanical and organic elements such as car parts, weapons, jewelry and human anatomy over an initially automatic abstract ink drawing, an amalgam of drips and splashes, to develop intricate compositions, miraculously assembling in front of the viewer. Introducing life-size, hollow suits of armor, constructed of post-consumer waste, recycled plastic, Hampton, explores further the discourse between a charged sexualized identity and its mechanism of defense.
Hampton’s striking heroines, part goddess, part warrior, adorned with corsets and armor, hover conceptually between the historic and the utopian, captured in an ambiguous moment of creation and obliteration, ultimately portraying the fragile equilibrium of a world threatened by ecological catastrophe and economical excess at the brink of disaster.
During a studio visit to see Debra's work, I was reminded of nothing so much as my favorite line of the Sufi mystic poet, Rumi:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn't make any sense.
I love Debra's work for its spectacular compositional beauty, palette, sense of motion and panache. Even in the absence of any further understanding about the way she layers shapes (pistols, gems, delicate fronds reminiscent of the beach), her work undeniably broadcasts the zeitgeist of the era in which it is being created--which is ultimately the hallmark of all great art.
Debra layers meticulously cut magazine pages, ink and watercolor to create ethereal and yet powerful visages of warrior women, nearly robotic but also completely, at least to my eye, human. That is, of course, one of the great ethical dilemmas of our time, this melding of machine and human consciousness and confusion about what is real and what isn't.
With imagination-scapes routinely projected into immersive digital media, and now the advent of augmented reality, Debra's work takes on a cautionary note but also a hopeful one that beauty can always be created--even from the plastic take-out containers choking our oceans and planet and the plastic toy guns that teach children to mimic lethal combat before they even understand the awesome responsibility of being human.
One of my mannequins from the Imagination Age Salon served as a model for some of Debra's work on the armor. I was privileged as Debra's friend to watch her process unfold in layers, like her work itself, and I can hardly wait for Thursday. The piece shown left in the above image, "Stream of Change (Plus a Key, Four Wheels and a handful of Hearts) is now part of my cherished collection.
Debra Hampton was born in Fullerton, CA and currently lives and works in New York, NY. Her work has been the subject of several solo and group exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad, including shows at the National Academy Museum & School of Fine Arts in New York, NY; and the Queens Museum of Art in Queens, NY. Her work belongs to several collections including the Permanent Drawing Collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, NY; and the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation in Los Angeles, CA.
This video, which features augmented reality tricks and the Jonas Brothers at the end, was captured in Chatroulette.
Back in 1996, I worked a brief stint as a vulgarity censor at America Online (a perfect job for a Brooklyn Italian). The story, "Terms of Service: Sweaty Scenes from the Life of an AOL Censor," ended up on the cover of the Village Voice.
Then, as now, I was enchanted by the Internet and all the possibilities it creates for connection, but I was also curious about how the split between childhood and adulthood would be handled in a way that would let adults be adults (which means different things to different people) while giving kids have some freedom to explore without being exposed to behaviors that most adults will never witness.
Congratulations, Chatroulette--you've knocked the Latex Nun in Gas Mask forums (from my AOL days) out of first place for most vivid internet memory.
For those who haven't tried it or heard about it, here's how it works: Once you hit play on Chatroulette, a video comes up with a stranger from someplace else in the world. You can video chat with that person in voice and in text. When you get tired of the exchange, you move on, unless you bore or disgust the other participant first.
Of course there's only anonymity in Chatroulette if nobody recognizes you, and then it's only a fleeting image if nobody is screen capturing. After a while, every time I saw one or two males on screen, I instantly forwarded to the next chat to avoid witnessing a scene that was all too often repeated. I didn't realize until after the fact that I had captured two of the Jonas Brothers. While the footage is fleeting, they're there, in the last frame of the video--but there's no going back in Chatroulette.
My verdict is that Chatroulette would be fabulous if participants weren't anonymous, but the anonymity, and the lack of control over who shows up on the screen, create a golden opportunity for malcontents to be disruptive and for minors to witness completely inappropriate material.
Jeru the Damaja and I both grew up in Brooklyn. We both got our start at block parties, a huge part of Brooklyn culture at that time. He started rhyming, I started writing.
My first steps were taken at a block party. My grandmother's estate contains little but a Florida condo, a box of cherished costume jewelry and some flickering Super 8 reels, mainly shot on location during block parties--the one special occasion that motivated neighbors to separate themselves from the world, draw boundaries with strings of plastic flags, party lights and bright orange hazard cones.
In Brooklyn in the 1980's, neighbors opened their doors to one another, shared food, music, a metal half-moon ride on the back of a truck,tables full of watermelon and jello, special cakes iced with coconut, the aroma of grilled meat. We lit sparklers and spelled luminous words in the air. We played games, darted across the suddenly safe street into other people's houses and watched the adults loosen up.
Above all, we had the music, and dancing in the streets. The fact that Jeru the Damaja started off at Brooklyn block parties is reason enough for me to love him. Objectively, however--I believe he is one of the finest voices to have emerged from the extremely creative and special culture of Brooklyn in the 80's. I find myself devoting hours of thought to two of his lyrics in particular. Both are extremely challenging for different reasons, and I'd appreciate your perspective in comments if you have time to muse.
FIGURE A:
"Wrath of the Math"
Let us now discuss the mental attitude The mental must always stay calm You must let nothing move you Be it good or bad
But when the mental and I be moved There is no longer good or bad, there just is When there just is You have the power to form and shape
So now witness The wrath of the math Tell me when you're ready I'm ready
My first two tweets coming out of seeing "Ajami," the Oscar-nominated Arab-Israeli film, praised its rare, "portrayal of Arab & Israeli male aggression AND vulnerability" as well as the decentered, interweaving narrative structure. The more I've thought about the film (and seen it again), the more I've come to appreciate the way that the first time directors, Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani, made such portrayals possible through their brave fusion of documentary and narrative forms.
To begin with, they shot most of the film on location in the rough neighborhood of Ajami, in the city of Jaffa, after which the film is named. Those two decisions alone, location and title, ground the film in an environment that actually exists and call it by its name. This removes any doubt about where we are and how constructed the story is going to be. It's as if the directors are saying, from the outset, "This is not a true story but it might as well be."
With their world already set, Copti and Shani chose to cast mostly non-professional actors from the neighborhood of Ajami. This is a hugely ballsy move, especially for first-time directors, but it pays off in spades as the characters in the film consistently behave and speak in ways that are not at all 'larger than life' but rather completely life-like. The directors spent a year in workshops with the cast, placing them in dramatic situations and encouraging them to act exactly as they would in real life, using language that they would use in real life. For the film itself, they often worked without a script or without telling the actors what was going to happen next, so as to elicit the most pure, gut reactions. That is exactly what they got and it makes for some of the most gripping emotional performances I've ever seen on the big screen.
Naturally, an authentic location and authentic neighborhood cast call for an authentic shooting style, which "Ajami" delivers through the lensing of Boaz Yehonatan Yaacov. The roving, handheld style places the viewer squarely in the middle of the action, never quite certain what's coming next or from which direction. Mr. Yaacov is an excellent student of the cinema-verité school and takes it to another level, becoming almost an extension of the raw, unpredictable action of the characters.
But perhaps the most impressive (or, at least, notable) meta-narrative operating within "Ajami" is that of the film's creators, Copti and Shani, whose own collaboration creates an aura of hope around an otherwise tragic tale. Copti, an Arab Christian who was raised in the Ajami neighborhood and followed in his father's footsteps to become an engineer, discovered a passion for filmmaking when a friend asked him to collaborate on a short film about their neighborhood. He later met Shani, an Israeli Jew, who had attended film school in Tel Aviv and ran a student film festival, for which he encouraged local youths to make films about their environment. The two found in eachother a creative soul mate and embarked on writing the screenplay that would become "Ajami". They worked on the project for four years, while holding down day jobs, and eventually cobbled together financing from German and French film finance companies, as well as a grant from the Israeli Film Fund, just enough to shoot for 3 weeks.
When the film premiered at the Jerusalem Film Festival last summer, it brought down the house and was immediately hailed as the film of the year, which it won (as well as Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Editing) at the Israeli version of the Oscars, the Ophir Awards. It has since been nominated for Best Foreign Film for the upcoming Academy Awards.
I'll resist the urge to wax political about the lessons that can be drawn from the success of this Arab-Israeli, Christian-Jewish, Euro-Israeli collaboration. Suffice it to say that such lessons are abundant, but not nearly as significant, perhaps, as the artistic triumph that was achieved by the brave co-directors.
On second thought, "artistic triumph" is far too lofty a description of what they did. Instead, I'd like to qualify their triumph as one of truth and honesty in storytelling. Whether documentary or fiction, scripted or improvised, the boundaries of filmmaking in the Imagination Age are not only expanded by advancements in technology (read: "Avatar") but, maybe more so, by the filmmakers themselves who are willing to forego the artifices of cinema and lay bare the raw humanity of everyday life on film. For me, this was the true power of "Ajami", the willful blurring of that antiquated line between art and reality.
About Joshua Asen, Co-Founder/CEO, Hip Hop Diplomacy
After graduating from Brown University, Joshua made the first of several trips across the Atlantic to promote Hip Hop abroad. This first crossing was on behalf of storied Hip Hop label, Rocafella Records, for whom he created the label's first international promotions campaign in Paris. Later, Joshua ventured further south to Morocco, earning a Fulbright grant to study Hip Hop in an Arab/Muslim context. Joshua immediately expanded his project into a documentary film and became the first American to interview the leading Hip Hop groups in Morocco. Responding to their need for more performance opportunities, Joshua began developing plans for the country’s first Hip Hop festival, which he convinced the American Embassy and the Coca-Cola Company to co-sponsor. The 3-city concert tour was attended by over 36,000 young Moroccans and reached thousands more, across the globe, in screenings of the eponymous documentary film (www.ilovehiphopinmorocco.com).
Joshua has since gone on to produce independent films and video content, and continues to develop the Hip Hop Diplomacy brand, encompassing a number of cultural diplomacy and youth outreach campaigns, with varied public- and private-sector partners, as well as an online journal of global Hip Hop and geopolitics, www.hiphopdiplomacy.org.
Morozov's op-ed was written in response to the State Department's current Russian Tech Delegation (#RusTechDel on Twitter). The participants have been live-tweeting and inviting questions from their followers. But is social media the new jazz? Does Ashton Kutcher, one of the participants, a comedy actor and businessman who became a social media sensation only because he was already a celebrity, really have the same magnetic power as the jazz greats wordlessly shattering illusions so deeply entrenched in the human psyche? No, only music can reach the realm of unspeakable pain and injustice that afflicts so many people around the world, and that's not what today's Russia delegation is attempting.
Can a group of dedicated tech-focused Americans make a difference in Russia? Absolutely, and not just because they are encouraging more people around the world to use Facebook and Twitter.
Over the next few months on 1,000 Inches in Loveland, we'll be profiling "Inchvestors" (people who have purchased inches in "Loveland" Jerry Paffendorf's experiment in micro-real estate). Rita J. King is the largest inch holder in the Loveland's first colony, which is called Plymouth.
The first profile, posted today, is with Detroit area resident, Nazz Lane, who first learned about Loveland on this blog.
Bettina Tizzy sent out an invitation to DB Bailey's "The Conflagration," an installation made up of items from his inventory including a striking nude at rest beneath luminous floating wings and transparent, etched maps. From a distance, she looks real, in the physical sense, as if the model was a real woman, photographed and made virtual. Upon closer inspection--she's an avatar.
I spent the day collaborating with Josh Asen in the Experimental Story Studio at the Imagination Age Salon. He took a break in the evening to attend a history of jazz class while I attended "The Conflagration" and edited the video.
While Josh was on his way back to the Imagination Age Salon, he met Geechee Dan, whose music I used in "The Conflagration." Check out his video below, captured at the 59th St. northbound 1 platform in NYC.
Digital Diplomacy as a concept continues to evolve. It is still very new with limited analysis of the effectiveness of new media and technology tools for cultural relations. To confound this more, the tools and venues are in a constant state of evolution: Appearing and disappearing oftentimes on a near monthy basis.
In the course of her analysis, Ms. Nasar visits the virtual world of Second Life and the locations we covered in our report. Her personal, visceral reaction to visiting the hajj to Mecca not only informs the unique aspect of this medium, but demonstrates how far we have to go in understanding its potential. From the blog:
Another benefit of Second Life, is that it transcends many societal attributes that could otherwise prohibit one from approaching sensitive topics as religion. Virtual worlds offer people the ability to immerse oneself in another culture. However, it must be noted that virtual worlds cannot and should not replace real-life exchange programs.
I am on Second Life, and recently I visited the Kabaa, in Mecca. It was such a bizarre feeling but amazing at the same time. I was able to meet other Muslims from all over the world and understand more about Islam. I also have the opportunity to now participate in a virtual pilgrimage, or Hajj, to Mecca. In the future I hope to explore other religious sites around the world.
When @chapmanchapman tweeted about a secret Guns n' Roses show in NYC I instantly recalled a forgotten childhood memory of my parents laughing hysterically over Father Guido Sarducci when I saw Axl Rose.
I found this amazing video, "Father Guido on art school." It's a must watch for artists or anyone else who likes to sleep until "a quarter til noon."
More from the ongoing re-mixing and mainstreaming of social media and digital culture with meta culture, in this case street culture. Alice Taylor shares this image from the streets of New York City in which graffiti taggers are using the "@" sign, commonly used in social media, Twitter and website forums to refer to the person with or to whom one is speaking, tweeting or posting. (For an example of how it is used in Twitter, see the post below illustrating the Twitter-based discourse between Kevin Smith and Larry King.)
There is something amazing going on when Big Journalism (in this case Larry King Live on CNN) does their business transparently using social media tools. In this case, Larry King Live using Twitter to invite Kevin Smith on his show. Typically a producer would reach out to an celebrity's agent or manager to make the request. Or, in the case of Larry King, King might make a phone call directly to the potential guest, which make the use of Twitter in this case, novel and very interesting.
(As reader Hiro Pendragon notes, this could also be a savvy move by a publicist at Larry King Live who understands the PR value of having Larry King participate in the Twitter conversation directly instead of just using it as a broadcast tool. We previously blogged about how the US Ambassador to Kenya is failing to realize the potential of Twitter by using it solely as a broadcast medium.)
For those who missed out, writer, director, producer Kevin Smith, was ejected from a Southwest Airlines flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco for purportedly being too large to fit in the seat. Smith, in turn, went "social," lambasting Southwest Airlines via Twitter. Gawker has a great write-up of the blow-up.
Today, instead of having an assistant call Kevin Smith, the invite from Mr. King is sent via Twitter. Kevin Smith's response makes it sound like he would prefer to be interviewed by Oprah.
Kevin Smith later clarifies to DIP's Rita J. King that the Oprah reference was a joke. I thought the Oprah reference was funny too, but the fact that Larry King used Twitter to make the request was even funnier and was the point of this post.
Larry King, or whoever is managing his Twitter account, replies again, extending the invitation anew. A happy ending ... ?
Yesterday Jerry Paffendorff announced that the Plymouth Colony of Loveland, the first 10,000 inches of Loveland, has sold. The community is now sealed.
Starting next week we will be profiling members of Loveland's Plymouth colony over on the 1000 Inches in Loveland blog.
The Detroit Free Press has a new article about Jerry Paffendorf's Loveland project. As readers may know, Rita J. King is the largest "inchvestor" in Loveland. Her story of the project can be found at 1000InchesinLoveland.com.
Rita J. King has confirmed that the 1,000 inch holder who "plans to install an actual mailbox on the site" is indeed her. From the article:
"I would like to get to a point where it is globally interesting," said Paffendorf, 28, who moved to Detroit's Corktown neighborhood in January. "I want to bring these inches to life."
Inch by inch Paffendorf has taken the popular concept of virtual worlds -- where you can be anything or anyone you want to be on the Internet -- and given it real roots in Detroit.
"If you can stretch your imagination ... this small space can be as big as you want," said Paffendorf.
The project allows property buyers to virtually and physically alter their land.
With 1,000 inches, one buyer plans to install an actual mailbox on the site, giving the plot, which Paffendorf calls "Plymouth," a place to receive mail.
Trevor Smith, a Web developer in Seattle, plans to use some of his 333 square inches to install solar panels that will charge up a battery to distribute power to other inchvestors. Smith plans to give it away at first and potentially charge his neighbors in the future, "assuming we could negotiate right of way through the inches in between," he said.
Starting next week we'll be profiling members of Loveland's first community of inch holders to ask them about their experience, vision and take on Loveland.
The Imagination Age is pleased to welcome a guest post from our collaborator, Josh Asen, CEO and Co-Founder of Hip Hop Diplomacy.
In response to the recent Gov 2.0 event in Los Angeles, Mark Drapeau wrote, "Does the Public Currently Need to Know What Gov 2.0 Is?" Drapeau's points about jargon and the traditional idea that the public is the unwitting beneficiary of policy and behavior change are well made, but raise a larger question: What happens when the public, through strategic use of social media, becomes the driving force behind change in Gov 2.0 instead of waiting for change to occur? This post highlights a great example of that model.
If you haven't already seen the new Sundance channel reality/doc series, "Brick City" (Sundays at 9PM EST), then you haven't experienced one of the best examples of the use of new media to create better, more transparent governance, or what is now popularly referred to as 'Gov 2.0'. President Obama, in his "Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government", explains:
My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.
Over months of shooting and 5 hour-long episodes, Mayor Cory Booker of Newark (@CoryBooker on Twitter, another great example of Booker's commitment to Gov 2.0) opens up his office, his city, and his own life to the Emmy-deserving cameras of Marc Levin and Mark Benjamin ("The Last Party", "The Blues"). And not only Booker, the energetic, Ivy league-educated, community organizer (remind you of anyone?) 1st term mayor, who defeated longtime incumbent Sharpe James (see Oscar-nominated doc "Street Fight"), and has made it his mission to rebrand Newark as a city on the rise. But also the Police Director, who is fighting not only the gangs on the street but his political opponents within the Department; a former gang-member turned women's activist, who is pregnant with her second child (by her boyfriend from the rival gang) and also facing multiple years in prison for an assault in 2004; the principal of one of the city's underfunded public high-schools, who is trying to put pressure on the school board to make good on their promise of a new school building; even the governor, former Goldman Sachs CEO Jon Corzine, makes a few cameos.
So, how does this all add up to a case study of effective use of Gov 2.0 strategies? It's all in the way each character uses the power of the camera to connect with the virtual community that has grown around the show, from its fans, watching live, streaming clips, commenting, tweeting, retweeting, and in other ways multiplying the impact of the show's content and various change-agenda; the way those characters use the show as part of a multi-platform social media campaign to promote their individual causes. This allows Cory Booker to be tweeting about Newark's "achievements" as they unfold on the screen and in the online forums and episode guides. It allows ex-gangmember Jayda to promote her peer group, Nine Strong Women, and provide professional video content to its website. It allows Central Highschool Principal Ras Baraka to make an impassioned speech to his students about the abnormalcy of gang violence and have it reach audiences across the state and country, even the world (see below).
Please notice the posting by a Youtube member (unaffiliated with the school or the show) of Facebook and Twitter links for "OurBrickCity" and "CoryBooker", as well as the positive comments from actual students and supporters of Principal Baraka. I would call that a very effective partnership between Education, Media, and Government, and the public to rally wide support behind a change-initiative. It's transparent, it's open, it's participatory, it's collaborative, and it aims to build trust between partners. In fact, the Producers Guild of America recently hosted a panel to discuss "Brick City" as a 'New Media Marketing Case Study'.
But more than just the effectiveness of increasing visibility for the show and, ostensibly, support for the various causes that it champions, "Brick City" introduces a whole new way to (literally) look at governance: as a fully transparent, interactive, publicly-accountable system of leadership.
Here's a little promo reel. Many more clips at the Sundance site.
About Joshua Asen, Co-Founder/CEO, Hip Hop Diplomacy
After graduating from Brown University, Joshua made the first of several trips across the Atlantic to promote Hip Hop abroad. This first crossing was on behalf of storied Hip Hop label, Rocafella Records, for whom he created the label's first international promotions campaign in Paris. Later, Joshua ventured further south to Morocco, earning a Fulbright grant to study Hip Hop in an Arab/Muslim context. Joshua immediately expanded his project into a documentary film and became the first American to interview the leading Hip Hop groups in Morocco. Responding to their need for more performance opportunities, Joshua began developing plans for the country’s first Hip Hop festival, which he convinced the American Embassy and the Coca-Cola Company to co-sponsor. The 3-city concert tour was attended by over 36,000 young Moroccans and reached thousands more, across the globe, in screenings of the eponymous documentary film (www.ilovehiphopinmorocco.com).
Joshua has since gone on to produce independent films and video content, and continues to develop the Hip Hop Diplomacy brand, encompassing a number of cultural diplomacy and youth outreach campaigns, with varied public- and private-sector partners, as well as an online journal of global Hip Hop and geopolitics, www.hiphopdiplomacy.org.
My company, Dancing Ink Productions, has been collaborating with Manpower Inc. on issues related to virtual work since 2007. DIP produced the event depicted in this video. The exploration of Second Life is one aspect of Manpower's work in this area. I've been consistently impressed with the senior leadership at Manpower's adaptive and visionary approach to virtual work.
I also collaborate with Linden Lab on advancing awareness of what can be accomplished in Second Life for business enterprise groups. For the past year I've been working on case studies to document projects like Northrop Grumman's Cutlass Robot, which disarms real-world bombs, the National Oceanic And Atmospheric Administration's simulated ocean from equator to poles, and the Children's Memorial Hospital Chicago, which conducts full scale evacuations in a mirror build with health care practitioners training in a variety of lifesaving ways. The number of sophisticated, creative projects in Second Life with real world benefit is staggering.
I couldn't have imagined in November 2006 when I first went into Second Life to track down IBM scientists and researchers around the world that I'd still be working in this platform and still amazed in 2010. As Innovator-in-Residence at the Analytics Virtual Center, directing the Smarter Work project, I am committed to virtual work for the benefit of a new global culture and economy in the Imagination Age. Virtual work is not about stepping away from the physical world. It's about including the people with the skills necessary to create new opportunities, systems and careers.
IBM Senior Fellow Grady Booch (SL's Alem Theas), right, speaks with his machinima collaborator Ariella Furman (SL's Ariella Languish)
A recent event worth noting: On Thursday, a forum hosted by the Gronstedt Group in the virtual world of Second Life, discussed the collaborative machinima work of IBM Senior Fellow Grady Booch and machinimist Ariella Furman. (Embedded video of one of their latest project below.)
What was most striking about the event, which was attended by around fifty professionals in corporate, government, arts and machinima production, were the types of questions being raised. Topics included: Unionizing of both machinimatographers and avatar actors; and hiring professional actors who are experienced in blocking and direction. The focus is not just to get video shot in virtual worlds but to produce professional quality video.
There are some critical issues here. For example, some of the misperceptions about virtual worlds being simplistic or facile are perpetuated by machinima that present a pixelated, low-resolution version of virtual worlds that is not representative of the experience of the people who work and participate in them. The recent PBS Frontline's Digital Nation on which DIP appeared demonstrated this with the pixelated machinima video they used. The fact that Frontline did not hire a professional, hi-resolution machinimatographer illustrated a misperception on the producer's part that the medium is not mature or, certainly, not television ready. In the videos DIP has produced we worked with Ill Clan Animation Studios, who produce machinima video in high-resolution and high-definition: The kind of images that look good on television.
A second major problem with the video that PBS Frontline used to portray virtual worlds was the content of the video: Avatars dancing and meeting at bars. This kind of stereotyping does a disservice to the kind of meaty projects that are going on in virtual worlds. There are a number of fascinating projects going in Second Life that demonstrate how far beyond bars and dancing the virtual world experience is. For example, take a look at these two reports written by Rita J. King that as explore case studies, complex uses of virtual worlds (which would have made excellent examples for PBS to have focused on):
Feltron. The name itself smacks of time travel, which is why I supported his project on Kickstarter. I had no idea what Feltron vs Kickstarter was when I pledged $100 to support it. I did it because Jerry Paffendorf suggested it and I have a habit of taking him up on almost anything he suggests, which is how 1000 Inches in Loveland, an experiment in micro-ownership of real estate in his LOVELAND project, was born.
My area of focus as Innovator-in-Residence at IBM Analytics Virtual Center is Smarter Work. Kickstarter is a great example of working smarter by incentivizing others to give you funds to make your dreams real. On Kickstarter, you post your deliverable and you let people vote with their wallets. If you reach your goal, you get the funds. If you fall short, you don't. This creates a very exciting mood around projects. More than that, funders are offered incentives. The only reason I haven't posted a project on Kickstarter yet is because I'm working to craft the most exquisite rewards I can imagine.
The rewards ultimately separate the projects that get funded from those that don't.
Kickstarter founder Perry Chen in Brooklyn.
The incentive for contributing to Feltron vs. Kickstarter at the $100 level was that I got to serve on a small committee of other donors on a conference call to collaborate on...something. At the time I had no idea what, really, but that didn't stop me. I wanted to be on that conference call, to take part in whatever it is that people were willing to pay $100 to discuss.
Next thing I know I was on Skype with Feltron and the other donors, talking about the design of the Kickstarter pledge page. Feltron shared the link with each of us and led us through a presentation. We asked questions about the process, listened, made suggestions about function and aesthetics and it was a wonderful experience. We participated in making an already brilliant site a bit easier to use.
I immediately thought Feltron was a most magnificent human.
I had NO IDEA!
Every day of the year, Nick Feltron asks the people who have had meaningful encounters with him to fill out a survey. This is the result of that process!
Feltron explains:
Each day in 2009, I asked every person with whom I had a meaningful encounter to submit a record of this meeting through an online survey. These reports form the heart of the 2009 Annual Report. From parents to old friends, to people I met for the first time, to my dentist… any time I felt that someone had discerned enough of my personality and activities, they were given a card with a URL and unique number to record their experience.
I kept track only of who I gave survey invitations to, the number of the card and where it was given. The surveys answers were submitted via text forms, allowing the respondee to write whatever they desired, and leaving the task of making comparisons between the data up to me. I have used only this information to create the report, however accurate it may be. I have strived to sort and collate the data in a clinical and repeatable manner that could be reproduced by someone looking for the same stories I have selected.
The data set itself was messy and overwhelming, and filled with enough information for several more reports. There are inherent shortcomings (like the unrepresentative amount of water recorded), and endearing strong suits (like the exploration of mood). I used several tools to make this task a more manageable, including Processing, which allowed me to map and explore alternate layouts much more quickly than previously, and Amazon's Mechanical Turk.
Readers who will be in London this coming Monday, February 8, may be interested in this cool event sponsored by Counterpoint the British Council's in-house Think Tank. The event explores the cultural relations angle of cloud computing. DIP has been examining the intersection between cloud computing and Smarter Work. But the cultural relations aspect of it raises some interesting and important issues. Wish I could be there.
As cloud computing comes of age, our links to one another will be increasingly routed through a vast shared “cloud” of data and software. These clouds, supported by huge server farms all over the world, will allow us to access data from many devices, not just computers; to use programs only when we need them and to share expensive resources such as servers more efficiently. Instead of linking to one another through a dumb, decentralised network, we will all be linking to and through shared clouds.
Which raises the question: whose clouds will these be?
Cloud computing is bringing with it “cloud capitalism”. Companies will make money from organising these clouds for us. Apple already is, with its iTunes cloud of music and its cloud of thousands of third-party apps to run on the iPhone. Cloud computing will also bring a kind of cloud culture: increasingly, we will express ourselves through these clouds of films, videos, pictures, books, stories and music.
We are following with interest this new game announcement by Jane McGonigal (via the omnipresent Alice Taylor) about a World Bank Institute-funded game she is releasing in March called "EVOKE."
EVOKE is an online game designed to teach collaboration, creativity, knowledge networking, entrepreneurship, courage, resourcefulness, sustainability, and vision.
Our goal: to empower young people all over the world, and especially in Africa, to start tackling the world’s toughest problems: poverty, hunger, sustainable energy, water security, conflict, disaster relief, health care, education, human rights. ... The game runs for 10 weeks, with a new mission and a new quest each week.
Players who successfully complete all 10 missions and all 10 quests will be able to claim their honors: World Bank Institute Certified Social Innovator – Class of 2010.
Sounds like a great idea. Collaborative. Web-based (thus more accessible to African audiences) who have Internet access and, possibly, those who access the web via mobile phones, though it's not clear from the announcement whether it will be mobile-friendly. Most importantly, it's cross-cultural.
The graphic novel look and feel seems like a good idea as well.
Eric Hackathorn, better known in Second Life and virtual world circles as the person behind the impressive Second Life incarnation of NOAA -- the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, has just unveiled his newest effort: The US Department of Energy in Second Life.
The educational and experiential potential of this build is exciting and mind-expanding. From a trip through a super collider to life as a sub-atomic particle. Eric suggests, "Try smashing into each other as sub-atomic particles, take a tour of a super collider." For non-Second Life users, the video above will give you a good sense of the experience.
[Ed. Note: Eric Hackathorn comments: "Credit should really go to Brandon Lynge aka Addoceo Siamendes for his incredible Second Life development skills and the good folks at the Office of the Chief Human Capital in the Department of Energy including Edwin Luevanos aka Edwin Alekseev." So noted!]
"The Power Gap," by DemosTV might tell us something we already know (the rich elite are still in charge) but it's an intriguing animation that leaves the door open for imagining other forms of organizational power created not through expensive pre-existing connections passed down through the generations, but rather through creative entrepreneurial discipline, implementing new forms of currency exchange and maximizing data to create new systems.
In a fascinating turn of events, Fortune 500 Science & Research firm SAIC, better known for their classified research in and around national security issues, announced today that it had acquired virtual world platform Forterra Inc.
This is a significant move. Forterra, while not as expansive as Second Life commercially, focused on a very specific virtual worlds niche: Closed virtual world platforms for government. So much of government, because of the attendant needs of a bureaucracy to create a sense control around information, requires closed technology systems in order to function and to create a sense of security around their many classified research and training exercises. Forterra offered that. (Second Life now offers this through their Second Life Enterprise client, focused mainly on businesses.)
Forterra, under the leadership of its president, Robert Gehorsam, who will not be making the move to SAIC, focused doggedly on addressing the needs of government in virtual worlds. And it looks like it paid off. (Gehorsam who has not announced plans for his next venture, is a veteran game and Internet communications expert whose experience dates back to the days of Prodigy in the 1980s where he lead their games division and more recently for the Massively Multiplayer World for his work at Sony Online Entertainment the makers of MMOs like EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies.)
SAIC's move demonstrates that virtual worlds, far from flagging, are playing an increasingly critical and integrated role in how we work.
One additional footnote: I think this might be the first example of a corporation buying a virtual world company.
Second Life documentary Life 2.0 took Sundance by storm and is the subject of this article, "Second Life, Better than the First?" featuring an interview with filmmaker Jason Spingarn-Koff. The implications of co-existing realities and the way in which we create ourselves when all options are possible is at the core of Second Life's power.
To me, it's less about whether Second Life is better than life in the physical world and more about how meaningful experimentation in Second Life can lead to greater understanding of self, community and social systems.
In the past three years, I've worked in a personal and professional capacity on many different types of projects in Second Life with IBM, Manpower, Linden Lab, the American University in Cairo and the US State Department, PROBOSCIS, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and many more.
During my first week in Second Life, I met a Muslim woman in a Jewish synagogue who told me that she'd been curious all her life about what happens during prayer services, yet felt that she would be persecuted or at the very least make other people uncomfortable if she showed up at a synagogue in the physical world. I knew immediately that there would be no going back from this development--the ability to create and collaborate on *anything* you can imagine and share that three-dimensional space with people from all over the world.
My exploration of culture in Second Life also led me to a strapping green avatar with dredlocks named Schmilsson Nilsson, created by Joshua S. Fouts, who was at the time directing the Center on Public Diplomacy, a think-tank that he founded at the University of Southern California. In the time since, we've worked together in four continents in the physical world and across the digital culture as a whole to raise awareness about this unprecedented opportunity to truly understand something entirely new about individual and cultural identity.
So much fear stems from worrying about how others will perceive us if we behave in a way that goes against conditioned social expectation. Second Life is a complex and beautiful experimental lab for creating a more evolved state of cultural and economic development, not to mention the development of self. In 2007, when the New York Times profiled my company, Dancing Ink Productions, I realized that my office in Second Life, sparse and well-designed, did not match my office in the physical world, which was more an art studio filled with drawings, pencils, paint, collage scraps, musical instruments and books. I cleaned the entire studio out, organized everything and reinvented the space for the photograph.
It was then that I realized that avatars, for some, are an opportunity to play out a fantasy, such as the desire to be a vampire. For others, however, self-created avatars are an opportunity to design new concepts of self and community for meaningful participation in the physical world. This is, of course, a dangerous concept, which is why society is built around rules and expectation to keep people from thinking too much about why things are the way they are. Stopping and thinking often leads to trouble. Stopping and creating an entirely new concept of what it means to be a conscientious global citizen, however, as well as to take action in crafting one's own life and career at a time of economic and cultural transformation, has become a necessity as well as a strategic advantage.
In the past three years I've worked in dozens of platforms within the digital culture, but the special creative power of Second Life dazzles me every time I participate in a moment of indescribable beauty that real people take the time to create. While I have spent a great deal of time in the media, at meetings and at events defending Second Life, I've come to realize that the level of creativity required to envision a deeper reality is overwhelming to some--a fear that often manifests in disgust or ridicule. Such people run the risk of becoming casualties in the new economy.
Curious about the relationship between Augmented Reality and Virtual Worlds? Imagine having a fully interactive relationship with your world. Imagine a virtual world overlaying your physical world helping you understand the objects in the physical world so you can better interact with them. Imagine interviewing someone from another country and being able to see a universal virtual marker on them conveying a critical cultural message. One of the reasons DIP is so excited about Augmented Reality and virtual worlds is their predictive ability: An allusion of things to come. The above video, referred to us by our collaborator Ryan Chapman is a fun exploration of how the virtual might overlay and enhance the physical in the not-so-distant future.
Today, a new wave of speculation broke out about the great mystery of which of her paramours Carly Simon immortalized in her song "You're So Vain." This coincides with Carly Simon inviting fans and filmmakers to create videos that use the song. 
