Category: Essays

Posted on

Thinking Odd: Learning from the Future

I mentioned earlier that it’s often difficult for adults to trust the youth, but that it’s imperative. Letting youthful vision lead is the only way into the future. Well, Tyler the Creator and his Odd Future crew aren’t waiting for permission, approval, or funding — much less trust — from anyone. They are doing it, and doing it big.

Everyone can stop mongering the minutia of Radiohead’s every move. Though they’ve done nothing but smart things since parting ways with the past, they were already famous in three solar systems when they stepped out on that limb. Clamoring to find what one can learn from their marketing strategies is like trying to climb the stairs to catch the elevator: They’re already there. Odd Future is showing everyone how it’s ground up from the ground up. I’m not going to pretend that I can distill what they’re doing into a simple myth-making and marketing how-to, but I would like to point out a few key things. Some of you will find parts of this redundant, but Odd Future offers an excellent case study in getting out there in the now.

“Go make the art you believe in.” — El-P

For the uninitiated, OFWGKTA (Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All) are a Hip-hop collective out of Los Angeles. The oldest of their ten members are barely out of high school and the youngest are barely in. They have been making waves for the past year or so releasing as many records as they have members — for free — on their website, posting YouTube clips of both of their hoodrat antics and music videos for their songs. The aesthetic is somewhere between Wu-Tang Clan and Anticon, but way more dangerous and unpredictable (any one of them would slice me for those comparisons). The music is amazing, the skills are off the crazy, and their fanbase is huge, growing, and includes Mos Def, Despot, Skyzoo, and Jimmy Fallon, the latter of whom had them perform on his show recently. These kids prove that there is nothing so cool as youthful nihilism.

So, how do ten teens from L.A. build such a following? Here are six things Odd Future does right. This is how the music industry works now.

Release your darlings. Straight up, music wants to be free. It’s not a maybe. It is what your audience expects. Couldn’t you be selling yourself short (so to speak) by giving your work away? How so? Have you seen record-sales numbers lately? Odd Future has given away every record they’ve made thus far. They’re all on their website. Go ahead. Go get them.

Consider the vehicle. Does your idea fit in a tweet? Is it better as a post on your website? YouTube video? Song? Record? Painting? Poem? Find the vehicle that will best let the idea find its audience. Odd Future posts YouTube videos and new songs on the regular, often as soon as they’re recorded. Their cult of personality has largely been built three minutes at a time.

A lot of those videos are just the various Odd Future/Wolf Gang members skateboarding, graffiti writing, and goofing off, but here’s Tyler the Creator’s latest clip for “Yonkers” off of his forthcoming record Goblin [runtime: 3:05]. Take notes, kids. This is how it’s done.

XSbZidsgMfw

“Playing it safe isn’t interesting” — Ryan Kidwell

Risk it not once in a while, but every time. If you just watched that video, you know that it took a lot of courage or a touch of insanity — or a bit of both — as well as a truckload of raw talent (If you didn’t watch it, you should probably do so.). When “anyone” can do this, the just noticeable difference can make all the difference in the world. Tyler took what could’ve been another weird rap video and instead made a visual, artistic statement. That isn’t easy. You have to risk a part of yourself to get anything out of anything. Put it out there, and don’t feel forced to explain it. Mystery loves company.

Find a foil. I suggested before that one should start by having heroes as foils would likely come, but Odd Future show that having a common enemy (or three: Steve Harvey, NahRight, and 2DopeBoyz) can unite your crew. They also don’t really look up to many folks. Their whole take is about putting the tools to work in a “fuck it” kind of way. They don’t want or need your guidance. Sometimes we could all use a good shove to the next level, no matter if we feel ready. Finding someone else’s work to counteract can be just the push you need.

“You really can’t wait for anybody, and if things start fucking up and slowing down, you have to do it yourself and you have to make your own noise.” — Apathy

Do it yourself. You can’t wait around for someone else to make your thing happen. Using the establishment when possible is okay as a supplement, but your own efforts are your best resource. Make them count. OFWGKTA don’t even have parents, much less managers, publishers, or label contracts. As their website says about “Yonkers” (above): “Song Produced And Video Directed By The Nigga Thats Rapping.”

“Do what you feel, and feel what you do.” — J-Live

Love it. When you find what you think you want to do, make sure you love doing it. If you don’t, find something else. People often say that great art comes from pain, but I think that sentiment is misguided. I think that everyone should love it or leave it alone.

————

Here are Tyler the Creator and Hodgy Beats on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon from February 16, 2011 [runtime: 3:57]. Tell me they’re not having fun. When they announced this appearance on their site, they added “Time To Scare White America.” Mission accomplished:

XlGWRPnp0ok

Now, go do something bigger than you had planned.

Posted on

The BMX-Files: A Brief History in Two DVDs

In the June, 1987 issue of FREESTYLIN’ Magazine, underground BMX rider and zine-maker Carl Marquardt described a ramp trick he called a “flakie”: a backflip fakie air. His friend and fellow rider Paul Mackles had offered him $100 if he pulled it. Three years later, Mat Hoffman did the damn thing at a contest in Paris. In his usual methodical style, Mat worked on it in secret in Oklahoma for months beforehand. As he puts it in The Ride of My Life (Harper-Entertainment, 2002), “To make it, I needed at least six feet of air so my head would clear the coping. It was the kind of stunt that required 100 percent conviction each time. I practiced them every day until I had the flip fakie pretty wired, landing high on the transition rather than jarring into the flat bottom Then, I got invited to France.” The photos of Mat’s first public flip-fakie landed on several magazine covers, including the July, 1990 issue of Go: The Rider’s Manual (the publication that combined FREESTYLIN’ with its forebear, BMX Action).

Mat Hoffman burst into the BMX mass mind via the letters page of FREESTYLIN’. Masquerading as the then thirteen-year-old Mat, his mom sent in a picture of him blasting a nine-foot air on his driveway quarterpipe. In his response, editor Andy Jenkins’ described the air as “not normal,” and I think everyone — myself included — knew we were going to see a lot more of this high-flying kid in the coming years. Even so, little did we know…

More than once, Mat Hoffman has been called the “Michael Jordan of BMX.” As Tony Hawk — who could be considered Mat’s equivalent in skateboarding — puts it in The Birth of Big Air (Team Marketing, 2010), “If you know anything about BMX, you know who Mat Hoffman is. And maybe that’s all you know.” This movie illustrates why that’s the case. He’s paid the price for his place in BMX lore — with his body. “There’s not an extremity he hasn’t broken in a violent manner,” says Mat’s orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Carlan Yates. Mat’s basically dedicated his physical form to the advancement of BMX. There have been smoother riders, there have been people who’ve done it longer, there are people finishing things Mat only started, but no one — no one — has pushed the limits of vert riding on a BMX bike more than Mat Hoffman has. No one. Ever.

“Let’s just say it would’ve sucked to have been born a hundred years ago or a hundred years from now because I would’ve missed out on all of this.” — Dennis McCoy

If you have any doubts about the pedigree of BMX as a sport, Joe Kid on a Stingray (Bang Pictures, 2005) will put them to rest. Its twisted and dirty 1970s roots are exposed and explained. Watching grainy footage of Stu Thomson winning races on a Schwinn Stingray is as sketchy as it is sick. Any story of people sitting on the verge of something that has become as big as BMX has is inspiring, and Joe Kid… is no exception.

“Ask anyone, ‘who invented freestyle?’ Bob Haro!” — Ron Wilkerson

From imitating motocross riders to emulating skateboard tricks, BMX evolved from racing to freestyling (all of which is just called “BMX” these days). Bob Haro was bored with racing and started doing tricks between motos. Eventually, his wheelies, endos, and 180s lead to actual sanctioned freestyle shows at the races. Through touring and innovating, Haro, R.L. Osborn, Mike Buff, Pat Romano, and Ron Wilton made trick riding into something to be taken seriously.

“Maybe that’s our problem. Maybe we just never grew up.” — Bob Osborn

It would be remiss to document the history of BMX without mentioning Bob Osborn. Through BMX Action and FREESTYLIN’ (and their aforementioned combined form, Go), Osborn, his son R. L., and his daughter Windy created the look of BMX media and brought the sport to the world. They also acquainted the world with Andy Jenkins, Mark Lewman, and Spike Jones, who have all gone on to create other great things in art, movies, television, skateboarding, and advertising. Trusting the youth is often difficult for adults to do, but Bob did, and the world is much better for it.

In the late 1980s, I was street riding with some friends in Huntsville, Alabama. One of them, Dave Nash, was wearing these Airwalks held together with duct tape. Someone there asked him why he didn’t just get some new shoes, and he responded, “Because I don’t want to spend any more money on this sport.” It was one of the most depressing things I’ve ever heard anyone say. The initial decline of BMX was a scary, strange thing to witness as a kid, but it was actually a positive move. Just as skateboarding had done before it, BMX changed hands from the companies to the riders.

Speaking of, anyone know where Chris Moeller was during the making of this movie? In many ways, S&M Bicycles, along with the efforts of Hoffman, Wilkerson, and the Plywood Hoods, represents the largely unsung part of the bridge from what BMX was in the 1980s to what it is now.

Anyway, big props to Jeff Tremaine, Mark Lewman, Johnny Knoxville, and Mark Eaton for documenting the history of our sport. If you’re a hardcore BMXer of any era, these two movies are your history. If you are bike-curious but know nothing about the sport, these two movies will give you a pretty in-depth crash course.

I don’t know if Mat Hoffman ever collected Paul Mackles’ money for doing Carl Marquardt’s “flakie,” but he was in the same issue of FREESTYLIN’ Magazine, along with another youngster Scotty Freeman, in a piece called “Little Giants.” He was fifteen years old.

———-

Here’s the official teaser for Joe Kid on a Stingray [runtime: 3:25]:

XYnbQuPZBx4

———–

Special thanks to Brian Tunney for additional reporting and fact-checking.

Posted on

Word Power: Watch What You Say

When I was six years old, I propped a 2×4 up on a brick in our driveway and jumped my Evel Knievel Signature Schwinn Stingray a few inches less than a foot off the ground. My grandfather saw me trying to achieve escape velocity and told me to keep it up, that it would “earn me some money one day.” Well, I’m still pedaling toward inclined planes attempting to leave the earth’s surface, but I’ve never earned a dime doing it. The point is not my inability to parlay my propensity for doing dumb stuff on my bike into a career, but that the things we say to each other often have long-lasting impacts we could never anticipate. The smallest utterances can shape a person’s life.

Language leaves lips for lines and spins through circuits
We send and receive and talk in circles
When we leave and the circles are broken
What happens to all the words we’ve spoken?

Riding BMX got me into making zines. I saw an article on them in FREESTYLIN’ Magazine and decided I wanted to do one. When I wasn’t riding my bike, I’d be in my room with photos, Sharpies, and gluesticks, cutting and pasting my visions on half-folded eight and a half by eleven pieces of paper.* During one of those sessions, my dad told me I should work for a magazine. I ended up doing just that (and the web equivalent) for several years.

If I were forced to pick a single answer to the question “what do you do?” I would probably say I’m a writer, though I never did well on writing assignments in school. In spite of my placement in advanced classes, I scored poorly throughout high school on writing-related projects. Hell, I made C’s in both English 101 and 102, but In my second-to-last semester of undergrad, one of my instructors complimented my writing. We had done several in-class essays in her Abnormal Psychology class, and one day she pulled me aside and told me what a good writer I was. This came as a surprise, given my previous track record and the fact that I’d been an Art major for my first three years of college. Regardless, it stuck with me. I took a class on writing for social science research the next semester, and though I barely made a B, I felt more at home researching and writing than I ever had trying to do traditional art. I give the credit for my newfound confidence to my Abnormal Psychology teacher.

When I moved away from Seattle the first time, I used to keep in touch with local cable access celebrity the Reverend Bruce Howard (you can find clips of his ranting on YouTube). Once, during a long-distance phone conversation with him from Alabama, he interrupted himself and told me out of the blue that I had a great speaking voice and that I should use it. I’d never really thought about it because, as you know from hearing your own voice on recordings, I thought I sounded weird, but coming from such a dynamic speaker, it made me rethink it. I have since become an instructor and a regular public speaker. Part of my having the self-assurance to make this leap was Rev. Howard’s comment.

These are all positive examples, but it works both ways. In communication studies classes, we teach that communication is irreversible. Once you put something out there, you can’t take it back (I always think of the courtroom scenes where they strike something from the written record even though everyone in attendance already heard it). As the above examples illustrate, in butterfly effects of the word, even the smallest comment can leave a lasting impression. Be careful what you say to your friends, family, colleagues, coworkers, and others around you. Your words can have impacts you never imagined.

———————

* So fervent was my zine-making that I got a copy machine for my high school graduation present. I still have one, and I do still make zines once in a while.

Posted on

A Compassionate Eye with a Tendency Toward Celebration

With 2010’s emergence of Aesop Rock and company’s art-driven 900 Bats website and the death of Peter Christopherson, I got to thinking about inspiration for art and design and, well, inspiration in general. I just read Scott Belsky’s Making Ideas Happen (Portfolio, 2010; with thanks to Matt Schulte for the tip). His book and Havi Brooks‘ Tweets keep me thinking about what I find inspiring and–often more importantly–motivating (they’re not the same thing).

I don’t draw or do traditional art work as much as I used to, but I still feel very much informed by that world’s processes and struggles. My man Sean Walling will send me something once in a while that inspires a day in the sketchbook, Dave Allen will post something that sends my head in a different direction, or Jared Souney will do some one-off shirt design or post a rad photo that gets me stoked. A lot of this stuff gets lost in the ephemera of the electronic flow of the web (e.g., Twitter streams, status updates, etc.), and I used to try and collect it once in a while (as Dave has been doing with his Friday Awesomeness Files). As we move into a new year, here is a new attempt to collect and catalog inspiration.

As TEDxAustin Tweeted earlier today,

@TEDxAustin: Reviewing 2010? Planning 2011? We wish you a compassionate eye with a tendency toward celebration as you do.

Jared quite often inspires me with process. Like me, he comes from the pre-web era of  “real” photography, handmade ‘zines, and photocopy art. When he posted the Polaroid transfer above earlier this year, it reminded me how much of my thinking still happens via analog means. Now don’t get it twisted, I wouldn’t trade my computers for a typewriter, but when it comes to art and design work, I often find myself near the copy machine with paper, scissors, Sharpies, and gluesticks in hand before I complete something in Photoshop (you already know how I am about my notebooks). As was the case with the logo I did for the University of Texas’s American Studies “Fault Lines” conference this fall.

Point being that processes are often endemic to the finished product. This summer I visited Full Sail University in Orlando, Florida, and I was struck by the way they set up their classes. If you study character design (for animation or games), you go through classes on illustrating, 3-D modeling, and animating by hand before you ever touch a computer. It made so much sense to me: Finding the core process of your project informs the finished product.

The periphery influences the process as well. Design professor Peter Lunenfeld and I once had a discussion during which we talked about things we thought with and through. For example, one of my many side interests is architecture. I don’t understand most of what goes into designing buildings or living spaces, but I find the process and thinking about it inspiring. I was reminded of that discussion when Oleg Mokhov posted his Beastie Boys Guide to More Creative Designs in which he “thinks through” the Beastie Boys lengthy, storied, and successful career as a guide for creativity. The tenets of his brief guide are these:

  1. Be the outsider
  2. Fuse separate styles together
  3. Add subtle humor
  4. Don’t repeat your past work
  5. Be open to collaborations

I can stand behind those 100%.

I just found a t-shirt emblazoned with T.I.’s Paper Trail (2008) cover art by Ian Wright, and was reminded of its impact on me when it came out. It’s somewhere between Salvador Dali’s “Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea” and Chuck Close‘s grid-portraits. Here’s a quote from an MTV interview with T.I. from July of 2008, with a little about the cover:

We didn’t want to just do a typical cover, especially for my sixth album. I wanted to try something a little more different. The illustration for Paper Trail pays an obvious homage to my rekindled affinity for writing my lyrics down as well as displays my commitment to keep my art slanted towards the abstract.

Often inspiration just comes from seeing something done well. Here are a few other things that keep me going:

One of the challenges of creative work and staying inspired and motivated to do it is paying attention to your natural tendencies in an attempt to fight or change them (both Scott Belsky and Havi Brooks address this struggle in their work). Knowing what gets you going is part of that challenge. As I told a colleague of mine recently, remember that you are defined not by what gets you down, but by what gets you off.

Posted on

The Essential Tension of Ideas

One of the key insights in Richard Florida’s latest book, The Great Reset (Harper, 2010) is that rapid transit increases the exchange of ideas and thereby spurs innovation. Where the car used to provide this mass connection, now it hinders it. Increasingly, our cognitive surplus is sitting traffic.

Ideas are networks, Steven Johnson argues in his new book, Where Good Ideas Come From (Riverhead, 2010). The book takes Florida’s tack, comparing cities to coral reefs in that their structure fosters innovation. Good ideas come from connected collectives, so connectivity is paramount.

Human history in essence is the history of ideas. — H. G. Wells

On the other end of the spectrum, in a recent post about Twitter, David Weinberger writes,

…despite the “Who cares what you had for breakfast?” crowd, it’s important that we’ve been filling the new social spaces — blogs, social networking sites, Twitter, messaging in all forms, shared creativity in every format — with the everyday and quotidian. When we don’t have to attract others by behaving outlandishly, we behave in the boring ways that make life livable. In so doing, we make the Net a better reflection of who we are.

And since we are taking the Net as the image of who we are, and since who we think we are is broadly determinative of who we become, this matters.

His description sounds like we’re evening out our representations of our online selves, reconciling them with our IRL selves, initiating a corrective of sorts. Coincidentally, in their sad version of “The SEED Salon,” a recent issue of WIRED had Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson discuss the roots of innovation (by way of plugging their respective new books; here they are discussing same at the New York Public Library). Kelly states,

Ten years ago, I was arguing that the problem with TV was that there wasn’t enough bad TV. Making TV was so expensive that accountants prevented it from becoming really crappy—or really great. It was all mediocre. But that was before YouTube. Now there is great TV!

It sounds as though Weinberger and Kelly are calling for or defending a sort of “infodiversity,” which one would think would be a core tenet of media ecology. As Kelly puts it in What Technology Wants (Viking, 2010), “Both life and technology seem to be based on immaterial flows of information” (p. 10). He continues in WIRED,

To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap. Another example is spectrum. One reason we have this great explosion of innovation in wireless right now is that the US deregulated spectrum. Before that, spectrum was something too precious to be wasted on silliness. But when you deregulate—and say, OK, now waste it—then you get Wi-Fi.

In science, Thomas Kuhn called this idea “the essential tension.” In his book of the same name (University of Chicago Press, 1977), he described it as a tug-of-war between tradition and innovation. Kuhn wrote that this tension is essential, “…because the old must be revalued and reordered when assimilating the new” (p. 227). This is one of those ideas that infects one’s thinking in toto. As soon as I read about the essential tension, I began to see it everywhere — in music, in movies, in art, and indeed, in science. In all of the above, Weinberger, Johnson, and Kelly are all talking about and around this idea, in some instances the innovation side, and in others, the tradition side. We need both.

One cannot learn anything that is more than one step away from what one already knows. Learning progresses one step or level at a time. Johnson explores this idea in Where Good Ideas Come From by evoking Stuart Kauffman‘s “adjacent possible” (a term Johnson uses hundreds of times to great annoyance). The adjacent possible is that next step away. It is why innovation must be rooted in tradition. Go too far out and no one understands you, you are “ahead of your time.” Take the next step into the adjacent possible that no one else saw, and you have innovated. Taken another way, H. G. Wells once said that to write great science fiction, one must adopt a perspective that is two steps away from the current time. Going only one away is too familiar, and three is too far out. As Kelly puts it in the WIRED piece, “Innovating is about more than just having the idea yourself; you also have to bring everyone else to where your idea is. And that becomes really difficult if you’re too many steps ahead.” A new technology, literally “the knowledge of a skill,” is–in its very essence–the same thing as a new idea. For instance, Apple’s Newton was too many steps ahead of or away from what was happening at the time of its release. I’m sure you can think of several other examples.

Johnson, who has a knack for having at least one (usually more) infectious idea per book, further addresses the process of innovation with what he calls the “slow hunch.” This is the required incubation period of an innovative idea. The slow hunch often needs to find another hunch in order to come to fruition. That is, one person with an idea often needs to be coupled with another who has an idea so that the two can spur each other into action, beyond the power of either by itself (see the video below for a better explanation). It’s an argument for our increasing connectivity, and a damn good one.

That is not to say that there aren’t and won’t be problems. I think Kevin Kelly lays it out perfectly here:

…[T]here will be problems tomorrow because progress is not utopia. It is easy to mistake progressivism as utopianism because where else does increasing and everlasting improvement point to except utopia? Sadly, that confuses a direction with a destination. The future as unsoiled technological perfection is unattainable; the future as a territory of continuously expending possibilities is not only attainable but also exactly the road we are on now (p. 101).

———————–

Here’s the book trailer for Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From [runtime: 4:07]:

NugRZGDbPFU

————————

References:

Florida, R. (2010). The great reset. New York: Harper.

Johnson, S. (2010). Where good ideas come from. New York: Riverhead.

Kelly, K. (2010). What technology wants. New York: Viking.

Kuhn, T. (1977). The essential tension. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Weinberger, D. (2010). “Why it’s good to be boring on the web.” JoHo The Blog.

WIRED. (2010, October) “Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson on where ideas come from.” Wired.com.

Posted on

Browser Don’t Surf: The Web’s Not Dead… Yet.

Remember when people used to “surf the web”? Now it is said that typical daily browsing behavior consists of five websites. William Gibson’s age-old summary of web experience, “I went a lot of places, and I never went back” has become, “I go a few places, and I stay there all the time.” We don’t surf as much as we sit back and watch the waves. I started this post several months ago when I noticed that the lively conversations that used to happen on my website had all but ceased (and eventually ceased altogether). Though the number of visitors continued to increase, the comments had moved elsewhere. A link to a post here on Facebook garners comments galore on Facebook, but none on the actual post. I doubt that I’m alone in experiencing this phenomenon.

I Tweeted (that still sounds silly, doesn’t it?) sometime last year  “Facebook 2009 = AOL 1999.” I was being snarky at the time, but there are good reasons that the analogy holds. As Dave Allen of North pointed out recently, search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine management (SEM) are shams for users. For those that don’t know, SEO and SEM are strategies for gaming Google’s search algorithms, thereby attaining higher page-rank in search results. That’s great if the optimized site actually has what you’re looking for, but unfortunately this is becoming less and less the case (Dave was looking for some bamboo poles from a local source for his backyard in Portland. I challenge you to find one using Google).

Enter closed communities like AOL and Facebook: These social networks help filter the glut by bringing the human element back into the process. So-called “social search” or “social filtering” helps when Google fails. So, even as Facebook has become the new “training wheels” of the Web (as AOL was before it), it also serves as a new organizing principle for all of the stuff out there.

Once I read the Wired cover story on the death of the web, I knew this idea had to be revisited. The claim that the web is dead is more than a ploy to sell magazines and less than a statement of truth. Yes, we’ve used the terms “web” and “internet” interchangeably (even jokingly combining them in the portmanteau “interwebs”) when they’re not the same thing, but don’t get it twisted: The web is not dead. It’s changing, growing, reorganizing, yes. But it’s far from dead.

Organizing principles are just filters; they include, they exclude, they make sense of would-be chaos. Good examples include books, solar systems, and city grids. As an organizing principle, the web is lacking at best, but it’s not lacking enough to wither and die just yet. Sure, the “app-led” (i.e., Appled) future, with its smart phones, iPhones, iPads, and other gadgets is forming closed silos using the internet’s backbone, but you aren’t likely to be sitting at your desk using anything other than the web for a while to come yet.

That brings us back to the shift from outlying sites (like this one) to filtering sites (like Facebook). As long as web search is run by algorithms that can be gamed (thereby rendering them all but useless), then the closed silos will stack — on and off the web proper. Where will that leave sites like mine? I don’t know, but no one is interested in The Roy Christopher App just yet.

Posted on

Three Models in-Progress

Now that Spring semester is over, I can get back to the real work. One of my classes (Dr. Nick Lasorsa’s Theory Building in the Social Sciences class) inspired me to rediscover visual modeling (see Shoemaker, Tankard & Lasorsa, 2004 and Britt, 1997). I’ve always been a big fan of playing with ideas visually, but it had been a while since I’d tried to model any of the things I’ve been working through in my head. Below, I’d like to float three models in various stages of development.

I’ve been playing with this model for several years. Thinking through the creation and evolution of culture continues to lead me back to a mix between people and technology. I see people working on the prevailing culture through various bottom-up processes and technology shaping it from the top-down. There’s a lot more to it, of course, but that’s about as parsimonious as models get.

It has long been the case that media studies saw the evolution of media technology (and its relationship to our senses) as moving from an oral culture, to a print culture, to electronic media (i.e., back to a predominantly oral culture), as shown on the left side of my model above — Walter Ong (1982) and Marshall McLuhan (1964) both recognizing the shift from the ear to the eye and back. I believe, however, that the history of the theatre system has been widely overlooked in media and communication studies, having just as much to do with the evolution of electronic media as print has. Performance studies might bear this out, but I think it’s all but missing in our discipline. Print has been unduly privileged. So, I added a second column to the model to illustrate the theater’s place in the history of our current wired culture.

The last model in my head lately is just a new way to slice up the communication process. The ancient sender/receiver model and its many updated versions have served us well, but I want a model that would account for the channel and the message in a different, more nuanced way. If we break communicative acts into the three constructs above — content, context, and contact (each of which influences the others and can come in any order, but all must be present) — we can account for things left out of the original Shannon and Weaver (1949) model (upon which most subsequent models of communication have been based).

These are far from finished, but I’ve worked each to a point that I find useful. I’ve withheld a lot of my explanation and expansion on these preferring instead to see how well they stand with minimal support. Suggestions and discussion are welcome.

———–

Special thanks to Brian Spitzberg for teaching me this stuff in the first place and to Nick Lasorsa for the recent refresher.

References:

Britt, D. W. (1997). A conceptual introduction to modeling: Qualitative and quantitative perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Ong, W. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the world. New York: Routledge.

Shannon, C. E. & Weaver, W. (1949). The mathematical theory of communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Shoemaker, P. J., Tankard, Jr., J. W., & Lasorsa, D. L. (2004). How to build social science theories. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Posted on

Desiring Lines: The Path More Traveled

Campus sidewalks meander between places of interest, connecting buildings and parking lots in a maze of concrete stripes. Often where their right angles turn near grassy areas between them and another building or parking lot, there are paths leading off diagonally. These forking paths are called “desire lines,” so named because they show where people would rather walk. There’s a story circulating that says good engineers (or lazy ones, depending on who tells the story; see Brand, 1994, p. 187) put sidewalks in last as to follow the desire lines and avoid wear on the grass. Desire lines illustrate the tension between the native and the built environment and our relationship to them.

Desire lines are where the system – the system of people in conjunction with their built environment – asserts itself. “Thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived,” wrote Gaston Bachelard in his book The Poetics of Space (1958). “These drawings need not be exact. They need only to be tonalized on the mode of our inner space… Space calls for action, and before action, the imagination is at work. It mows and ploughs” (p. 12).

Our dealings with Nature are just lines in innumerable directions.
— William James

In A Line Made by Walking (Afterall Books, 2010), Dieter Roelstraete examines a series of art work and black and white photographs thereof by Richard Long. In 1967, while a student at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London, Long wore single, straight line on a hillside outside of London. His single photograph of the line wore his name into the annals of art like so many footsteps on that hill. The piece, also dubbed A Line Made by Walking, Roelstraete writes, “equally belongs to the histories of early Conceptual art, Land art, performance or body art…” and experiments in photography, among others (p. 2). It was Long’s first recognized piece of art and set in motion a career that took art out of the gallery and into the landscape. Roelstraete’s book explores his work, but also the many trajectories that spin off of it. Travel, technology’s influence thereon, walking, performance, and the relationship of the body to the world.

Rebecca Solnit has done the best job of exploring the history and philosophy of walking and thinking. Roelstraete situates Long’s work in relation to Solnit, quoting Solnit’s Wanderlust: A history of walking (2001): “Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them… Walking is a mode of making the world as well as being in it” (p. 27; p. 5). Richard Long’s work and Dieter Roelstraete’s book about it illustrate this thought in lines both walked and written.

By the way, A Line Made By Walking (the book) is an entry in Afterall’s “One Work” series, each of which explores a particular piece of art and how it changed art and our perception of it, not unlike what Continuum’s 33 1/3 Series does for records. Both are highly recommended.

Desire lines and the meditations in A Line Made by Walking remind me that aspects of our lives only matter because a certain amount of us have decided that they do. Often called social construction and often harshly critiqued as uselessly postmodern, the concept is testable. Go to your local coffee shop or restaurant and try to walk behind the counter. You will be swiftly ushered back to the other side of the counter if not out of the establishment. Whether or not there is an actual physical barrier in place, there is an accepted area for the employees and one for the patrons — that’s social construction. As a society or culture we tend to agree on a great many of these constructions. We decide what matters.

To read Solnit, you’d think we’d decided that walking no longer matters. She writes,

Walking still covers the ground between cars and buildings and the short distances within the latter, but walking as a cultural activity, as a pleasure, as travel, as a way of getting around is fading, and with it goes an ancient and profound relationship between body, world, and imagination. (p.250)

Though I’m less pessimistic than Solnit sounds above, I acknowledge that technology often makes decisions for us. Often we aren’t left a choice as to what is easier, more convenient, or more fun, much less what is more acceptable. Often the technology in place makes only one path available — a sidewalk in the current example. But, as GeorgieR, an admin for the Desire Path Flickr Group, puts it,

The key to the desire path is not just that it’s a path which one person or a group has made, but that it’s done against the will of some authority which would have us go another, rather less convenient, way.

Desire lines illustrate our endless ability to stray anyway.

References:

Bachelard, G. (1958). The poetics of space. New York: Beacon.

Brand, S. (1994) How building learn: What happens after they’re built. New York: Viking.

James, W. (1903). The varieties of religious experience. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Roelstraete, D. (2010). Richard Long: A line made by walking. London: Afterall Books.

Solnit, R. (2001). Wanderlust: A history of walking. New York: Penguin.

———-

Special thanks to Katie Arens for introducing me to the concept of desire lines.

Posted on

How To Do Stuff and Be Happy

For my recent guest lecture at UIC, I was tasked with three things. Mike Schandorf asked me to do a little motivating, do a little background, and answer some questions. For the first, I went back through some of the posts here, some things I used to handout at the end of the semester in my classes, and a few key essays by people who have motivated me. This is still rather diffuse, but since these are all just recommendations (i.e., you should only use what works for you and ignore the rest; they are suggested tactics, not steadfast rules), it would probably seem that way no matter. Continue reading “How To Do Stuff and Be Happy”

Posted on

How Gene Simmons Made Me a Music Geek

Gene Simmons must be one of the most polarizing personalities on the planet. He co-founded one of the most controversial bands of the 70s, has allegedly had his way with thousands of women, has run magazines, written books, hosted talk and reality shows,* and has revolutionized merchandising. I’ve always had a soft spot for The God of Thunder, but I’m not surprised when I find someone who hates him.

The first record I ever bought with my own money was Gene Simmons’ KISS solo record. In 1978, the four masked men each released solo records. Gene’s wasn’t the best corner of the square (everyone knows Ace Frehley’s opus lay claim to that spot), but it was probably a solid second, even if a distant one. KISS was my first favorite band and Gene was my first favorite member.

KISS is a band that invited investigation from its young fans. From their comic-book personae, super powers, and devilish face paint to their catchy, cheesy songs, they had a lock on the imagination of preteen boys for over a decade. We had to dig deeper and, thanks to a massive merchandising arm, there was always more to find.

I saw them live in Biloxi, Mississippi in 1979 on what was to be their last tour in the makeup (until the reunions, of course), and KISS remained my favorite band until almost sixth grade, at which time my friend Keith Vanderberg introduced me to Oingo Boingo. Oingo Boingo was the first band whose lyrics actually made me think about things. Bands like KISS were soon on their way off the playlist, and bands like Talking Heads and The Clash were on, eventually giving way to hardcore, Hip-hop, and indie rock.

Gene reemerged somewhere in here, impressing me with his indie rock knowledge. In some music magazine in the early 1990s, Gene waxed geeky about the lineage of Teenage Fanclub, including BMX Bandits and his love of Eugenius. This seemed not only out-of-character for him, but also oddly too well researched not to be genuine. It was impressive.

Fast-forward a few years, I was working as the editor of Pandemonium! Magazine in Tacoma, Washington, and KISS had reunited for what would be the first of several top-grossing tours in the old makeup. In a fit of nostalgia, we were planning to put them on the cover. Our staffer Dave Liljengren was handling the interview, and when Gene called him to chat, Dave was on his way out the door to something he absolutely could not miss.

Dave: “Sorry, Gene. I’m walking out the door. Can you call me back at the same time tomorrow?”

Gene: “Not a problem.”

Now, you’d think that this on-and-off freelance writer for this little regional rag in Tacoma, Washington had just blown his one chance for calling Dr. Love (that’s certainly what I thought), but I’ll be damned if Gene didn’t call Dave back the next day and do the interview. We didn’t end up using it, but the point is that Gene Simmons could be bothered to call back the next day.**

In a questionable move on the other end of the spectrum, Gene donated a $5,000 KISS casket to Dimebag Darrell Abbott‘s funeral. Apparently that’s what Dime would’ve wanted, so it can be seen as a good look. On the other hand, it could be seen as the most tastelessly lame marketing move in the history of tastelessly lame marketing moves.

So, say what you will about Gene Simmons, he is slimy, brilliant, shameless, hokey, flamboyant, cheesy, innovative, and a butterfly flapping his wings in my distant past.

———-

* Is it just me, or does Gene’s son look like Paul Stanley?

** Finding out before we went to press that the October, 1996 issue was going to be our last, I put another of my all-time favorite bands on the cover: the mighty Godflesh.