Tuesday, 30 January 2001
It's a Wrap: Where Do We Go From Here?
David Rosen & Neil Seiling, moderators
DR: This has been quite an adventure and we've covered a lot of ground. I've been very impressed by the caliber of both the presentations and the rigor of the questions from the audience. We've created of a meeting of minds among equals. When we started this effort, it was my intent to place the position of independent mediamakers within a sort of larger social and intellectual context, one linking technology, public policy, creativity and business. This context could create what I believe to be a more holistic look at our lives as both individuals and as professionals in the independent media sector in whatever capacity we define ourselves.
| "Digital media are setting the stage for a new aesthetics that is still in its infancy." DAVID ROSEN |
What excites me in looking at the evolution of technology and media is how the human experience is presented with more complexity, with more subtlety, with more depth, as each of the media has moved forward over the last hundred and fifty years. Compare the earliest photographs in the 1820's and 1830's with the stereography of the 1840's and 1850's (which has been all but lost). Early photographs captured human experience in a two-dimensional way; stereographs attempted a three-dimensional visualization. Film (and the subfilm genre of television) incorporated motion and eventually sound and color. The shift to digital represents yet another expansion of our ability to capture the fullness of human experience. Digital media are becoming increasingly more sensuous or plastic in the Greek sense of having a richer context in which you can portray other people, yourself, or the world we live in. Digital media are setting the stage for a new aesthetics that is still in its infancy.
NS: I appreciate the talent and good will that has been on display at the Digital Independence conference. David and I consciously tried to bring people who have been leaders in their fields, but also people who are bridges between the many areas in the rapidly growing digital domain. The speed and the scale of the growth of digital media have been hard to fully grasp, even for the most knowledgeable of professionals. Building bridges between people, groups, and disciplines will be a crucial step in the future success of the independent media community.
I believe that there is an immense wealth of talent, passion, tools, and buying power in the independent media community. Digital Independence is one way to knit all of that potential power together, and the response of many people here gives me real optimism for the
collective realization of a vibrant, independent, and self-sustaining media culture.
Andrew Blau, policy analyst
I want to focus on the underlying ecology of digital media technology, on how a work finds an audience or makes its impact. This ecology is defined by two distinct or defining features. On the production side, it is marked but what I call a savage freedom, the radical democratization of production and distribution technology. The consequence of this on the reception or experience side is the tyranny of uncoerced choices. Let me point out three trends here.
The first trend I call social search. It turn
s out that research about how people use web marketplaces are confronted by an essentially chaotic information world, a universe that's not particularly organized around them and their needs. So they develop various strategies for moving around that space in ways that make sense of it for them. Social search is a quasi-academic way of talking about what you hear from your friends and other people. Audiences are attracted to different kinds of online sites or products or services thanks to a "social swarm" of people talking to one another. This is potentially a very powerful strategy. Viral marketing is based on it. By sharing sites or sharing resources, certain sites start to crawl out of what David called "the digital slime." This may sound really obvious, but that's simply because it describes the online experience of most of us.
Second, and a related matter, is that on the web winners keep on winning. Among other things, the web allows for positive feedback loops, where people talk to one another as part of a social search. A fact of life on the web is that you have a small number of very big successes. This turns out to be true not just empirically, but theoretically as well. Big winners, big attention-getters, keep growing – and if you don't grow, well, just look at Disney closing down its Go.com, cutting 400 jobs. There has been a period of robust competition for audiences, but only one or two will be successful and the others will need to find new unique niches. My point that in each one of these ever narrower niches we will see the same thing happening.
Third, we used to fight about access to networks and it turns out that we now have access to networks and we haven't gotten what we wanted. Access to an audience is what's really hard under these conditions and let me suggest that this is not a new phenomenon. Folks in Hollywood have known this for a while. On average Hollywood studios spend a dollar and a half on marketing and outreach for every dollar they spend on production. The issue is that they cannot get audiences at will and so that for every dollar they spend in creating a highly crafted product, they have to spend one and a half times that to create an audience for their product. Obviously, when you're talking about $100 million budgets, that really adds up. Think about the music business as we experience it today without radio - it would not exist in the form that it does without outreach, marketing, promotion and, critcally, audience development.
Michael Nash, Warner Music
I want to talk about what I call the "music industry bridge," the bridge between the old and the new economy. The AOL/Time Warner merger is a defining moment in the coming together of old and new. The music industry space is perceived as the portal, the hourglass, where the
| "I think that there's also such a thing as the failure of success, and that it's characteristic of much of independent media." MICHAEL NASH |
entertainment and cultural businesses are going to make this new paradigm. I want to talk about the sea change that's occurring now in that space, give you a projection of what's going to happen with peer-to-peer or "p2p" networks after the Napster settlement changes what Napster is. I will focus on the construction of community as a different way to situate artists and cultural workers and how this might create new opportunities for artists.
There's a term to describe how video art didn't change television: the success of failure. I think that there's also such a thing as the failure of success, and that it's characteristic of much of independent media. As part of a fundamental transformation of culture, the work of independents is not so easily distinguished from from the culture at large. It's easy to see the cycle of opportunity and then retrenchment, and conclude that nothing is fundamentally different. But I'm one person who believes that things are fundamentally different - thanks not least to the hard work of people in this room.
Culture and artists are located within communities. Community formation is dynamic – fans want to have a direct relationship with the artist. They want to know all the stuff about the artist. They really want to have this feeling of personal communication in connection with the content of the art that they experience. So it's pretty obvious that you would want to make an artist essentially more accessible online. But there are two other important factors here. One involves building community solidarity around particular kinds of culture based on lifestyle interests, philosophical values, and human concerns. Communities coalesce around culture - around music, for instance. So you have to provide the resources that a community needs - bulletin boards, chat, instant messaging – if it is going to express itself as a community. The other factor is the activation and activating and organizing tastemakers. There are people in every community who turn others on to cool things. We've got to think about the Internet in a holistic way - think about how communities form preferences about what they like. We also need to think about how to develop a business model within this context and how to create opportunities for artists that are neglected by the current system.
Natalie Jeremijenko, NYU
I have scribbled a lot of notes during this conference. It's been maddening and fantastic, and I've decided to focus on two main points that keep coming up. The first one is revenue models - how to make things pay. I've got a great idea on how to do this, but I'm not going to tell you. The other one is the straw man about the narrative form. It seems that a lot of people are concerned that the new interactive technologies threaten narrative storytelling. Let me just say, and as subtly as I can, that I think this fear is utter crap.
| "New technologies, new toys create new narrative forms." DAVID LEITNER |
I've heard many people say how important narrative is. I don't think narrative is threatened at all. I think that we're talking about holding onto a certain notion of narrative which means holding onto a notion of sitting people down in a black-box theater, turning out the lights and showing them a film - analog or digital or whatever. This locks you into a particular idea of narrative and privileges a certain way of thinking. People here know that technical systems don't change the genres of storytelling that incorporate data and can be very persuasive. But they all suggest new narrative, even non-narrative forms that are very instructive.
There are some smart toys that have come onto the market in the last year and a half. The Furby is probably the best known. I've been doing a little project with these in which they've been slightly reengineered, adding little video cameras in their eyes and little stereo mikes in their noses. What happens is they have the behavior – and you control how they behave, how they interact. Commercially, the next generation Furby was P
oochie. The problem designers had was to make the Poochie more expressive and so they put little love hearts in the eyes of Poochie to make him expressive. New technologies, new toys creating new narrative forms.
Tommy Pallotta, Flat Black
A lot of my peers have a sort of theatrical release fetish and they think only in terms of showing in a movie theater. Whenever I produce work my effort is to think of multiple platforms and different ways that I can get my work seen by different people. I'm very interested in video games and the synergy between films and video games, and I think everyone can see the influence of games on movies and movies on games when you look at The Matrix. Matrix uses the cinematic syntax from video games and, going the other way, we're seeing movies made into video games. I think there's a great opportunity to take this hardware and this software and make something unique.
My last project, Waking Life, was created completely inside the computer. It's easy to take elements that are built inside a computer and transport them to different mediums and different platforms. I personally think, as a filmmaker, that it's an exciting challenge to look beyond the traditional methods and modes of distribution and exhibition and look at new platforms.