Hurdles

After a furious weekend of work and play, my project is done.

Hurdles is about the obstacles that stand in between two subcultures. It's about an attempt to leap over the obstacles. I let the footage guide my editing of it, and this was the story that came out. It's simple, a little jumpy, and fairly awkward, as the footage was. I love the interactions in the DnP building, and I had fun lampooning Andrew.

I hope it's up to standards.

Camtasia

This project was hard. It took me a disgustingly long time because I, like the fool that I am, wanted to do more with it than I ever could. I played around on two different editions of garage band trying to figure out how to sample in the way that I wanted. After six classes of wasted time, I decided that Garage band and sampling are incompatible. So I moved on to just straight Camtasia. My life got easier and I started making progress. Unfortunately lack of time has made it impossible for me to polish this to the extent that I want to polish it to. It's a series of you tube videos, everything from failblogs, to marine uploaded combat videos, to pop culture phenomena set to the music of Aesop Rock's Tomorrow Morning. There's something terrifying about youtube. It's in the way that a video about police brutality will have links leading you to a children's show. It's in the apocalyptic preachers and the beatings and the cruelty of mockery, and the schadenfreude culture of internet videos. It's in the trillions of aspiring failiures. This is a chronicle of youtube, and therefore a chronicle of our time.

I don’t care all that much about the culture of the Montagnards. I see it this way: We live in a world dominated by a global culture, fostered by a global tribe, which has come into being through the interconnectivity of the information age. Within this overarching culture, there are millions, if not billions of tribes, small (or large) subcultures which we subscribe to and participate in. We all subscribe to multiple tribes, and each one of us has a different combination of cultures, making all of us individual, making all of us a tribe within ourselves. It’s beautiful, and I think it’s the inevitable arc of evolution. Hard to have a sense of individuality when you and everyone you know eats the same things, talks the same way, listens to the same music, dances the same dances, hunts just like you do on the same days. The revolutionary inventions of the industrial age have made it possible for people to do more in their life than just survive, and in a way it’s made us all royalty. We’re still pretty new to it, and we’re still just figuring out what it means to be safe, so we do some petty things, and we do some great things with the time and ability we have on our hands.

I’m not sure what I need to know in order to make this work. I’m not even sure what this is yet.

But I’m sure it’ll come to me.

Watch the Lecture at the Bottom

The Marshall McLuhan chat about the global village reminded me exclusively of my facebook. Facbook is a product (I guess you’d call it a product more than a service, though it’s only really “bought” by advertising agencies,) that is all about involvement. Everyone is involved in every one else’s business. You’re friends are looking at, liking, and commenting on everything you do, even the friends of your friends have an eye in on you, and even perfect strangers, depending on how you’ve set up your account, can look in on your life and make judgments, and even send you a message to tell you how you’re doing. Beyond that, advertising companies, and millions of other interests, be they activist, political, or even military or police are looking in on you as well. Sometimes they want your attention, sometimes they want your opinion, and sometimes they just want information about you, or they use you to get to your friends. We live in the heart of a world where our frame includes access to so much of everyone else’s information.

“The Persuaders” FRONTLINE documentary was interesting, but all of the information felt rather old to me. Regardless it was very interesting that even six years ago the advertisement agency was having to re-frame their entire outlook on the business, turning it into either a spiritual ideal, or trying to smother people in the sheer mass of their advertisements, or they ride the celebrity and tv game. The most recent (and if we look ahead the 6 years to now, the most effective) the internet based advertisements are fascinating to me. I’d say that their effectiveness is due almost entirely to the advent of facebook, which is the advertiser’s dream tool, letting every company to develop a facebook game, or an add, or an application or a facebook page, and suddenly they have the ability to do what Repai, (the psychiatrist gone marketer,) does in his three part session all the time with everyone.

Bob, you must watch this video, it’s going to stimulate your ideas about framing advertising and where we’re going with this mad journey.

http://www.g4tv.com/videos/44277/DICE-2010-Design-Outside-the-Box-Presentation/

Miles Duffiled
21
From Telluride Colorado
Nomadic
Actor
Floater
Obsessed with flight, comics, video games and diner food.
Has trouble sleeping, but no trouble dreaming.
Smiles too much.
Tries to be wise. Sometimes it works.
Likes to write, but has trouble reading.
Has faith, but not in anything in particular.
Wants everything.
Is lucky.