Doing it Yourself - My first Documentary

We are screening it on Thursday 6th December, the day I get back from Berlin.

Here's a teaser clip. It's rough around the edges, and suffers from lack of experience, zero budget and not enough time - but I'm fucking proud of it.

I'm off to Berlin for a while for some fear and loathing. In the meantime I'll leave you with the clip, the blurb is below.


Rio Blanco: The Mine and the Farmer (preview) from donshades on Vimeo.


On the 21st of April 2004 5000 farmers from Huancabamba province, Northern Peru, marched to protest against a proposed mine in their area. Farmers feared possible contamination of their fresh water sources and were angry they had not been consulted over the project. Although meetings had been prearranged for the 21st of April to start a process of dialogue, representatives from the Peruvian government and the mining company failed on two occasions to arrive at the specified times (the mining company is Monterrico Metals, based in London). On the 22nd of April the farmers arrived at the mining site and were again told to wait for the representatives from the Government and the mine. While waiting and without forewarning, a group of police started firing tear gas at the protestors. In the ensuing chaos a protestor, Reemberto Herrera Racho died; according to the police he fell down a hill; according to eyewitnesses he was hit in the head by a tear gas bomb.

Rio Blanco, The Man and The Mine is an investigation into these two days. It draws from footage shot at the time, interviews with protestors on the march and press coverage of the event to build up a picture of what happened and how it was portrayed afterwards in the national and international media. The documentary highlights the top-down way in which many multinational companies operate in the developing world and the conflicts that arise from the lack of dialogue between company and community.

Star Chamber: doing it yourself in life 2.0

So Facebook, Bebo, Flickr, Tickr, Twitter and Bitch-Slap-Her are all great toys for us 2.0 kids. We do like to play, add each other as contacts, and fuel the desperately incestuous concentric circles of mixed opinion regarding all these new gadgets, gizmos and various wastes of time which seem to get rolled out by the hour these days without ever thinking how we could really put them to better use. At least that's just me right now.

I was refreshed on Friday evening however.

Old time friends of mine; star chamber put on a bloody good rock and roll show last Friday evening, down in New Cross. A light show, a concept performance, a real professional job. They're now making an attack on the music industry 2.0. These guys aren't signed to some tin pot wannabe rock and roll label - they're doing it themselves.

mp3's, itunes, last fm and by going to tune tribe - you can help put them in the singles chart, without even buying a CD! Do it. Now!

Photo by _Ade

Malkovich 2.0

viao-john.com

Like Ewarwoowar, I try not to post much of the work that we do at Dare, in an effort to stay sane if nothing else. This site however is definitely worth a mention as to me it represents the good side of Web 2.0. It is a site to educate, to stir up ideas while asking for a well thought out response.

If only the Tube could have captured the essence of thinking before you upload as well as this small project. This project, of course stated it's claim in planet User Generated Content (a small moon orbiting Planet User Generated Crap) right from the start in that it was for Sony - a brand holding themselves high up.like.no.other in an otherwise over saturated technology market. Claridges, rather than McDonalds contributions please.

But beyond fast food video, there are still a large range of good video sites, quality controlled and vetted for the best which I still wouldn't think twice about sending my work too. However I took ages, with my mouse hovered over the submit button on this Malkovich site. Is it that I hold careful consideration of words as a higher art than the same of images? Or is it because I was hammered into writing with a fountain pen by my primary school teacher, while told there was no right or wrong in art class.

Who cares? The fact is that web is full of pictures of nudey girls, rude boy race-car videos, User Generated Idiocy and hastily designed pages. We are much less the land of flowing milk and honey for design as envisaged by the futurists, more like conurbation riddled with more back allies than Soho. Maybe it's time creators of 2.0 sites raised the bar in their briefs for quality over quantity of uploaded content. This is a site with a challenge I've enjoyed. Touché my friends.

The Beginning of The End For Web 2.0

This week's rant finally broke after a conversation with Flo last week regarding the amount of utter bollocks up on web 2.0 sites such as the Tube, the rampant and often hysterical misuse of the humble yet much overrated inverted comma, and an email from Yasmin regarding corporate sponsorship of live music.

Where do I start?

It is clear that the novelty factor surrounding video on the interweb is wearing off, and I for one am starting to get very worn down by all of the user generated rubbish which cloggs up an otherwise fantastic medium.

YouTube? YouShit I say; for the majority of the clips that you find are poorly shot, badly compressed and contain little of worth in terms of the value in their content. Last Week saw the Tube announce an increase in their upload limit from 100MB to 1GB. Tech talk aside, this looks to me like a desperate attempt to raise the perception of their site from the MacDonalds of video on the web to coming on Burger King status. While this might work in the short term, those of us in the know have been far more interested in more future facing services like Joost, Hulu, Stage 6, Vimeo etc for quite some time and it'll take more than a full fat option on a dying dog to temp us away from our rising stars.

But the trend only starts here.

Web 2.0 has, unfortunately, become just another excuse for people to upload more rubbish onto the interweb, dream up new services (often missing the point of UGC) and all too often simply repackage dynamic services in a new wrapper to sell back to the clients who already paid for it all the first time round. Even worse, is the recent growth in well executed bad ideas.

For example - the nice guys at Twitter sent out a news letter with a great new service called Foamee. Just another I owe you a pint dot com. I really see no point in this sort of business at all. If you owe somebody a pint, or more importantly if somebody owes you a pint then go and reclaim it; don't blog about it via a twitter based web2.0 mash up plugin type text message. Here you start to miss the point of the owed pint in question: a reason to meet up, share banter, stories and communicate in that 80% of the way digital communication currently prohibits.

Then there was Jott. This is a web based dictation service which only costs you as much as the call that you make to the automated response system, when then charges you a for a text message back telling you what you just spoke into the other end of the telephone. All rather silly if you ask me. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer to carry a note book for the thinks I need to remember, and text twitter just to show off to everyone in my web 2.0 sphere of influence what a rock and roll life I have.

And so we return once again to these reoccurring themes of:

1. Being swamped with data, a Tube that's far too crowded with mobile phone videos of happy slapping incidents and no way to filter the good from the bad, or ugly.

2. Digital Pioneers, who face the future alone, as opposed to cashing in on the now. The innovate, they push the boundaries of what we can do with the technology, however they are still branded as Geeks.

3. Finding the great idea; at the center of a project which effectively combines the thinking of Geeks, Freaks and Future Thinkers and then makes it work.

So, web 2.0? Web 3.0? or a Really Useful quagmire of good, bad and ugly? Something has to change; and I for one hope that this change comes in the form of a shared feeling of responsibility. Now the novelty has worn off we need to take command of our ideas. When a client says "I want a face book application", we need to look them square in the eyes and ask them why they want a facebook application. Will it really help their image? Is it really right for their brand? Or are they just jumping onto a bandwagon that is running out of steam.

Brain Computer Interface pluggs up to 2nd Life

Stop Press I say! After a brief spell of jumping up and down in an excited manor you say: "Stop eating that acid, dave". now watch this:



But wait, it's true. This article on Pink Tentacle outlines a neuro-2nd life interface which allows the user to control the basic walk functions of their avatar. The research team from Keio University Biomedical Engineering Laboratory have developed a Brain-Computer Interface technology (BCI) which allows the user to transfer thoughts about movement into actual digital movement of their 2nd life character. The User wears a head piece which measures nuro-electrical activity in the motor cortex (the region of the brain involved in controlling the movement of the arms and legs). The BCI then interprets this crazy data and transfers it into signals which control your avatar. More detail here.



Amazing, yes; but I'm more interested in the potential to grow this technology. Touch Screen? No - Think Screen. Just stop for a minute and start to imagine the possibilities of controlling computers with our thoughts. Very quickly the mind boggles (well, mine does but maybe that is down to the acid); as the potential spirals out of prediction.

Now think of what we are doing in digital - the things that we are all talking about, getting excited about and wetting ourselves over. What of this problem of being swamped in data? How do we know where to search? etcetera. Now attack the same problems with some sort of crazy BCI thingey at the helm, steering our computer interactions. Our brain: able to deal with many concurrent thought processes at speeds intel can only dream of. Take out the clumsy mouse running off the mouse-matt, or clunky keyboard shenanigans.

And what of our digital marketing model? Well for me this is yet another nail in the coffin for banner ads, mpu's and other digisexed up oldworld advertising mediums which have bumped along with us so far as our industry has struggled to keep up with the kind of thinking that will guide it from infancy to adolescence.



And who do I think will be the early adopters for this neuro BCI technical stuff? Why the porn merchants of course. Take a walk down any back alley in 2nd Life; cower away from the light given off by over-branded cooperate worlds such as the Vodafone inside out island and you find an abundance of sexual adventure, role play and people prepared to explore the darker side of their sexual psyche through the clinically safe digital projection of their inner lust. Imagine a 2nd life blowjob which fires orgasm-inspiring neuro electronic transmitters in our brains to give that ultimate after work dopamine hit. Think of your long distance relationship, enabled by a full duples BCI, transmitting the gentle touch of your partner from the other side of the world, straight into the relevant receptors in your brain.

Then imagine the premium which will come with real experience.

Lo Fi on a grand Scale

I took this on my camera phone back in September.



Just thought I'd post it in the spirit of moving along my various Lomo projects.