just a quick note to announce that the new bonnaroo site i consulted on for threshold just launched yesterday.
it ain’t just your regular music festival website, that’s for sure.
check it out:
ugc
the do lab’s collaborative cross-media experiment
we’re embarking on a new experiment for the winter issue of the do lab artist network publication. looking for animators/ motion graphics/ v-fx artists to participate.
full info here:
For the past year we have been producing a quarterly arts publication showcasing the diversity of artistic expression within, and relevant to, the Do LaB’s community. For our forthcoming issue we seek to spotlight the creative output from various sonic creators combined with that of visual effects, motion graphics, and animation artists.
Many talented musicians have submitted original music, and we are now seeking the rockstar visual artists in our midst interested in creating an interpretation, accompaniment, or re-envisioning of the music through THEIR eyes to complete this collaborative, cross-media experiment.
We are calling this an experiment because we have never attempted to do anything quite like this before, and are just as curious as you to discover where such a project can lead and what kind of dynamic creations it can inspire.
The end-results of this collaboration will be distributed to the Do LaB database and beyond, as well as screened at one of our upcoming events.
If this project sounds like something you would like to participate in, you can get all the info HERE.
my so-called quarterlife
marshall herskovitz & edward zick + the quarterlife crisis + the rise of the creative class + myspace =
marshall herskovitz and edward zwick aren’t simply geniuses, they are CONSISTENTLY the only ones creating television programming that reflects the real struggles of an entire generation.
thirtysomething was before my time, (though i do know it as the series that went down in history as the first to feature a gay relationship on TV, so that already says something about the creative team’s cultural prescience), but a decade later my so-called life was RIGHT on schedule. what made that show so great wasn’t that it was incredible television (though it was–winning 6 golden globes and 7 nods in its two short seasons on TV), but because it felt like it was ABOUT ME!
well, it’s been a decade since claire danes became the vicarious incarnation of manic-paniced, post-grunge-era high school girls everywhere, and this november herskovitz and zwick are launching “quarterlife” an internet series and social network.
from the quarterlife site:
A show about a group of twentysomethings coming of age in the digital generation. And a social network about what it means to be creative, to pursue a passion, to make a difference in the world — or just to find a place in it.
From Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, the creative team behind “My So-Called Life,” quarterlife is the first Internet series that is as high quality as any film or television show.
quarterlife is premiering on myspace on november 11, and on quarterlife.com on november 12–but IMDB still insists it’s a TV series. hello? IMDB? might be time for a new category?
before i launch into my little speech about how amazing i think this show (which, unless you’re in the right demo for it, you’re probably going to find incredibly hokey; ahem: the demo is in high school and college, it’s not ACTUALLY 20-somethings) has the potential to be, i’d just like to point out that this move perfectly exemplifies what i mean when i say that “culture” is the next “community”–i.e. we’re all social networked out. we’re all connected and commented and poked to death. stick a fork in it. we’re done. we’re ready for social networks to become channels for cultural content, rather than JUST mind-numbing social drama timesucks.
it’s an incredible talent to be able to put a finger on the very pulse of a demographic, and use that rhythm to broadcast a beat that invokes the identification of a generation. (i swear to god, in the quarterlife trailer, it looks like one of the characters is directing a scion commercial! ok. i think it’s time now for an official word all unto itself, that does not involve several iterations of the prefix “post,” for the word “post-postmodern.” can someone get on this?)
marketing would kill for this, but herskovitz and zwick live and breathe it. the same qualities of curiosity and understanding that would allow a team of television producers to create content that bespeaks an unyielding fascination not just with generational cohorts, but with, essentially, the impacts of cultural shifts in general, are equally as crucial not just to the process of creating relevant marketing, but to generating greater cultural understanding.
god damn, that was a long sentence– but boy, it was worth it!
but wait! it gets BETTER!
in case you’re wondering what they’re gonna do in few years when the show’s characters grow out of their quarterlife crisis:
quarterlife.com is a social networking site for creative people. Whatever your interest – photography, writing, music, filmmaking, dance, design – quarterlife.com will help you go to the next level. Connect with like-minded people, gather information about schools, grants, and internships. It’s a place to explore the issues in your life, where changing the world is as real as the friends you meet.
damn. this might actually make up for the fact that the only network my so-called life had was a TV network. not that i think myspace is necessarily the right venue to launch this through anyway, but then again MSCL started out on ABC and became salvaged into cult perpetuity on MTV, so there’s always room to find where the right audience is really at. now more than ever. so we’ll, no doubt, see how it goes.
Quarterlife Trailer
aside from that, the only other thing i think they could have possibly done better is the casting. in 2007 it kinda seems really strange for a contemporary show to have an all-white cast (this isn’t facebook, after all–badumching!). it’s not just me, is it? i mean… is it weirdly anachronistic looking to anyone else?
community management IS image management
crowd at LIB07
photo by: fightingwords
this weekend, at a do lab birthday dinner, the other half of the do’s community management team started giving me shit about removing a particular video from the LIB youtube group.
it was this weirdly psychedelic video that didn’t even really show much of the festival (i think most of it was a strange, imovie effects-laden loop of a girl in a tutu) and the reason i took it out was because the soundtrack was a song (also totally unrelated to the LIB music style) with the words “cunt” and “fuck” repeated over and over. since LIB happens to be very much an all-ages, family friendly event, this video seemed sorta…uhh… inappropriate. it’s not like i told the creator that he had to remove the video from youtube entirely, and i also didn’t just X his video out of the group in silence. i sent a message to the creator and explained that the video wasn’t actually all that appropriate for the group, and that if he had any other videos that were more palatable we’d totally love to have those included.
apparently, the other half of the team thinks this makes me a prude. i think it’s just effective image management, and it’s an integral part of what’s ENTAILED in the community management process.
the thing about a real community is that it is a group of people who understand each other in a way that people NOT in the community do not. inside jokes get reinterpreted literally by those not in on them, inside norms are judged by the mores of the outside world, and all these things bear the potential for an untold number of misconceptions about your brand and your product, just waiting to create controversy. any significant community management then isn’t JUST about “getting people involved” (if your product is relevant, people will get involved, believe me), it is to a huge extent, about image management.
think about it like this… when you’re 17 your myspace profile isn’t all about the fact that you got a perfect score on the verbal SAT, that you’re the editor of the school’s lit mag, and that you’re a state champion sax player. no. your page has a photo slideshow of you playing beer pong at a party with your friends last weekend, and it’s covered in a million inside joke comments that in no way bolster your college recommendation letters. let’s say this 17 year old is a “brand” that you are trying to sell to a potential university (as many a 17 year old brand is), if any admissions officer happens to check up on the myspace profiles of applicants, then what you’re facing is a case of tragically BAD image management. however if this 17 year old brand is trying to be popular in high school, then you’re doing a fantastic job; keep it up. (also, congratulations, facebook: i just used myspace in an analogy and felt stale.)
the truth, of course, is that you (the 17 year old) are actually responsible for managing both these conflicting images of yourself simultaneously. and likewise, managing a community is very much about navigating the balance between outside and internal expectations while staying true to BOTH! if your approach to “radical transparency” is entirely negligent of the vital impact of context, then you’re just gonna piss a lot of people off (not the least of which will be your community for approaching their representation quite so carelessly), and screw your brand over. this is not to say you can’t ever break the rules of cultural context–in fact, in the cases when adhering to these rules is a detriment i’d actually say that breaking them is definitely a direction to consider, (if you do, however, you have to understand what that means, and all of the repercussions that it entails) but this post is not about breaking the rules of context. that happens all too easily on its own. this is about the much more complicated, much more sensitive, and much more precarious process of balancing them.
the reason i took that video down is because of the impact i felt it could have in a very particular context: potential LIB08 attendees checking out the youtube group, who’ve never come to a do lab event before, and are considering bringing their kids. while we don’t have any hard statistics, i think the amount of families with little kids present at LIB this year can be adequately reflected by the word: shitload. even though the video in question wasn’t adding anything particularly enhancing to the overall community its general irrelevance could simply be dismissed, but it’s off-putting choice of soundtrack, however, was too close to being a detriment for comfort. had such a video been added to a group for lucent delirium, for instance, the do lab’s “twisted tribal affair,” or any of our other late-night, dance-till-it-hurts events, i probably wouldn’t have cared. not, however, a weekend camping festival taking place during mother’s day. (even though the words fuck and cunt are indispensable to motherhood, they’re just totally not gonna go in a video group for the festival. sorry.) and for the record: that sentiment does not make me a prude, it makes america a prude. i’m just here makin sure we’re keepin’ things in context, yo.
the deeper conflict in this situation, of course, is that our particular community is comprised of some VERY uninhibited, counter-cultural artists and all their freaky friends–i mean, we’re a circus for god’s sake! and while even just up until 2006 the dolab’s events were all underground, and the community that has nurtured and supported us is used to this outlaw mentality, we no longer have the luxury nor, frankly, the interest in producing unpermitted, below-the-radar events. the scale is too big, and so are the stakes. this means we now not only have to take permits and fire codes and laws in general seriously, but it also means we have event publicists and work to deliberately cultivate relationships with the mainstream press. yet at the same time there is absolutely no way we will risk jeopardizing the free and bohemian vibe that we are known for, and which our community expects us to deliver… if you happen to think the juxtaposition of these conflicting cultural contexts and expectations might be complicated to manage…. yeah, i’d agree.
the week leading up to LIB was a hardcore community management vs. publicist smackdown battle in which we all struggled to find some kind of balance between what was best for our community, our brand, and for our overall image in the glare of the growing exposure which we are very much courting. amazingly, after a bit of initial fumbling, in the end it all went off without a hitch, and i’d say in no small part due to the very fact that these kinds of issues were critically considered and addressed.
you know… as much as dealing with publicists (even when they’re OUR publicists) really is NOT the highlight of my day, i think that it’s pretty critical that the people in charge of the inward-facing image and the outward-facing image know what the other side is up to. the message may not be different, but the translation most likely needs to be, and if there is not a direct line of communication between the community dept. and the PR dept., and if either side is not conscious of the considerations required by its context, then your brand is setting itself up for a potentially very messy spill in the image management aisle.
i wonder if anyone else out there has any stories or experiences dealing with similar kinds of dilemmas… how did you handle them? what were the results? what’d you learn in the process? i’d be very curious to hear.
eewwww… GROSS!
i am actually blogging about blogging. i really didn’t want to be, but it’s come to this. at the moment i find myself with three different urls–which is 2 more than i want–and, of course, none function properly.
first there’s this one. which won’t allow anyone who doesn’t have a blogger account to comment. which is laaame. this was the problem that started it all.
then came #2, which is way cooler looking (at least on the top. thanks, kris). i kind of have a bone to pick with how uselessly narrow the actual BLOG part of the blog is. especially once you start scrolling down, it’s kind of got the feeling of long trail of snot running down a large white napkin.
which is, you know….. the kind of imagery you want to be conjuring with your self expression, obviously.
but i was told this is something that can be fixed in post. post being an upgrade. i was also told that post would be where i could get it to play all that video content that worked just fine with the po’ html blog #1, but which apparently css won’t deign to chill with unless it gets all blinged out with plugins or some shit.
so i figured, if i’m gonna have to get an upgrade, i may as well just get some kind of respectable domain to go along with it. this is how i ended up with social-creature.com, and that’s right about the point at which all hell broke loose, as is evidenced by the catastrophe happening at #3.
(that, there, may yet be grosser than snot AND blogging about blogging put together).
oh, and i might mention that in the meantime, #1 decided to just up and have some kind of anxiety attack where it can’t figure out whether it’s supposed to put the current post first, or instead maybe one from sometime before may 24, so it does this psychotic thing where tries to sort of smash them together in this nonsensically horrifying coding breakdown that i swear, i SWEAR, i didn’t do! (and can’t figure out how to fix :(. )
now…. this would not even be worth mentioning normally, because i’ve got a couple friend who, under normal circumstances, would take care of it for me. however, when i say a couple, i actually DO mean only two, and one of them is off being a monk at a 1o-day silent meditation retreat (aka LIB detox) which started a few hours ago, and the other one is off being a rockstar on a mini-tour with his band somewhere between l.a., vegas, and austin for the next two weeks.
in the meantime, i have no idea WHERE i’m supposed to write anything anymore. i know i’ve been with #1 for a few months now, and things were going ok, but it was kind of boring. then i met #2 which does all that kind of stuff for me that #1 wouldn’t. ultimately tho, you can’t tell your friends that you’re with a skanky hoodrat url like that. #3’s the one that’s gonna be in it for the long haul, but it’s all, like, got SERIOUS issues to work out before i can commit.
all i know is i can’t handle two more weeks like this. i’m just not cut out for having blogs on the side. i need some stability. i need some answers. i need some tech geeks to tell the internet to stop picking on me.
i’m allowed to have a blog even if i do start to zone out when people start speaking in consonants. why do i gotta know shit about css or html to be able to write, goddamnit?? they don’t make programmers know how to wield alliteration or analogies or allusions to do what they do.
side note:
our LIB street team leader in portland just turned our poster into a blunt!
how cute is that!?
ok, seriously. i need help getting my wordpress blog over onto the social-creature domain–i can trade you either in prophecies or literary devices–your pick. anyone know how to get this done?