Posts Tagged: Life

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25
Oct 09

The state of the art is falling short of dreams

Among the publications of Moses King is a curious postcard titled N.Y.  11 Future New York “The city of skyscrapers”. John Timberman Newcomb, teacher at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, wrote a piece titled The Footprint of the Twentieth Century: American Skyscrapers and Modernist Poems citing it as being published sometime in 1913-1918. I picked my copy up at a local store that sells old and used postcards.

N.Y. 11 Future New York "The city of skyscrapers" (Front)

N.Y. 11 Future New York "The city of skyscrapers" (Front)

The back reads, “Future New York will be pre-eminently the city of skyscrapers. The first steel frame structure that was regarded as a skyscraper is the Tower Building at 50 Broadway, a ten-story structure 129 feet high. There are now over a thousand buildings of that height in Manhattan, and hundreds in course of construction. The best known skyscrapers are the Singer Building, 612 feet height the Metropolitan Building, 700 feet high, and the Woolworth Tower which towers above them all at rises to a height of 790 feet. The proposed Pan-American Building is to be 801 feet high.”

N.Y. 11 Future New York “The city of skyscrapers” (Back)

N.Y. 11 Future New York “The city of skyscrapers” (Back)

For comparison, The Empire State Building is 1,472 feet including the spire, doubling what the 1900’s regarded as towering. It remains one of the tallest buildings in America and is currently number 15 world-wide. An impressive iconic structure, the Empire State Building is far from the vision that this postcard imagines.

Modern futuristic movies reach out into space (2001, Star Wars), explore extraterrestrials (ET, Alien) and robotic life (Short Circuit, Terminator). Others imagine close calls with the end of humanity (I Am Legend, Men in Black). Others yet explore genetic (Gattaca) and psychic phenomena (Minority Report). To make these movies commercially accessible they are kept edgy-plausible. In comparison, the minds of the 1900’s went far more radical imaging a metropolis of buildings stacked upon buildings with rail cars at high elevations and the possibility that a person’s world may be contained within one building. Movies have riffed on these concepts but at 750 ft, the Woolworth Tower was a far from the futuristic city New York was thought to become.

In general, the current state of futuristic thinking lacks radical imagination. The fiction has become too accessible offering probable possibilities instead of the kind of “what if” thinking that raises the societal consciousness – what could be beyond what we think.

There was a time that my work focused on managing technology diffusion and amplifying the volume on innovative activity at IBM. It is a space where there is literally no shortage of work to be done at every level. While people tended to focus on the tangible build out of infrastructure or web experience that facilitated innovation access, most failed to see how important the dream was. For example. “what if 30,000 employees were always running the n+1 version of the IT experience?” Dreams are lenses that provide a critical filter and check point as things naturally evolve and depart from the original motivations.

Making innovation accessible is an important part of the Darwinian selection. A more interesting topic is pushing innovation beyond current understanding. Quite simply, the majority of innovation today is incremental or copy cat – applying something from one domain to another in hopes it might be useful in a different context. Certainly interesting exploration, but not what I would call transformative. It seems real innovation comes in the form of individuals and when they move on for whatever reason, so does the dream. Who in your world is a dreamer that has started many fires but whose fires seem to be smothered or worse yet have burned the wrong forest?

Consider what is still an impressive demonstration, Jeff Han’s demo at TED in February 2006. It is 2009 and the best we have seen of gesture based and multi-touch, pressure sensitive computer screen technology and the best we can point to is Apple’s application in their mobile devices. More importantly, notice the first demo Han shows exploring human lava lamp interactions – more sophisticated than current interaction experiences that exploration is relegated to research scientists. The few hundred of audience members, purported to be some of the most connected in the world, were impressed and unmoved to imagine a different computing world, or if imagined selfishly horded.

What is beyond web-based anything, micro-blogging, social flows and the constant meme generation? I am not tired of the world we live in, but who is imagining the world beyond. If we simply evolve from here, the future will fall short, just like the New York and cities that never became. Some cite the state of the economical climate as the reason for such underwhelming thinking. I think it has been here for many years and it would be a good time to shake it up. If you are a dreamer, a futurist, a creative thinker, why is your volume so soft? The future is here and we need bigger thoughts.

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10
May 09

Breakup with your organization without leaving

Sophisticated organizations construct relationships with the people that enable the group. Even if all you do is punch the time clock at work, part of your identity is associated with your job, the building you work in, the company you work for and the people you work with. If you actually like what you do, have skills that help you deliver in meaningful ways and the stomach to deal with the human condition, then it is in your organization’s best interest to retain you – even better if they get you to retain you.

It takes an incredible amount of clarity to both understand what is important and why it is important. A few years back an executive offered some mentoring advice to help structure the conversation of what was important to me. Consider money, recognition, visibility and content. Assign a percentage to each of these according to the contributing importance to what drives you. This and other techniques help someone understand what is important, but not why. What in the absence of why is dangerous. Deriving insight from the what is certainly possible, in fact powerful. Investigating why someone feels a certain way can be even more transformative.

Incentives are a common method of influencing behavior. The most powerful of which communicate social or professional status – titles or black credit cards. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be an executive with a fancy title, but the meaning of such a label has power within the organization and possibly with other groups that identify with similar notions. Everyone else, especially an indigenous tribe in a far away land, has no idea what it means. Creative workplaces often poke fun at organizational structures encouraging titles to be fun – Guru of Internet happiness. It is easy to not realize why what you desire is fabricated. Ensuring the “why” of “what” comes from you and not someone else is the key to freedom.

Breaking free from your organization makes you a more effective contributor. It is impossible for your relationship with an organization not to contribute to your identity. The longer you groove over the same mental and physical paths the more efficient traversing these passageways become. Realizing any path is possible often means breaking some of the psychological and physiological habits associated with the current context – the more deep the groove the more resistance and pain involved in changing. This can be an emotional break up where the individual is reorganizing and reestablishing the relationship with the organization. People tend to change organizations instead of changing their conception of the organization – guaranteed to repeat the pattern. Your organization defines you, but you can define the organization and leave and define something else somewhere else if need be. The terms of your contract are not to be a hamster in a running wheel. That is just what happens when people accept things as they are.

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12
Apr 09

More vocal and alone. Sext me?

Last month I finished authoring a chapter submission on how social artifacts mediate the deluge of content a social network consumes and how diversity of participation is an imperative to keep us from French inhaling our tweets. We are living in a time of content explosion – this was news back in 2003 when a UC Berkeley study summarizes the prior year’s information detonation:

1. Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks.

2. We estimate that the amount of new information stored on paper, film, magnetic, and optical media has about doubled in the last three years [1999-2001].

3. Information flows through electronic channels — telephone, radio, TV, and the Internet – contained almost 18 exabytes of new information in 2002, three and a half times more than is recorded in storage media. Ninety eight percent of this total is the information sent and received in telephone calls – including both voice and data on both fixed lines and wireless.

How much information? 2003, Peter Lyman and Hal R. Varian

All of which is insanely outdated considering YouTube alone was only founded in 2005 and yet the community produces and views more content than all the commercial production houses – consider in 2008 10 hours of video per minute were uploaded to the site. Since the 2003 study of 2002’s information explosion, we can safely say it has only grown in magnitude since. The eruption of information could easily bee seen as an individual’s need to communicate, which brings us to the modern day where a considerable amount of content is being created, vetted and spread by social networks.

Aric Sigman authored an interesting article in the February issue of Biologist titled, “Well connected? The biological implications of ‘social networking’”, where he presents various findings and side effects of our social affliction.

Britons now spend approximately 50 minutes a day interacting socially with other people (ONS, 2003). Couples now spend less time in one another’s company and more time at work, commuting, or in the same house but in separate rooms using different electronic media devices.

The Office for National Statistics has just reported that “over the last two decades the proportion of people living alone doubled”, a trend now highly pronounced in the 25-44 age group.

A study by the Children’s Society recently found that television alone is displacing the parental role, eclipsing “by a factor of five or ten the time parents spend actively engaging with children”. Another ongoing study reports that 25% of British five-year olds own a computer or laptop of their own. In particular, the study noted an enormous increase in ‘social networking’ among younger children which “has overtaken fun (online games) as the main reason to use the Internet”.

“Well connected? The biological implications of ‘social networking’”, Aric Sigman, Biologist

All of this is shown to affect health and for that matter society. Family is a historically critical element of survival. It is the embedded network that should be active for life.   Yet, we see that even among married couples there is less interaction even when sharing the same physical spaces. Consider that population of 25-44 year olds that are living alone and likely having less long-term intimacy and as such fewer babies. One could see this as an expression of independence. Either way, it is an alarming trait. We are expressing more than ever, constructing our identity, in some cases identities, and yet are physically more alone than ever. The Internet equals social equals the primary content of our youth, bypassing the parental input that has developed generations prior.

One-third said they have posted or sent racy images of themselves, and almost half have received them.

Teens’ nude photos get unexpected results, Irene Sege, Boston Globe

It is not surprising that teens would use their devices to express their sexual curiosity and interests. The porn industry paved the way for almost all commercial transactions, streaming video technology and collaboration tools. Scary, but true. Mobile devices make it easy for our pervy teens to be more out there than ever. If you can see it on FaceBook, you know the real material is floating over the mobile network. One might conclude that this level of openness is part of a generation change and thus a societal shift. There are likely others hoping our virtual fetish means teens are not having sex, clearly not the case. Sigman (the guy who write the article for the Biologist) was making a point, that it is not common for a physician to advise on a patients sex life, and yet he feels that is exactly what needs to happen. As we grow further apart, we lose some of what keeps us healthy (sexual intimacy being part of that). Teens sext, teens have sex and yet as a society we have less meaningful relationships. What exactly would Sigman have to say about this? Maybe we need to do a study on our youth, as they are the future of the world, we just get to help avoid self-destruction a while longer.

The information explosion and social networking storm are replacing the therapeutic and developmental tools of the past. Instead of parents and therapists, people are in a constant creation and editing of their identities through new media. If the online world is the safe place to explore one’s self, then why has it become a destination to a better reality? What is fascinating is that our growing immersion into a hyper-virtual-reality, where we mentally masturbate around all things “me”, is removing us from our social reality where our developed selves act and all the while, evolving into a sexually explicit twittified frenzy. Forgive me, I missed the sexting revolution, I was too busy typing on my BlackBerry, what was that?

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8
Mar 09

Pro, Prosumer and Amateur

A few weeks ago, I tried the pre-paid mailer service purchased at B&H serviced by A&I. The roll was from my Mamiya, which I have always pronounced as mam-eye-ya but have since found out could very well be ma-mee-ya. The delay in mailing across the country, processing and back was painful. Especially when I walk by Duggal on the way to work which as far as I can tell does fantastic work! Opening the envelope returned a rush of excitement you get from hanging a freshly developed strips of negatives. You scan them with a flashlight as they dry, hunting for the images you remembered to be special. While the prints are not made to match the 6×7 ratio, the 4.5×6 prints make for friendly proofs.

Claw foot

Reviewing the negatives has me watching film scanner prices on ebay. Good ones are expensive and add one more thing to the equipment pile. It is hard for me to justify for anything beyond the love of my art. If I had a stable flow of income from photography, it would be a simpler decision. That said I am not sure I want to be a commercial photographer. Scott Kelby featured Syl Arena as a guest blogger a couple of weeks ago. Syl listed twelve things he did not learn in photo school. The last resonated with me most…

12. Resist the temptation to become a pro photographer.
The true meaning of “amateur” is “someone who works for the love of it rather than for money”. Choosing to remain an amateur photographer is no measurement of your skill or commitment to the craft. The photo world is filled with unskilled professionals. Thinking that you want to be a pro shooter because you really love photography is absolutely the worst reason to get into the business. I guarantee you, if a love for photography is your main motivation, the economic realities of the industry today will pound your passion into the ground. If, however, your inner voice continues to shout “this is what I want to do” after your passion has been beat out of you, then you are truly hearing the call to the trade. Let me be the first to say “welcome” and “I’m here to help”.

Consider that Prosumer is what marketers have coined to capture professional consumers that want more than “amateur” equipment but cannot afford or rationalize the purchase of professional equipment. Prosumer emphasizes the consumer, not how professional they are. While equipment is certainly part of the recipe, everyone knows they are but the paintbrush and the paint. Given my primary employment does not flow from my photography, I embrace the title of amateur.

Flourish

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31
Jan 09

Extending, reflecting and refining on the way to interesting

In December, I treated myself to something old but new, a Mamiya RZ67 ProII outfit. It is a legendary film camera with a cult following. There are many reasons to fall in love with a camera like this and I am just beginning my journey.

As a child, I remember sitting around the dinner table and discussing how the racket did not make the player. Tennis was a big deal in our house and while I knew the sentiment was true, this was the dawn of composite rackets, a move away from traditional wood frames. For me it was a conflict worth waging, because the racket was significant. The racket indeed matters, but without a competent player, it is no better than a lesser tool. The racket does not make the player, but a good tool in the right hands is magical.

Right before I found my new tool on Craigslist, I read an inspired blog post by Chase Jarvis around being successful in photography. It is always interesting to hear the secrets of successful people. People love to try to boil things down to consumable words of wisdom when in fact how someone ends up where they stand is far more complex. Nevertheless, a fantastic quote of a quote from an interview with Steve Martin.

Be undeniably good. When people ask me how do you make it in show business or whatever, what I always tell them and nobody ever takes note of it ‘cuz it’s not the answer they wanted to hear — what they want to hear is here’s how you get an agent, here’s how you write a script, here’s how you do this — but I always say, “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” If somebody’s thinking, “How can I be really good?”, people are going to come to you. It’s much easier doing it that way than going to cocktail parties.

Not only is that true, it is brilliant. I tend to be understated out of fear of being labeled arrogant, but I also enjoy seeing how other people perceive my work and me. If I were more aggressive, I would taint the viewing. I am interested in getting feedback and the best way in my mind is to let people react and then watch and listen. Be undeniably good.

In the first weekend, I shot the camera twenty times. I forgot what it was like to work with film and in this case peel-apart expired Polaroid. Everything takes time. With my Canon 30D, I can rip through hundreds of shots in an hour. My keep ratio is extremely high and I am brutal given the number of photos I am left to manage. The digital darkroom is now an extension of my mind and tweaking is effortless. We forget how much the camera and computer are doing.

Buttler sink

My first few shots were first metered by my digital camera and then transferred to the RZ. Underexposed. Test. Underexposed. Test. Ah, the film. Then years of experience with film rushed over me. Film selection is a critical part of creating an image. Expired Polaroid peel-apart is a wild card. To further complicate things, I was metering with my Canon, which has fancy algorithms for referencing neutral gray. The lighting conditions were such that the best exposure would have been metered from an incident reading, where instead of looking at the reflected light off an object you read the light falling onto the object. Unfortunately, I was without meter and for my first weekend, compensating would have to do.

Sculpture with fan

Chris Orwig, a faculty member at the Brooks Institute, was a guest writer on a wildly popular blog by Scott Kelby. Scott and team run a slick show keeping everyone in tune with Adobe products and photography. Most of their work is tool and gear focused, so inviting Chris to the show was an unexpected and genius move, because he is all about the art. Chris is a fan of quotes. It must be the educator in him.

The review [of one of Chris’ student’s portfolio] was fine, yet after it was over the student pleaded with Jay [Maisel], “Tell me, how can I take more interesting photos?” With missing a beat, Jay volleyed back, “Become a more interesting person.” Or said in another way, as Chris Rainier told me last week, “…at some point photography becomes autobiographical. In order to create better photos, sometimes we need to put down the photography books and magazines. Then we need to go out and to develop who we are.”


Who we are, shapes what we see.

Be undeniably good. Become a more interesting person.

Mouth cast

My setup came with extension tubes, which enable lenses to focus at very close distances, excellent for macro (micro) photography, something I dove head first into last year. My still life rested atop a mantle. Extension tubes and my 110mm lens attached to an unqualified tripod. My Canon 580EX attached to the hot shoe. Test. Underexposed. Test. Underexposed. Test. Ah, the film. Compensate for the film, the extension tubes, and the power level of the strobe light. A color print of what is essentially a black and white subject. Slipping in a pack of Fuji black and white instant film, I nailed it. Unreal. Hours go by as you shoot, wait, look, adjust and expose. Over and over again, totally engrossed in the process, frame and science. The smell of the caustic Polaroid chemicals and the fascination with even poorly exposed shots. Now I remember why it was so amazing to get 10-20% of your shots as keepers. When you shoot film, you have no choice but to wait to see what was captured. The delay is part of the process.

I had been dragging my feet on a couple of purchases, a light meter and a good support system. This new outfit requires both. They have been among the best investments I have made.

My first photography class had everyone shoot slide film. Hardly anyone shoots slides anymore. The process of looking at images projected on a wall is no longer captivating to most. What is smart about slide film is that you basically get what you shot. While there is a development process, there is no magic going on in the darkroom in creating a print. The realized image is the developed slide. Instant films are much the same way. The image only exists in one place. There is no negative. You get what you shoot. Wickedly humbling and intoxicatingly addictive.

I am already a better photographer than before my Mamiya. Bringing me back to all the inconveniences of film informs how I construct my image. Those inconveniences are the pauses that leave you only to think, feel and reflect. Hopefully one step closer on my expedition to being undeniably good. More importantly giving me another window of exploration by which I become more interesting. After all, the process of capturing images is a method by which we interpret and reinterpret our world. That journey is its own therapy.

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