Brazil- Arrival

Travel by bus is also difficult

Finally, I am safe in Brazil 6 airports and 40 hours later.  Fighting travels sickness off, (nothing to do with hygienic conditions in developing areas)  and everything to do with  municipal/airport authority institutional capitalism (thank you Panda Express at George Bush International Airport).   I had forgotten what it’s like to fly on non-U.S. airlines:  lots of fresh air in the cabin, food service, multiple beverage services on short flights….. Meanwhile, at George Bush I saw my first “self-service” boarding gate, for an international flight no less.  Apparently our future in the U.S. is even more jobless (and chaotic—no one to control people at the boarding gate??) than I’ve even imagined.  And on the San Francisco-Houston leg of my trip I felt like a fish in an oxygen starved aquarium 

I am now in Santarem, Para State, Brazil.  I will be staying for the next night or two in a hotel best described as 1970’s military dictatorship Internationalist architecture relic.  Think Internationalist more as in 1970’s coup-conspiring ITT, not Le Corbusier.  But, as in all things Brazilian, it is the wonderful people that make it a living place.  And there are definitely worse places to land at 1 a.m after all your plans have been disrupted.

I recommend highly the book,  Amazon Journal: Dispatches from a Vanishing Frontier  by Geoffrey O'Connor  if you have any interest at all in the reality of the not-that-distant Amazonian past and how it ended up portrayed in the media.  One thing I have realized in my preparation for this trip, and already from the very short time I have spent traveling across Brazil, is just how much more complicated the situation is here in the Amazon than I had taken the time before to understand.  As opposed to (what O'Connor refers to as) the eco-kitsch, Indian-kitsch, and political-kitsch, etc. that we have all been fed.   No matter how much we realize that this information is not reality, it is so pervasive that it does end up shaping our perceptions. 

Ceci n'est pas un indien

This is opposed to the good kitsch of which there seems to a fair share here in Brazil and which I hope to share with you as well, like a huge fake Christmas tree constructed out of burlap standing mutely in the 93 degree heat with the tropical birds squawking up a riot.  More later on how similar the internal “dream life” image the media creates in Brazil is to the U.S. version.

Not Christmas in Connecticut

My producing partner arrives hopefully tomorrow, after an unscheduled delay in Lima and being separated from his equipment.  Then, it will be time to get hard at work.  More on that later.  Roughly we will be working in this region till next week, when we head out on the Arapiuns River (Amazon tributary) and later the Tapajos (also an Amazon tributary) River.  My posts will be fragmentary and sporadic, but I hope to share some of the interesting moments I find with you.

Interesting fact that I learned while preparing for this trip:  the Amazon area was a large lake and the river flowed from the lake to the Pacific, not Atlantic.  The geological events that created the Andes mountains reversed the river’s flow.

Tchau.

Qwiki

I have to make this short, as I leave for a month of filming in Brazil tomorrow.  This is definitely a step in the direction to which I see media consumption moving.  Forget watching movies or shows in segregated time blocks, we will be experiencing bits of media constantly and not just from "professional" media producers.  Nightmare or dream?

For sure, the future of media consumption will be imperfect.  Funny that they coded this crazy product but couldn't get all of the video to load at the correct aspect ratio on Vimeo.  They may need to add a couple of teenagers to their marketing team.


Qwiki at TechCrunch Disrupt from Qwiki on Vimeo.

Update

I am now tweeting, mostly about technology and the future of media consumption: @cmieritz.

Also, here is an interesting article that clearly explains how Facebook and Google have become direct competitors (include Apple on the list as well).  Essentially, it is a battle to see which company will become your everything.  I am guessing that Facebook has replaced the Trilateral Commission in the paranoids' minds-eye by now.

O.K., back to my Amazon trip preparations.

Visually Mapping the World?

I know it's popular to bag on Microsoft but this is pretty amazing stuff.  Are they going to leapfrog Google in photographically reproducing the world online?  And with crowdsourcing rather than actually investing in a physical infrastructure to do it? This is already being integrated into Bing Maps and it is also a nice showcase for Silverlight.

Click on me

Mapping Information (and life)

It is time to start sharing the groundwork of what I am learning about an affirmative future for media, media consumption and generally, understanding information.  I think this post will be best served by letting the really smart people speak for themselves.  The first video is long and somewhat abstract.  However, I suggest that information, like life, is promiscuous and the parallels are obvious between what he is speaking about here and how we may build our knowledge of using and understanding media/information.




This video is a lot more accessible.  It is a kludgy and preliminary step in the direction that Enriquez lays out in his lecture.  This is not the only group of people mining this territory, but from what I know the efforts seem to be similar.




In ten years, I suspect that this will be as dated as Pong, which was the future when I was a kid.

Finally, I think this does a better job of explaining the theoretical thinking behind the "Sixth Sense" technology.



And, if you want to see the reality of where we are today in the marketplace, here is digital intuition, on your cellphone in 2010.  Don't get too excited.  I've used it quite a bit and sadly, I'd rather sort through all my information manually (actually the more accurate term would be intuitively) still.  But look out John Henry, the machine is gaining on you.

Here are Enriquez' "new rules" for life:

1. It is imperfectly transmitted code.
2.  It happens.
3.  It is promiscuous.
4.  It adapts.
5.  Likely it is common.
6.  Humans increasingly design/control life code.

Life and information are moving ever closer together and at a quickening pace.

The Burden of Dreams

I have been a little silent lately.  There is a lot going on, in mid-November I am going to Brazil to help shoot a film in the Amazon about a non-profit that is doing a sustainable development project.  I have also been thinking a lot about what I am doing, professionally.  That, is a dangerous thing in the film business.   It is an industrial workplace, geared towards grinding out film after film, with everyone hoping that each one will advance them a tiny step towards their ultimate goal or at least help them pay their rent.

I have a somewhat unpopular view.  There are too many films being made.  What?  Ok, more precisely, there are too many films being made that are not adding anything to the conversation about film or life, or even the conversation about the potential of technology in media production.  Does the world need 10,000 short films that are basically variations on the same thing, over and over and over again even if they are shot on the newest camera?  Hard question, particularly when the industry of film schools is churning out thousands and thousands of bright eyed graduates who are sold a dream (and very high tuitions) every year and the industry of film festivals is selling the same dream (news flash, most film festivals are about tourism and economic development).  It is a big machine that sucks you up, regardless of your intentions.  I have been disappointed to recently see a few really interesting projects, innovative in structure or process, gradually become "regular" projects because that is where the positive feedback comes from the system.

Anyway, I hope to share some of my thoughts in the not-too-distant future about, well,  possible futures in media creation.  There are a lot of really interesting possibilities out there, even if the current tendency is to milk the present model to death.  I am a firm believer that, for the most part, it is human nature to only change when we must.  In the meantime, I will satisfy my current need to do something that will hopefully be of use on the ground for people doing important, difficult (and unglamorous) work.  I will be working hard to let them tell their own stories, a far harder job than many people realize.  We all like to overlay what we know, or think, instead.  In this age of media over-simplification, vilification of those who think differently and "instant experts," I think we can all use a lot more small dollops of little truths from those who do not have the time to have a media presence.  I don't pretend to have answers, but hopefully I can at least learn to start asking some good questions.

Destroy what we do not understand or,  just try to make money off of it?

Is it me, or does Werner look kind of buff in this?

River City

I had an iPad/Alexa/DSLR/DaVinci dream in 4K/3D last night.

Am I the only person out there who gets weary of all the shuck and jive going on in the creation of culture?  Blogs that are promoting technology, selling dreams to sell themselves by association?  Tweets that are just personal brand building?  I have to admit that, at times, I find it extremely discouraging that the new normal for making ground-level culture seems to often be so cynically capitalistic, particularly when we have so recently seen on a large scale just how likely this mindset is to fail and leave us all to flail on our own.  I'd like to think that we are all more than personal brands.  Don't get me wrong, I love technology and know that there are extremely liberating aspects to what is happening right now.  But just how real are these "relationships" that we claim to be building in the ether?  Are we all just salesmen?

Every time I log into my Blogger account, there it is, the monetize button.  Is that all we can aspire to now, to be little Mad Men?  Is that all culture makers can aspire to, being productive sub-units in Adam Smith's dream?  It seems to be an unquestioned assumption now, internalized by even the most ground-level culture makers.  My hope is that people will realize at some point, you are doing it all on your own anyway, create your own path and do what feels right for you.  You don't necessarily have to follow the "new" rules any more than you need to follow the old.

And for heaven's sake, please stop buying technology and throwing it away, replacing devices every few months.  Somewhere, there is an extremely poor person disassembling your "recycled" piece of technology and most likely getting poisoned (and poisoning their local environment) doing it.  Really, it's not ok.  The questions I ask myself are:  Can I do what I want without the new upgrade?  Will I make any money off of it?  Not perfect, I know, but at least it keeps in check the mindless upgrade beast that lurks in all of our hearts.  OK, no more cranky posts for a long, long time.

On a positive note, I'd like to mention a blog that I've found that I like quite a bit by Brad Bell.  It's really quite nice, beautiful and an interesting mix of technology, film, social concerns and their intersection.