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Cool Hunting has been reinventing the blog as a communications channel since February 2003. The site challenges the conventions of what a blog should be to the point that it is not even a blog anymore, it feels more like a ezine that adopted this emerging medium becoming a hybrid that communicates immediacy through its media design at the same time that lets content flow seamlessly through its blog-like interface.

The redesign has been sponsored by Adobe, which can also be considered as a breakthrough marketing initiative by the software company. With over 55 million blogs and over 2 billion websites, “design sponsoring” is set to become a discipline in itself, offering a win-win situation to all parties involved: the brand, site owner, and the people reading.

The question is then, should this trend be owned exclusively by software brands?

Perhaps not. By facilitating the redesign of a popular site that is consistent with a particular brand persona, the brand in question can impact people’s experience in a meaningful, non-intrusive way. Design in general and its digital, interactive form in particular carry a wealth of meaning and brands can use this vehicle to express not only their more rational benefits (in the case of Adobe this is obvious) but emotional ones, all without interfering with the site’s personality. Not an easy task but consistent with the level of sophistication needed to become a successful brand these days.

Posted by camilo at 08:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the second post of this series we discussed Shaïwear’s Summer 2006 interactive catalogue in the context of Richard Lanham’s human biogrammar, which offers a practical way of helping us prioritize attention-grabbing elements based on human nature. Not surprisingly, sex is somewhere at the top.

Shaïwear’s catalogue combines X-rated movies with a clever clickable video technology, which adds an extra layer of interactivity to the equation, providing not only an engagement component but also a functional one, which displays the virtual catalogue (with all the details necessary to purchase) within the movie. The experiment works and in our view, does not alter the flow of the experience.

In this occasion we would like to review a different kind of interactivity made famous by Crispin Porter + Bogusky and their now-ubiquitous-in-every-new-media-conversation Subservient Chicken. This type of interactivity seems to be powered by a Darwinian desire of demonstrating strength through domination. Whether we like it or not, most of us get certain level of pleasure when our orders swiftly turn into action.

The Economist declared that “Darwinism is back with a vengeance” in a special report on modern man and evolution published in December 2005. The series of articles taught us that “of the three great secular faiths born in the 19th century – Darwinism, Marxism, and Freudianism – the second died swiftly and painfully and the third is slipping peacefully away. But Darwinism goes from strength to strength…” permeating all areas of knowledge, including communications.

This lesson has been digested (perhaps not so literally) and put into practice again by another French fashion firm. Tooluxe is a boutique chain with six stores in France offering “les plus grandes marques du prêt-à-porter, pour le plus grand plaisir des fashion victims en mal de bons plans.” The brand recently launched a Virtual Tooluxe Shop that allows its users to give orders to Matt and Angie (two sexy clerks). The requests can go as far as the imagination goes as long as they are written in perfect French.

We suggest you type rouge to start.

Posted by camilo at 07:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail reminds us of what we already knew but rarely rationalized: “A hit-driven economy is a hit-driven culture.” Google search “hit-driven culture” today and you will get over 330 results mostly consisting of bloggers and “mainstream media” sites debating whether or not this form of culture is dying. Almost all of them refer to Chris Anderson’s book, which lays the foundation to understand the economics of a hit-driven culture (as well as its nemesis) while letting the cultural aspect itself open for much needed discussion.

Regardless of its longevity, this paradigm has been annoying artists, intellectuals, and anyone with the drive to craft content, for decades. After all, as Anderson clearly stated, “setting out to make a hit is not exactly the same thing as setting out to make a good movie,” or a good book, record, play, etc.

Right at the beginning of our hit-driven culture, Umberto Eco published in Diario Minimo (see details in previous post), an essay titled “Regretfully, We Are Returning Your…” which dealt with imaginary assessments of [hit-driven] publishers evaluating the manuscripts of Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, James Joyce and others. The piece flows just as well in 2006, and probably even better due to the fact that we might be experiencing an increasingly general annoyance with the mechanisms and end results of contemporary mainstream culture.

Here is Eco’s imaginary rejection of Don Quixote (published in Misreadings), just fast forward 34 years and imagine some record label executive doing the same thing:

Cervantes, Miguel, Don Quixote

The book -the readable parts of it, anyway- tells the story of a Spanish gentleman and his manservant who roam the world pursuing chivalrous dreams. This Don Quixote is half crazy (the character is fully developed, and Cervantes knows how to spin a tale). The servant is a simpleton endowed with some rough common sense, and the reader identifies with him as he tries to deflate his master’s fantasies. So much for the story, which has some good dramatic twists and a number of amusing and meaty scenes. My objection is not based on my personal response to the book.

In our successful low-price series, “The Facts of Life,” we have published, with admirable results, Amadis of Gaul, The Legend of the Graal, The Romance of Tristan, The Lay of the Little Bird, The Tale of Troy, and Erec and Enid. Now we also have an option of The Kings of France by that promising young Barberino, and if you ask me, it’ll be the book of the year and maybe even a book of the month, because it has real grass-roots appeal. Now, if we do this Cervantes, we’ll be bringing out a book that, for all its intrinsic value, will mess up our whole list, because it suggests those novels are lunatic ravings. Yes, I know all about freedom of expression, political correctness, and what have you, but we can’t very well bite the hand that feeds us. Besides, this book seems a one-shot deal. The writer has just got out of jail, he’s in bad shape, I can’t remember whether it isn’t raring to write something else. I’m afraid that in rushing to produce something new at all costs we might jeopardize a publishing program that has so far proved popular, moral, and (let’s be frank) profitable. I say no.

Posted by camilo at 07:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Robert Park clearly explained in The City, how urban areas are essentially the cradle for “reason and reflective thinking.” Modern society organizes itself in cities that are the product of the rationalization of our own needs, which are then classified and “reduced to measurable units, and even made objects of barter and sale.” The city is an accurate reflection of the needs of its inhabitants and for that reason a mirror image of themselves.

It is not surprising that there are so many different areas of knowledge devoted to understand the city, from urbanism to social anthropology; humans have been mildly obsessed with the structure, health, and future of urban environments. The latest version of the Venice Biennale, focused on “Cities, Architecture and Society” as its theme, is acknowledging the fact that over 75% of the world population will live in cities by the year 2050, and we should therefore keep paying atttention to this subject.

The event ended last Sunday and was visited by over 130,000 people. This year’s biennale was accompanied by a SuperBlog, a media experiment that left us with an interesting souvenir that lets anyone interested in this topic to access interviews, multimedia reviews, and most importantly, honest accounts of the event.

One relevant example of the city as a reflection of its inhabitants and as a symbol in its own right is Desktopolis, a project by London-based architect Tomas Klassnik that was exhibited as part of the RCA's contribution to the biennale. The project focuses on one of the measurable units described by Robert Park: the work space. Klassnik proposes an evolution of the modern work space that merges living and office areas in direct “opposition to positivist principles of transparency and progress.”

The bizarre world of Desktopolis offers the perfect tool to review the modern city in the context the work-life struggle and corporate fixation. Civilization grows into a chaotic [dis]order in which the benefits of safer, friendlier metropolis (like New York and London in the past few years) make cities a possible environment for families without loosing their quality for answering our needs in other areas, this force us to constantly wrestle with work-life balance, sometimes finding ourselves confusing one area with the other, which leads to monotony, inconformity, and certain sense of claustrophobia. At the end the solution might not be far away from Klassnik’s proposition.

Posted by camilo at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Science-fiction has always provided society with a healthy dose of fresh ideas that at times proved to be more than just inspiration for “real life” science. Perhaps one of the most notorious sci-fi writers in recent times has been Philip K. Dick, who passed away over 20 years ago and yet his ideas are now more relevant than ever. Cinematic fame can be one way to prove Dick’s relevance, a handful of his books have been recently adapted to big Hollywood titles such as “Blade Runner,” “Total Recall,” “Minority Report,” “Paycheck,” and, most recently, “Scanner Darkly.”

A 2004 article at The Economist attempts to explain Hollywood’s fascination with Dick’s ideas: “...why is a strange, drugged-out and paranoid bygone of such interest to modern-day filmmakers? Partly because today's revolution in the biosciences, in particular in neuroscience, makes the questions he was asking particularly relevant. What is real if we can take drugs that alter our moods, or if we can tinker with our own memories? These issues were the flesh and bones of Dick's books, all those years ago.”

Take a closer look at the context of his stories and you will also find a media environment that more or less depicts the multi-screen, information-saturated, ubiquitous present day media world. This is an environment that is somehow familiar in most science-fiction; it seems that there has always been consensus with the fact that we are media and that media will outpace our own evolution exponentially.

A harder endeavor is to add details, imagine a system, the media architecture of the future, more than just the media environment that provides context to the storyline. This has been recently tackled by a new generation of artists that are part of the modern media-savvy society (in which the producer-consumer barrier is long gone) with the ability to predict with more precision the possibilities of futuristic media engineering.

The perfect example is the web-based comic Shooting War, which we reviewed in a previous post almost one month ago. The story is set in 2011, which is not far way in absolute time but certainly distant in “technology years.” This dichotomy makes the vision of this story very interesting, we can almost grasp the future; it is credible and incredible at the same time.

It is surprising how little attention has been devoted to the media environment of Shooting War. Well, it is true that media is essential to the plot and that the story itself takes a hard look at the current media establishment. However, the media architecture itself has been almost overlooked and we find this area particularly interesting because it shows an evolution of digital media in which the web, TV, wireless technology, and evolved video cameras merge to become a seamless experience.

Here is how it works: in 2011 video-blogging (vlogging) is as popular as ever, probably even more so than traditional blogs, WiMAX (wireless internet everywhere) is standard in all major cities, a new generation of digital cameras can stream video directly to any url (vlog) through an easy-to-use interface, a couple of big news networks still command the larger portion of a fractured audience, these networks use a human/software process to constantly monitor the vlogosphere, uploading any signal straight to the network as needed. This provides corporate TV with an almost unlimited source of content in about every subject possible, which can be distributed in any screen imaginable. The system benefits from our collective intelligence in the most literal sense.

Media convergence as opposed to substitution. This doesn't necessarily translate into any improvement for network TV as it is clearly reflected in the story itself. Shooting War contributes with our understanding of modern communication systems by imagining and delineating a complex media environment with outstanding simplicity.

Click on the images below to see our own explanation of the key players in this possible future.

The New Samsung Camera

Vlogging Camera Display

The Network

Posted by camilo at 12:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday’s column The Public Editor in The New York Times pondered on whether or not the newspaper is going to be able to sustain its quality when delivering breaking news through its web version. “That means more editors are constantly balancing speed against completeness to decide when an article is good enough to carry The Time’s respected brand.”

Speed versus completeness seems to be at the core of the dilemma. The world of “instant information” requires a different paradigm in the context of delivering breaking news. The Times is then struggling with the speed of the net. No easy task given that this brand is well know for its proven ability “to add significant value” to the stories that it publishes.

The process of adding value, in the traditional sense (i.e. high level of reporting and analysis), requires time. There is some digesting to be made before the raw piece of information is turned into “a traditional Times story.” So far it seems that we are trying to deal with a mediatic problem via the editorial board and that route might not offer a solution to the newspaper.

This dilemma is offering an interesting look at a real-life case study of "radical versus respectful" Remediation as conceived by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin almost a decade ago (more about this subject here). By looking at this problem from the mediatic point of view we could see how the current policy of the digital operation of not giving priority to “speed over content” is already providing an answer and leading the Times in the right direction.

The problem shouldn’t be how to (respectfully) adapt to the new medium, in this case, how to replicate a daily newspaper in the Web with the maximum speed possible, understanding that in its printed version, The Times is already close to the speed limit (once per day) and that in the Web there is no speed limit (once per second, faster if necessary). The question is not how to balance speed versus completeness but how to use the newer digital channel in a way that is consistent and adds value to readers.

When answering that question the brand is forced to take a hard look at its own persona as well as to its vision. Those answers will provide key direction. The speed of the Web does not necessarily mean the end of an audience that appreciates excellent content, nor it means that all breaking news must now be swallowed raw.

Posted by camilo at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What happens when street signs are brought to life? There is certainly an element of surprise that always aids in the quest for attention. The message gets a natural amplifier: movement. The information flows regardless of whether you want it or not, street signage becomes a powerful medium.

Whether it is used for art, propaganda, or advertising, movement adds a certain level of interactivity to the message, bringing it to life in a context in which live itself converges (public spaces). An Adweek article (subscription required) in the November 6 issue explores the emerging medium of interactive out-of-home, laying out an extensive menu of options that range from user-generated digital billboards (i.e. Nike ID’s Times Square experiment) to video jukeboxes that can give a better use to the almost obsolete phone booth.

Street art can teach a lesson or two to those of us in the communications industry, the simplicity and ingenuity of some artists demonstrate that interactivity doesn’t necessarily mean “user interaction” in the literal sense, it doesn’t depend on the latest technology, and it can be austere and unpretentious while still driving home a clear message that engages its audience.

Most importantly, street art challenges the assessment of those experts that attribute the development of the "new" medium to technological advancements when in fact it has been around for quite some time driven by ideas and imagination.

Posted by camilo at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

One of the main problems with design is that it necessarily has to deal with a constant negotiation within substance and style. Richard A. Lanham proposes an interesting system to read, qualify, analyze, dissect, the weight of these two realms in media: The Style/Substance Matrix.

In the words of this attention economist “style and substance, fluff and stuff are loose and baggy categories but useful ones even so. Important versus peripheral, planned versus spontaneous, natural versus mannered, appearance versus reality, inside versus outside, why versus how, manner versus matter: we must make such distinctions every day.” Especially if you are in the business of crafting media.

In this context, it is particularly difficult to conceive a magazine’s website, mostly if the magazine has a strong voice in both territories. This is why the all-new TOKION website designed by Tiffany Malakooti is such a great example of style that lets the substance flow.

An essential element of Lanham’s Style/Substance Matrix is the “A/T mixture,” which serves the purpose of calibrating the act of looking “at” or looking “through” media; the former being focused on aesthetics qualities while the latter concentrates on pure content, always with the premise that “no point of the spectrum is intrinsically evil or virtuous; it seeks to describe rather than to proscribe, to analyze rather than to condemn.” The new TOKION site let us read right at the middle of the spectrum, and we thank Malakooti for that, the TOKION persona is finally alive on the web.

Posted by camilo at 08:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The SFMOMA is offering us an interesting view at Kiefer's work through an exhibition that runs through January 21, and an interactive program that reviews “four decades of art by Anselm Kiefer, including paintings, sculptures, books, and works on paper that reflect the artist’s career-long meditation on the relationship between heaven and earth.”

Kiefer has a particular way of embedding his own system of signs in his work, which is explored in a simple yet informative manner in the interactive program. The virtual curator reviews a sample of his work in the context of its "symbolic language" representing ritual, remembrance, and technology among others.

His views on technology caught my attention. The artist suggests "that communications technology fulfills the unifying role that state religion once did.” This couldn’t be more precise in the age of electronic information, a futuristic vision considering that this is interpreted out of a 1985 piece (Osiris and Isis).

Also below is a bizarre account of a recent MAC exhibition. Interesting to watch even if you don’t understand French, definitively worth the five minutes.

Anselm Kiefer – Interactive Program

Posted by camilo at 07:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Semantic Web

Pierre Lévy explains the modus operandi of dialectics and rhetoric as part of the “operations of virtualization:”

“A prehistoric man sees a branch. He recognizes it for what it is. But history doesn’t stop there, for the man, initiating a process of dialectic, sees double. He squints at the branch and imagines a stick. The branch signifies the stick. The branch is a virtual stick. Substitution. All technology is founded on this capacity for twisting and doubling reality… A real entity, embedded in its identity and function, suddenly harbors a different function, another identity, becomes a component in new assemblies…” And the process goes on and on until it becomes ubiquitous, being at the core of the way we create meaning by a system of association in which any particular object can have multiple names with the same meaning or multiple meanings attached to the same name.

In the virtual world of the web, text is one of the essential tools to make sense of the limitless wealth of information that exists in its networks. The problem with text is that it is too objective for the computerized mind and requires human discern to decode it in a real, human way. A front page article in yesterday’s New York Times posed an answer to this problem in the shape of an improvement in the way people and computers collaborate.

The article explained that researchers are “working to exploit the content of social computing sites, which allow users to collaborate in gathering and adding their thoughts to a wide array of content, from travel to movies.” The objective of that content “exploitation” is simply to aid database networks to become better at identifying associations and therefore at adding meaning. Software alone can identify text and even rank it a la Google; however it has been unable to precisely make sense of all the human nuances attached to it.

As discussed in our previous post on this subject, tagging is already contributing to the evolution of language, in this case via facilitating the textualization of images, sound, and video. This has tremendous implications on the way the new generation of database systems (the NYT article mentioned Radar Networks as a leading technology) will impact our lives through perfecting artificial intelligence that can save huge amounts of time making (human) sense of the web for us, so we can dedicate more time to enjoy life in the good old human way.

Posted by camilo at 08:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Terry Richardson has been defined as the “magazine world's Marquis de Sade,” and his work has been labeled as “notably raw, direct, and amateurish, though he is not an amateur.” In his own website he is described as “one of the most prolific and compelling photographers of his generation. Known for his uncanny ability to cut to the raw essence of whomever appears before his lens.” This is precisely what he accomplishes with his latest campaign for Lee Jeans in Australia.

Lee Jeans, The Terry Richardson Campaign, brings to the table advertising that is not quite like advertising. With a stronger focus on the photographer and what he represents, this campaign conveys a level of honesty that is extremely healthy these days when advertising per se is not on its brightest moment.

Lee is opening the door for people to come in and participate on the grounds that everybody knows that it’s advertising. So why not just be open, make it about the process of creating these pictures as much as about the pictures themselves, bluntly stating that in this case the brand is almost donating the space so art and fashion substitute plain advertising storytelling. At the opposite end is Calvin Klein’s underwear campaign (widely criticized mostly for the wrong reasons), which features models posing naturally, pretending that they are just there, that it is not an ad.

Chuck Porter (from Crispin Porter + Bogusky) shared some interesting insights at the AAAA’s Account Planning conference in Miami that we believe are relevant in the context of evaluating this campaign:

Popular culture wants to change. Anything that aids this process will be welcomed.

Beware of metaphors. If you have something interesting to say, say it.

They know it's advertising. So let them in on the joke.

Get really, really close to the audience. He used the example of a few pseudo porn films that they produced for Virgin Atlantic a few years ago targeting frequent travelers (London-New York) whom stayed in luxury hotels and tended to browse through porn with certain frequency…

Which lead us to: Turn off the political correctness filter.

Raw, honest, bizarre, shocking, amusing, not ordinary. These are values that can amplify the performance of almost any brand targeting modern, young-spirited people in the year 2006. This campaign is certainly delivering those values on behalf of Lee Jeans and we wish them all the best just for trying.

Posted by camilo at 07:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The success of Borat brought back good memories. We would like to revisit the great parody that, in the shape of literary pastiche, lived in a monthly column in the pages of the Italian literary magazine Il Verri. Known as Diario Minimo and led by Umberto Eco, the column was published regularly between 1959 and 1961, offering an “inside out” look at the “languages of daily life.”

Diario has been compiled and published in a few opportunities, beginning with an Italian edition in 1963 (with the same name, reprinted in 1975) and followed by at least two English-language versions in 1992 (How to Travel with a Salmon & other essays), and 1993 (Misreadings), each focused on different topics.

The sharp observation displayed in Diario Minimo is as relevant today as it was over 40 years ago. We find this extremely impressive. For example, the column titled “The Discovery of America” was inspired by the US landing on the moon and evokes a mediatic spirit that is still very much alive in the same way (remember yesterday’s TV coverage of the midterm elections?). Revisiting Diario can uncover the essence of contemporary culture through those details that remain unchanged four decades later.

Click on the image below to read the (short) essay.

Enjoy.

Posted by camilo at 08:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

That is how the Wall Street Journal announced yesterday’s improbable win in the race to the top of the US Box Office. The figure corresponds to last Friday, Saturday and Sunday and represents a $6.4 million lead versus the second place (The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause).

We consider this a semiotic triumph in its own right. Borat's existence is composed of the most open stereotypes, he does not have to lose time explaining himself because he already exists in the collective mind brought to you by the same people that created the European police car (small, noisy, slow, white, annoying, ineffective, vintage).

Because he already exists in our minds he can focus on the joke, which is carefully designed to uncover stereotypes, prejudices, fakeness, as well as honest misconceptions. Borat represents real serious parody; he makes us laugh to tears in the most literal sense possible.

Posted by camilo at 08:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Rewind to 1999. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin both academics and media critics publish a theory of mediation challenging the assumption that new (digital) media must “divorce themselves from earlier media” in order to produce a new set of “aesthetic and cultural principles.” Remediation argued that all new media forms refashion, repurpose, rival, and are therefore intrinsically linked to previous media in their permanent quest for their own identities.

According to Bolter and Grusin there are a number of possible “strategies for remediation,” from “respectful to radical.” The definitions are almost self-explanatory. In the specific case of multimedia on the Web, the authors saw a case of the radical form when compared to the more traditional remediation of print: “Web and Internet applications refashion the newer perceptual media of radio, television, and telephone more aggressively than they refashion print.”

Fast forward to 2006. The advertising industry struggles to crack the code of net video. As an emerging medium its potential generates a high level of anxiety among professionals in the industry. On the other hand, sellers are aiming high when pricing it “because they offer an engaged, actual audience rather than a passive, estimated one.” So far the formula is very “respectful” of the TV model, so respectful that both formats are competing head to head.

Were Bolter and Grusin wrong in their video-web remediation assessment? Let’s assume their interpretation was right. In which case, it means the industry might not be going in the right direction.

The current frenzy to leverage net video might be preventing us from taking a look at the whole picture. The ability to stream video on the web does not automatically transform the computer in another TV set. The non-linear nature of media consumption on the web has tremendous implications on how we use this medium to communicate. The application of the linear TV model (serving ads before content) is flawed in the sense that it’s insensitive to people’s relationship with the medium in which control is essential to the true experience. Take that control away by imposing any type of content and people will feel annoyed.

Trying to navigate against the nature of media is not only naïve but useless when it comes to generate any value to people in the other end. Remediating TV on the web should be as disrespectful as possible, leveraging the strategic advantages of the web of which “choice” is at the top. Any form of content that is not transparently user-initiated is probably going to push the wrong buttons. In the case of advertising, the British motto “if it’s not welcomed, it’s not working” should always come to mind.

Posted by camilo at 08:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We referred to the work of Richard Lanham and YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES in two separate posts. This time they come together as different parts of the same argument.

Lanham, in a chapter of his book The Economics of Attention titled What’s Next for Text?, argues that electronic media is slowly unleashing the full potential of the written word. Text as we know it in a static, lineal fashion has great (well-known) advantages. However, this traditional form shouldn’t be taken as the final destination of text. Electronic media is playing a role in advancing this medium in another direction, not necessarily in the spirit of replacement but in the spirit of innovation.

The Seoul-based group YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES is notorious for their experimentations with text in the digital arena. Their simplicity is outstanding when we internalize the profound effect in our feelings that their work is able to produce. They are indirectly answering Lanham assertion that “we want words to move for the same reason we want everything else to move, because movement means life and the space and time in which life exists.”

From the communications point of view, this media form is almost hypnotic; it is really hard to take your senses away from any of their pieces once they begin. Lanham, again, has an interesting explanation: “Our eyes are programmed to detect motion. We like it. When we see text move, we are drawn into the movement. And when the movement takes us to a land where meaning has a visual embodiment, we pay attention to it.”

Moving text is then a powerful media form in both the poetic sense as well as in the context of the attention economy. Its simplicity is the result of our strong relationship with text, developed over many centuries, and our genetic fascination with movement. YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES are certainly not the first ones to experiment with text but their work is original and more relevant than ever in a world that is just starting to grasp the concept of human attention as currency.

Below is a selection of some of their work in the political, storytelling, and even romantic realm. Enjoy.

CUNNILINGUS IN NORTH KOREA [English version]

JONGNO [English version]

NIPPON

Posted by camilo at 08:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“New York, NY - The year is 2011, and Jimmy Burns, a young anti-corporate blogger has just seen his Williamsburg apartment blown to bits by yet another terrorist attack on New York City. He’s recorded the gruesome scene on his videoblog camera-footage Burns beams live to a freaked-out world and that makes him an overnight media sensation. Exploited by his own network (Global News:”Your home for 24-hour terror coverage”), enraged by the terrorists, and determined to tell the American people the truth, Burns takes off for Iraq to get the real story of a war that’s been raging for more than eight years…” What follows is one of the most interesting experiments in media convergence in the recent history of comics.

Anthony Lappé and Dan Goldman’s Shooting War delivers a story set in the near future that forces us to take a hard look at our immediate past. Inaction will come at a price. That is probably one of the main takeaways of this absorbing story.

The medium, so far (according to Wired, there will be a hardcover print version next year), is an unusual combination of web + comics with an air of blogging that is consistent with the story itself. This is definitively an explosive combination. Right at the beginning of the web as mass media, Scott McCloud reminded us that, at the moment (1993), comics was “one of the very few forms of mass communication in which individual voices still have a chance to be heard.” That assessment remains true today, however technology has made possible other forms of media that are reshaping the toolbox available to independent voices.

It is impossible to summarize the importance of comics as media in this space. Impossible and unnecessary given the brilliant revision of this art form that is McCloud’s Understanding Comics. What we can anticipate is an evolution of comics in the digital form that will mix and remix with other media formats available now as well as with those yet to be invented. Another win for communication and communicators.

Here is a preview of chapter one, take it as my own trailer of this story.

Posted by camilo at 09:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)