Fwd: WWW Conference App - Curation of Materials
I trust each of you has read my 24-point memo called 'WWW Conference Conversation Guidelines' with 24 points that I believe give the spirit of the meeting itself. I've had excellent response from many of you as well as from sponsors and attendees. This memo addresses the outcome of the conference, in other words, what I do with the filming of these approximately 30 conversations.
It will be filmed in black and white by a team directed by Jon Kamen and Sidney Beaumont of Radical Media, and John Halloran.
It will be photographed in black and white and unedited. There will be a camera on each of the individuals chatting, as well as a long camera on the three of us sitting on stage.
Michael Smolans and David Orban of dotSUB will then translate it into many languages and add a running translation in English which will address the language needs of perhaps 90% of the world's population.
This will live on a server and be accessed by an app that will have a release date at this juncture of 1 December. The app will also contain a great deal of additional information on each of the presenters.
Scrollmotion has already done two extraordinary versions of the organization and design of this app. They have offices in San Diego and New York City.
There will be a series of unique videos on which I will comment later, made where appropriate of you in situ.
The video of the entire conference of course can be accessed by pairings of speakers from a list and viewed as you would at the conference showing individuals in improvised conversation. However, one could also double click on a single name and go into this visual biography of each of the participants.
The demo is attached here: http://vimeo.com/user7992663/review/47187545/29ddc526f0 (the password is WWW) It shows an extremely brief version of CK Williams, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, in which you cannot only see a bio, for which we will ask a major expansion, but also photographs of the covers of a few of his 11 books. We would also like to have all of his books, which you will be able to order from the app, some outtake videos, not from the conference but from other sources that we would identify, and that you will identify as well as, in the case of CK Williams, many pages, a few shown here, of his personally edited writings of his poetry - something you can't find on YouTube, a presentation or in a book, or perhaps anywhere but this app.
This is an important point: if you Google Richard Wurman, you come up with perhaps 450,000 citations. The number changes daily. This would amount to 40,000+ pages, which of course nobody looks at. Basically it's junk big data, and people mostly focus on one article and a Wikipedia entry. The attempt here is to have the first primitive development of a platform for beginning to assuage some curiosity in the beginning of looking at a visual biography of at least these 50 people. If the platform works it's scalable. That's the idea of a new modality. If it works for people perhaps it will work for healthcare and other subjects.
I'm putting together a team of people consisting of Ali Smolans, who will help curate some of the materials for many of you, Paul Kandarian, a magazine writer friend of mine from Rhode Island, and three others plus Blaise Zerega, CEO of FORA.tv who has agreed to make some original, simple videos such as Frank Gehry walking around his office showing and discussing models of buildings that he has not built, or variations of for instance the 8 Spruce Street tower in New York or hopefully Craig Venter's laboratories in a walk-through, etc. etc.
So this is a request for the following: please start thinking about the stuff that you've never shown: everything from baby pictures, pictures of your pets, pictures of your office, pictures of your home, things that make you real. Multiple photographs of yourself, perhaps a strip of photographs of you taken in a photo booth at an amusement park that you have in a drawer. Writings that you've done that show your edits, something that shows you're real, human, and shows your process. Pictures of your laboratories. Agree to have somebody do a 5- or 10- minute walk through with you in your office or your lab or your place of work or your architectural studio. Videos or DVDs that for example I know Moshe Safdie has which he makes to describe what a building will look like in computer graphics to a client. I know he has a fantastic one of an apartment house in Singapore. And I'm sure Bjarke has similar things that he generally does not release. Covers of books about you, covers of books by you. A list of articles that you think critically describes you and links to YouTubes or other videos or other citations that you think and you have curated yourself that make you particularly interesting, not the half a million available online.
We hope to have this put together, along with the entire conference, for release by 1 December and promote it immediately after Thanksgiving. I am going to ask for your cooperation out in Redlands at the conference and I will have additional copies of this and the other memo to give you when you register.
Attached are technical specifications for those of you who understand them yourself or have somebody in your office under the age of 30 who automatically understands them that would help us translate whatever you send us in usable form. Please read them or give them to somebody to read. I don't understand them myself but I'm sure some of you have a better handle on this than I do but this would make the process extremely more smooth and efficient and less expensive.
Sent from my iPhone