Bruce Sterling has a great post in Wired on “Atemporality for the Creative Artist”.It speaks accurately of the present, and offers a great prescriptive for what comes next. What’s “Atemporality”? Look at how problems are dealt with these days. I know I come fairly close to what Sterling lays out here, and it goes a long way to answering that first question:
‘Step one – write problem in a search engine, see if somebody else has solved it already.
Step two – write problem in my blog; study the commentory cross-linked to other guys.
Step three – write my problem in Twitter in a hundred and forty characters. See if I can get it that small. See if it gets retweeted.
Step four – open source the problem; supply some instructables to get me as far as I’ve been able to get, see if the community takes it any further.
Step five – start a Ning social network about my problem, name the network after my problem, see if anybody accumulates around my problem.
Step six – make a video of my problem. Youtube my video, see if it spreads virally, see if any media convergence accumulates around my problem.
Step seven – create a design fiction that pretends that my problem has already been solved. Create some gadget or application or product that has some relevance to my problem and see if anybody builds it.
Step eight – exacerbate or intensify my problem with a work of interventionist tactical media. And step nine – find some kind of pretty illustrations from the Flickr ‘Looking into the Past’ photo pool.’
Among many other treats, the piece also goes on to explain how today’s existence leads narrative to a non-linear, transmedia approach. Let’s face it, our brains have been rewired.
In trying to help find a solution to the indie film problems, I think it is crucial to deal with the real now; Sterling’s article describes it well for me. Many that I speak to, yearn to return things to the old; that’s nostolgia and melancholy. The genie is out of the bottle. Our world has changed.
Sterling takes it to where it really is: we have a new historical situation (“we have atemporal organized representations of verbal structures”). He also offers up how to approach it, and have fun too. He offers clear cut recommendations on approaching creative endeavors (“No longer allow yourself to be hypnotized by the sense of technical novelty. Just refuse to go there. Accept that it is already passe’, and create it from that point of view. Try to make it news that stays news.”). It’s a great rewarding read. And it’s short too. So take the 4 minutes. Don’t delay. Bring us (and yourself) into the now.
Read the whole article, and let’s talk. Or blog. Or text. Or tweet.
