But how?

Engine29 was a way of asking questions about arts journalism, challenging what we know, and talking to people inside and outside of the arts and journalism. What’s the value of what we do? How are people getting their information about culture? What’s valuable and what’s not?

The communications revolution offers power to the people. For many people, meaningful cultural experiences are not complete until they have the ability to share them with others. This is more than mere generosity; the act of sharing is a creative response, a way for people to express themselves, even define their identity. What we choose to share helps define how others see us. This creative response makes us part of the artistic proposition, and it is valuable to artists. So we sent a team to look at response - Twitter and QR coes and Facebook – and even some old-fashioned in-gallery audience research with white boards. What impact is all this sharing having on the relationsgip between artist and audience?

Journalism is too narrow a way to approach the changes in communications that are happening in our culture. So we wanted to talk to people who are using technology to build communities around them and see what they’ve learned about the power of technology to communicate and build relationships. Today, say the founders of the Tiziano Project, which tries to shine light on abuses in conflict areas, it is “morally unacceptable to have YouTube and undocumented injustice in the world at the same point in human history.” The ability to tell stories and shine light makes possible empathy and understanding, in the process teaching us about ourselves. Isn’t that what art tries to do? Isn’t that arts journalism?

One of the traps one can get into is burrowing so deep into an art form that one loses the connections it has to the larger world. We wanted to think about the role of context and physical surrounding in approaching art. LA is a car city – thus the approach to art is often made by car, on streets. So we took away the cars and sent a team out on bicycles and on public transportation to see if we could reconceive the context. What the team discovered is that how you get there can significantly redefine the experience you have. So how do journalists help to set contexts? Is it worth exploring a kind of Slow Food movement for journalism and the arts?

Then there are the ways we tell stories. Who says a linear narrative is the best way to convey a story? And why is an 800-word (or 1000-word or 2000-word) review the best way of articulating a reaction to art? What if people could find multiple entry points into a reaction to art? What if you could atomize artistic responses and let people assemble them in ways that were most meaningful to them? What if you could build information structures that could provide frameworks for telling stories depending on what the viewer/listener wanted? So one of our teams worked on building a timeline of information and critical response that could be accessed in many ways.

That kind of user interaction, of course, is integral to gaming culture. We wanted to understand the dynamics of games and how game designers motivate people to play and incentivize choice. It’s not all about success and reward, but how you make failure fun, about how players learn as they play, about how there are clear trajectories as you participate. In a world awash with choice about which cultures we decide to participate in, incentivizing one choice over another is essential.

Lastly, we recognize that we still live in the real world. So how do you adapt new thinking to traditional news organizations that have many constraints on what they can and cannot do?So we took a new community theatre section produced by the Cleveland Plain Dealer and tried to re-imagine it after talking to experts inside and outside of journalism and the arts. We came up with a list of design and usage principles, and a fantasy redesign.

What did it all add up to? It made us reconsider some basic beliefs about what we do. It made us consider other ways of thinking about sharing culture. And for me, at least, it made me think deeper about a kind of journalism that is more multi-dimensional, a kind of journalism that thinks about building stories on more levels and that includes the reader/listener/viewer in more meaningful ways.

Perhaps most of all, though, I think Engine29 reaffirmed for all of us the importance of storytelling and its essential value.

To browse the timeline, click “Start” in the pop-up box above. You can browse the entries by using the green arrow buttons on the right-hand navigation bar to scroll backwards and forwards. To zoom into a period, move the green horizontal tab up. To zoom out, move it down. To search the entries, click the small blue triangle just under the title and choose the “List” function. This will provide you a full list of entries that can be searched by key phrases.

A woman said: “Do the thing that only you can do.”
“Do the thing that only you can do,” said the woman.
To a table full of writers, the woman said: “Do the thing that only you can do.”

It was dark out and near-dusk inside the upstairs room of Más Malo. Chairs and tables  shifted outward, occasionally admitting another journalist into the conversation. Under discussion, egos and interviewing skills; experts and opera. Somewhere between Margaritas and red velvet cake, a woman, blond-haired and passionate about everything arts, said this: “Do the thing that only you can do.”

Do the thing. That only you, can do.

One of the journalists wrote it down — a reminder that talent is not the same for everyone.

We have spent decades learning and re-learning to do this “thing” that we do, imagining and re-imagining new ways to tell stories in our own way. Although our “telling” may travel diverging avenues, we often begin at the same point of origin: An idea. A need to know. A question:

  by engine29
Speaker: Celeste Headlee

We are nosy; curious; passionate; inquisitive. We are all storytellers — grown up daydreamers operating in reality. The reality is, the numbers do not cease the work of measuring how many of us are disappearing. Yes, we know our pages are shrinking. We have heard our listeners are tuning out and viewers are turning away. Where once we kept them rapt with the expertise of our craft, there are other voices now — many other voices now — that compete for their attention.

The world evolves. And so we must too.

THERE WAS NO THERE, THERE

See Jennifer. Jennifer has a camera. Jennifer’s camera is small. See Douglas. Douglas has a question. He does not write his questions down. Jennifer and Douglas are journalists.

Can you spell j-o-u-r-n-a-l-i-s-t?

They are nice.

Today, the nice journalists are visiting a nice man. His name is Mark Allen. Mark Allen has a company that helps people use ideas and technology. His company is called Machine Project. Today, the nice journalists will interview the nice man.

The man says that one thing leads to the next thing. He tells the journalists to think about every project as an experiment; as something new.

This is a good thing to remember,  for instance, when trying to fill a nice white page.
by engine29

by engine29
Speakers: Douglas MacCash, Alison MacAdam, Rick Holter, Edward, Lifson, Nekesa Mumbi Moody, Neda Ulaby, Kim Levin

“TRADITIONAL” JOURNALISTS IN A NON-TRADITIONAL WORLD

In 2007, attorney and constitutional law scholar, Scott Gant, wrote a 256-page book that is currently ranked 340,773rd on Amazon’s Best Sellers book list. Titled “We’re All Journalists Now: The Transformation of the Press and Reshaping of the Law in the Internet Age,” the front flap summarizes Gant’s work as such:

“[Gant] offers a persuasive and engaging argument for affording bloggers and anyone else who disseminates information and opinion in the United States the same rights and privileges that traditional journalists enjoy.”

The public seems to support Gant’s notion, with growing numbers of citizen journalists, pundits and bloggers, keen to join in on the discussion.

This changes things. The landscape of journalism, for example. And how we, the “privileged,” are now sharing column inches and airwaves with any and all who wish to exercise freedom of the press.

by engine29

by engine29
Speakers: Kim Levin, Laszlo Molnar, Celeste Headlee, Nekesa Mumbi Moody

TELLING STORIES

Elder man he is. Dark brown and capped with gray. Stately and colorful all the way.

She sits beside him at dinner. They have known each other once before, many years earlier, when she learned that he was an artist. A very good artist, too. His work is in a museum right now — The Hammer Museum. She has seen it and been moved by it and tells this to him.

She is a writer, so he tells her stories. Repeats the histories of his creation, of his work. He tells her of others like him who have been creating and working, but are still not known. She listens closely because she wants to retell these stories too. Stories about this man — John Outterbridge — and others like him who have been creating and working but are still not known.

by engine29 Speaker: Kim Levin

THE AUDIENCE

“As a traditional storyteller, my role was to create a kind of one-way street between me and my audience. . .It became clear that you had to begin to tell stories where the audience was and where they were going” – Tim Kring, creator of television drama, “Heroes”

by engine29 Speakers: Celeste Headlee, Kim Levin, Laszlo Molnar

THE JOURNALIST AS ARTIST

Performance. Audience. Witness. Period. Comma. Space.

We are known by our body of work.

We know ourselves by the work we embody.

Words curated, one on top, beside, underneath — the other.
The things we leave behind, the stories we tell: shaken loose in daily conversations.

by engine29

by engine29 Speakers: Laszlo Molnar, Kim Levin

THE THINGS WE LEARN — AND SHARE — ALONG THE WAY

Notes from “Liquid Content” discussion by Doug McLennan
Engine29 Day One – Saturday, November 5, 2011

-Journalism as a living thing: it creates more value as you go along.
-people get their news based on who they trust — the community of people who surround you; you get your identity from what you choose to share
-sharing as a primary way of being a creative person
-what are the best multi-media training tools?

Endpoint:
-how can you tell a story in a different way?
-how can you think about a story in a different way

*read: “The Perfect Pitch” on Engine28 site, and “10 Things I learned from Engine28“ on 2AMt blog
*learn more: Artsjournal.com (Doug’s site)

by engine29
Speakers: Joshua Brown, Neda Ulaby, Nekesa Mumbi Moody

TALENT

by engine29
Speakers: Kim Levin, Celeste Headlee

THE FUTURE

A woman said: “Do the thing that only you can do.”

“Do the thing that only you can do,” said the woman.

To a table full of writers, the woman said: “Do the thing that only you can do.”

The Future 1-2 by engine29 by engine29
Speaker: Celeste Headlee

Images: Joh Outterbridge, No Time for Jivin’, from the Containment Series; John T. Riddle, Jr., Gradual Troop Withdrawal, 1970; Samella Lewis, Migrants, 1968. All images from “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980.” Images courtesy of the Hammer Museum.

How do you tell the story of L.A.? A vast metropolitan area that is eighty miles wide and a hundred miles long; a city of villages that are as interconnected as they are isolated; a sprawling urban-desert carpet that is a million different places at once.

In conceiving and building the Southern California Time Machine, our group sought to see if there was a way that we could better understand the cultural history of Los Angeles in a way that didn’t involve linear narrative (a style of storytelling that seems to be ill-suited to a geography that is so atomized and diffuse). Part of this stems from my own interest in the way infographics have come to tell stories really effectively in the area of politics and business.

See this image I found on the blog The Big Picture — related to the current debate about the debt:

Below is another graph, which appeared on Mother Jones, explaining American views on economic inequity:

I find these graphics compelling because of the way in which they are able to tell complicated stories in clear and visual ways. And recently, they have been used to great effect by the political and business media. In the arts media, not so much — where we tend to stick to traditional forms of storytelling, stories that have a clear beginning, middle and end. (See the image of Artforum magazine, at right.)

In the case of cultural coverage, these types of infographics don’t always make sense — since charts require raw data with similar values that can be easily crunched and rearranged — and they shouldn’t necessarily replace long-form story-telling. But, that doesn’t mean that we can’t think about doing arts coverage that is more visually driven — something that goes beyond slideshows. So, I settled on the idea of a digital timeline.

To be certain, timelines aren’t new. Timelines seem to make an appearance in history books and art catalogs. And, naturally, these days, they also appear regularly online. (The New York Times does this particularly well: check out this timeline on the American diet.) While many of these timelines represent an interesting way of organizing data, many of them still operate on a linear basis. In most cases, they are still read from beginning to end.

But with digital technology we can create timelines that can be accessed entry by entry. They can be entered and exited at any point. Individual entries can be shared using social media. They can reside online and be continually updated, turned into living documents that can evolve over time. And, they can allow us to see old information in new ways. Part of what inspired this project was a timeline of data systematization published by Wolfram Alpha. The timeline is a record of the ways in which civilizations have systematized data (not necessarily new information), but by consolidating all of this data into one place, the timeline allowed the researchers to analyze the information in new and synthetic ways. (If you access the link above, you’ll see how they were able to break the data out.)

Which brings me to the Southern California Time Machine.

The intent was to weave together different aspects of Southern California culture in ways that might allow us to see the culture of the region in fresh ways: from important happenings in the city’s punk rock scene to the vibrant conceptual arts happenings of the 1970s to Nixon’s resignation. The intent was to put together all of the major happenings of the era in one place in a way that is easy to understand and navigate. Unfortunately, a technical glitch prevented us from using the content management system we would have originally liked to — a system that embodied the cellular structure we were seeking — so what you’re seeing on the site is our hasty Plan B.

But in terms of the journalism, I’ve already seen a pay-off in organizing information in this way. One, much arts journalism is compartmentalized into its individual subject areas: music, art, theatre, film. By putting everything together in one place, we were able to see how the zeitgeist was informing all the different types of art being produced. An example: for decades, articles, radio stories, and films have been made about Chris Burden’s 1971 performance art piece “Shoot,” in which he had himself shot in the arm with a .22. It is often discussed within a visual art context. Often, it is deconstructed almost entirely within the context of his own career. Any outside influences — be it the tumultuous politics of the era, or the fact that rocker Iggy Pop was cutting himself with drumsticks at his performances as far back as 1969 — are rarely addressed. By putting this information together, it allows us to see Burden as a product of a larger cultural milieu.

In addition, the digital nature of the project allows to be able to search the information  and organize it in different ways. Under ideal technical conditions, we would be able to sort the information by subject, by date, by keyword or by a mix of all three — making this an ideal tool for researchers, journalists and others interested in learning more about Southern California.