Such is the case in the new partnership announced last week between the illustrious Guggenheim Museum and Youtube, called YouTube Play. According to the Washington Post article on the launch, the Guggenheim sees this collaboration as an opportunity to “raise the standards” of YouTube. The writer of that piece takes issue with this idea, arguing that the beauty of user generated and curated content is precisely the randomness of it, and that it’s “strange to introduced a juried sensibility to a relatively new, user generated world”.

I feel as though this is a conversation I’ve had with folks who find “curation” as an idea to be yet another way to limit the forms and bind the creativity of artists, media makers and their audiences who are freely discovering all the randomness of the video/film art frontier on the web. While I don’t think institutions like the Guggenheim are well-informed enough about what is really happening in the frontier they are seeking, I do think there ought to still be curatorial forces that engage in thoughtful considerations of what is happening now, AS it is happening. We don’t have to wait a decade to figure out what the movements in video art were in the first decade of the 21st century. Information is readily accessible but it has to be searched for, studied and considered, before any grand pronouncements can be made.

In the museum world, there has traditionally been a very small pipeline leading to the galleries and eventually museums, and in order to have access to it, an artist had to be somewhat “in the know”. So I wonder now whether an open call for artists to submit their work publicly via YouTube isn’t just taking opposite yet similarly limiting tactic – that is to say the fact of YouTube doesn’t make for a better considered curation, it only makes for more submissions. It isn’t terribly different from any kind of open call, even a blatantly populist one like American Idol.

I wonder if institutions like the Guggenheim wouldn’t do better to study the troves of video ALREADY out there, and curate something based on real discovery, wherein a serious study of emerging video art forms is undertaken, and the discovery of video artists who may or may not consider themselves artists, might actually occur. We live in a culture of over-abundant content, and that is why I support curation. In my estimation, there shouldn’t just be a choice between clueless high-art curator vs. engaged user-curated option. There are lots of interesting movements happening right under our noses, and we don’t need a competition to discover them. Alright, Guggenheim?

I think the answer is yes. And I did some research to challenge my own assumptions.

Of course, now with the heavily rumored and anticipated i-something (maybe iTablet or iSlate) device from the happy people at Apple, it seems the transformation of reading is perhaps closer than we might have imagined. As is often the case, technology will drive the charge and likely change user behavior and only then will creative ideas for the product follow suit. Looking beyond the cool gadgetry of the new Apple toy, let’s just consider it another gateway into the world that Amazon’s Kindle has already established with e-reading. We can be sure of one thing though: it will likely be a user-friendly, very portable device that makes the crossover between text and image very appealing.

So there we are, sucked into the magical interface, switching between a Youtube video,  the latest issue of Vogue magazine and pages of Anna Karenina, making leaps of imagination and information that may have been a little more difficult when those materials were tactile. And I describe a scenario in a sequence that has actually happened for me. I have the Kindle for iPhone app, and I confess, I am currently reading Anna Karenina on that tiny, tiny screen on the subway and sometimes, I switch tasks and watch a randomly unconnected  video, then quickly flip through a fashion magazine all in the time it takes to get from Soho to Grand Central Station. So, essentially I contradict myself.

So I’m a media zombie, a self-proclaimed future filmmaker. But a book purist, right? Yes and no. I wonder how I would feel if there was an option to watch a dramatization of Tolstoy’s novel within my app. Would I do it? I’m not sure. But I think most people would if it made an old Russian novel accessible. And for that reason, companies like Vook and Fourth Story Media are emerging in the hybrid book space with titles ranging from how-to’s to teen novels and popular adult fiction. I downloaded and sampled the Sherlock Holmes double Vook and gave it a whirl. Frankly, launching a documentary about opium use during late 19th century London was really distracting to me when I wanted to follow the characters. But I found that I liked the interface when not actually engaged in the narrative. My conclusion is not that the Vook concept itself is flawed, it’s just that turning a classically structured narrative into a multimedia experience is a complex creative challenge. And I can’t say this particular title succeeded.

However, if a title was written by the author with the intention of creating a multimedia narrative in which the text and video where simultaneously conceived, the same way we do when writing screenplays intended for filming, then I think it would be an entirely different proposition. And I actually look forward to the birth of a new form with as much creative and intellectual rigor as good literature has traditionally had. As Bob Stein, whose Institute for the Future of Books says in an LA Times piece, “We’re going to see an explosion of experimentation before we see a dominant new format. We’re at the very beginning stages” of figuring out what narrative might look like in the future– “…the very, very beginning.”

By way of history, the Spanish Republican government commissioned cubist painter Pablo Picasso to create a large mural for the Spanish display at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (1937) Paris International Exposition in the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris. As you can see, the painting depicts the bombing of the Spanish city of Guernica by the Germans and Italians during the Spanish Civil War.

Guernica, Pablo Picasso 1937

Imagine my surprise when I came upon this 3D rendering of Guernica by a Spanish autoCAD design company  GaliciaCAD. With my limited Spanish, I browsed their website and discovered that they’re actually not in the business of entertainment at all. It seems this piece was some sort of a demo for their design work. Interesting idea, I think. Of course, there is no better candidate for 3D than Picasso, given the dimensionality of his later work.

Now, to imagine the possibilities of 3D that is truly original!

Guernica 3D from GaliciaCAD on Vimeo.

Attendees following the backchannel conversations during the conference, may have noticed a thread on authorship vs. crowdsourcing (not always in polarity), which led to the subject of auteurship and whether that idea has a place within the wide open world of Transmedia. It struck me that the Purefold case study, led by AG8 was in itself an interesting connundrum for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the irony that the canon on which the project is at least conceptually based (Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner) is a work of legendary auteurship, AND that AG8′s assigned task was to create an interactive multiplatform campaign for their brand which would drive business TO their production company which represents…what else…auteurs.

The panel was called “Case Study: Transmedia Design and Conceptualization – The Making of Purefold.” AG8 are the architects of the campaign, their client is RSA and their collaborators include The Alchemists, also at the panel. For people unfamiliar with the way companies like RSA work, let me digress into their business for a second. They are essentially production companies which also act as exclusive reps of commercial and music video directors – the directors’ marketability is based on their reputation as visual auteurs. When ad agencies have a commercial to produce, they take bids and creative proposals from a host of RSA-like companies and often make their decisions based on the creative compatibility of the campaign to the director and/or the strength of their creative approach to the advertisers concept.

For many years, companies like RSA rode the tide of an endless flow of million-dollar commercials and flourished by incubating the best visual creatives in the business. With the changing landscape of TV and the ad business pulling back from the traditional :30 ad and drastically slashed budgets in the last couple of years, these companies began struggling, and a number have since folded. RSA’s Scott family – Ridley,the most famous and his brother Tony, their brood of budding young Scott auteurs and other well-known film and television directors have managed to (barely) stay relevant because they have a lot of well-established brand names in their stable. But these companies are facing an unprecedented crisis, and they are desperately trying to find a way to keep their directors employed in an era of diversified advertising strategies and the proliferation of social media.

I go into this level of detail on the business because I find it deeply fascinating that the key tool – crowdsourcing – of an brand campaign – Purefold – aiming to keep RSA relevant is at complete odds with the very fiber of RSA’s business – singularity of artistic/aesthetic vision. This certainly signals the willingness of RSA to step into the new world of branding and storytelling BUT, what sort of bedfellows will the “crowd” and the RSA auteurs eventually make under their in their Creative Commons alliance? It is of course too early to tell as the project is still in process and their presentation was primarily focused on genesis and process and not yet on the creative results.

When David Bausola and Tom Himpe, principals at AG8, presented their method of crowdsourcing they used the word “harvesting”, a description which also appears on their website. The method: by seeding Friendfeed conversations with concepts/ideas that RSA auteurs have invented, they conduct what is essentially a real-time study of what people are saying about this subjects, all riffing (if I understood this correctly) on the core theme of “empathy”. Needless to say the world “harvesting” caused an instant flurry of reactions on the Twitter backchannel during the conference as attendees bristled at the semantic implication of the word. Defenders of the method responded saying that because they created the project under Creative Commons which allows sharing and remixing, the method does not in fact imply exploitation as some felt it did.

I chimed in on this Twitter chatter myself, as I think this unease between the “crowd” and the auteurs or their agents, in this case the Purefold team is something which has not yet been fully considered. In our zeal as storytellers to jump on the crowdsourcing wagon, many issues of authorship remain unanswered. Is curation the new auteurship? How is crowdsourcing in Purefold different from me browsing a news site or reading a magazine and tapping into the Zeitgeist in a way that informs my artistic work? On one hand, I understand that only through experiments like Purefold do these issues fully play out in a way that allows new paths to be forged and on the other, I worry about a world of participation in which the rules are either too obscure for the players to be aware, or in which the auteur is forced to crowdsource simply because it creates the appearance of some sort of creative democracy.

When I found this nicely done video of Henry Jenkins (of whom I am a great fan) talking about his theory of Convergence in the middle of Times Square, I thought it would be a nice kickoff. Nice conceptual and VFX work by HCD Media Group.

Sam Blackman, CEO of Elemental Technologies: Unlike other forms of media the Internet will not destroy the pay-TV model. Consumers want a high-quality video experience across platforms (mobile device, laptop, monitor). Consumers will demand quality and ease of use.

Doug Knopper, co-founder and co-CEO of FreeWheel: Consumers are getting closer to the type of content experience they want when it comes to video. Winners will be twofold in this world: those that create compelling content and those who can figure out how to build a business model around that content. Allowing the media companies the control and flexibility to manage and monetize their content will help content creators survive this transition.

Avner Ronen CEO and co-founder of Boxee: It may be the year of TV Everywhere, but the future is Internet Everywhere.   Storytelling will change. There are no limits on the length of a story, and viewers will be able to direct their viewing experience. One can also run parallel stories within a show. By 2015, there will be an Internet show that will be bigger than a TV show today. You will have more Apple subscribers than Comcast subscribe. People will watch more video and they will pay more for it.

Jeremy Reed, SVP Content and Editorial, Demand Media: Next big thing is trying to understand there is an imbalance between supply, need and cost. You need to understand the ROI before you greenlight content. Is it quality and relevant to a community? And increasing the competitiveness — in a search world is a social world.

And perhaps the MOST controversial was James Spare’s demo of “my TV is watching me” (watch demo close to the end of the video). Everyone screamed Big Brother!

James Spare, president and CEO of Canesta: We’ve invented technology that can track objects in 3-D space. The market for 3-D is huge. A new market is 3-D input, which can, for example, have a screen detect your motion and then be able to interact in a 3-D environment. (Shows video of TV watcher moving channels with hand wave gestures). This will give rise to a whole set of new capabilities.

The idea of a phone as a device of person to person communication as it was initially conceived way back when landlines were invented is certainly no more. What’s more, I think what this TED presentation demonstrated was that the mobile phone is now completely transforming our lives – socially, politically, physically and creatively. Of course, the question of whether these changes mark “progress” or not will continue to a subject of lively debate for some time to come.

I am personally fascinated by the idea of mobile Augmented Reality because it has the potential to completely alter the way we filter the world around us as we go about our daily business. In my last post, the overview of various experiments in AR focused almost entirely on gaming, or uses that required a less nimble and seamless interaction with the augmented world. With the iPhone platform (and to some extent Android) unlocking all kinds of possibilities in mobile AR, I think we are in for a complete shift that will impact our entire notion of reality.

The recently released Layar app for iPhone puts the location + information based product to work in a practical sense as the Techcrunch article explains “it’s the placement of a digital layer of information on top of a real-life view of the world around you, as seen through e.g. a mobile phone’s camera lens. …use your smartphone to glance around the main square of a city you’re visiting and get up-to-date information about nearby restaurants, ATMs, real estate offers, and more on-screen, bolted on top of what you’d be seeing if you weren’t looking through the lens.”

Then there’s Wikitude, which claims to be able to identify “more than 370,000 world-wide points of interests (cafes, museums, schools, caves, castles, archaeological sites, battle fields) and can be searched by address by overlaying information on the real-time camera view of a the iPhone, as you hold up the device. See a list of museums nearby sorted by distance and links Detail, Map, Drive.”

None of these advancements should shock anyone who has used a GPS device in their car because it is essentially using the same technology – mapping, and satellite tracking, enhanced with additional data applied to certain uses, like travel. I think it’s fantastic in the same way that having a cellphone completely transformed picking someone up from the airport – a convenience that you wonder how you lived without in the pre-mobile days.

But here’s where mobile AR leaves the realm of purely informational and begins to have real implications for the idea of SEEING, EXPERIENCING and STORYTELLING: Imagine if your mobile phone’s AR potential meant that you could simply “encounter” a story, rather than say, sit down in front of your television and watch a story, or go to Broadway and watch a musical, or even the very interactive experience of playing your Wii at home.

I think that when the mobile device leaves the realm of exclusively being a communication/information tool, it enters into the realm of being connected to a digital persona, in even the crudest of ways. Say, for instance, if I were to enable a virtual persona on my device (maybe I took it from The Sims, or Second Life, or heck, even Facebook, if I had some online identity that wasn’t me), within some sort of application that connected me to other people who were doing the same thing. What would happen to my experience of the world around me, or the people I am interacting with when I walk down the street? Is it possible that rather than “me” Aina, walking to the subway, my AR personality could be anyone I fictionally created, and I could interact with people IN REAL LIFE as someone else within a mobile story/game?

While this all may sound completely bizarre and unnecessary in the world of storytelling, it’s obvious that this development will invariably happen sooner than we all imagined. Even if you choose not to participate in that AR world, it still begs the question of how that AR capability alters our way of seeing “fictional” or “real” stories? In the same way that having a mobile phone changed our social behavior, I think we are bound to see a shift in the way we both view, consume and create fiction.