Tag Archives: culturematic

The ‘wicked grin’ test (a new creative measure)

How do you know when something in our culture is really good?

I think it’s when it makes us grin a wicked grin.

This is one of those: Dave Chappelle does imitation of Prince and Prince uses the imitation for his album cover. Dave becomes Prince. Prince becomes Dave becoming Prince.

For post-modernists, this is ‘signs circulating.’ Fair enough but not very interesting. It doesn’t explain why we grin wickedly.

It’s the relocation that does it. Daveness taking on Princeness. Princeness taking on Daveness as Princeness. These are meanings in motion. We grin wickedly because we can’t believe that Dave dared attempt Princeness. It’s not temerity that gets us. Dave is free to make fun of a genius like Prince. That’s the privilege of his genius.

No, what makes us grin is astonishment. How did Dave do it? How is that possible? Daveness and Princeness share a claim (and a proof) of genius, but they come from very different parts of our culture.  They are in a sense incommensurate.

And they just made themselves (for a moment, in a way) commensurate. This makes our minds happy…and our faces grin. I think it is at some level it makes our brains happy. Meanings attached to one thing now, astonishingly, belong to another. We can feel gears turning in our heads.

Dave and Prince have brought meanings together that are normally kept apart. And we thank them for this semiotic miracle by grinning our admiration, astonishment, gratitude. Who knew our culture could do that.

We make a lot of culture with acts of unexpected, unprecedented combination.  (I have tried to map this process for contemporary culture in a book called Culturematic.)

Indeed, wicked grinning should be the new objective not just of comedy and album cover design, but of branding, design and advertising. We used to slavishly obey the rules of official combination (aka genre). Now we bore people with this predictability. If the user, viewer, consumer, audience can see where we’re going, they won’t come with us. (Susan Sarandon did an interview yesterday on Charlie Rose in which she said precisely this.)

Compare a culturematic to old fashioned marketing. The ad man and woman came up with a blindingly obvious message, stuffed it into one of the mass media (3 network TV, magazines, newspaper, radio) and fired it at the target over and over again until our ears bled. Everyone just wanted the “persuasion” to stop. This was cold war torture. And the worse part of this torture was how completely unsurprising it all was.

Every thing changes when we assume that our “consumers” are clever and interesting, and, chances are, making culture on their own. This means first that they can see the grammars we are using. Second, it means that they are looking for culture to make their own, for critical purposes and creative ones.  Culture creative, assume you are talking to someone has smart as you are. Assume you are talking to someone who can do what you do. And go with the idea that we have no hope of success unless we are making content that makes people grin wickedly.

Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green have invited us to embrace a new slogan: “if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead.” The idea is that a message will die unless people take an act hand in distributing it by social media. I am proposed that before we apply the Jenkins-Ford-Green test, we apply “wicked grin test.” Forget the focus groups and the audience testing. Just show your work to someone and look at the expression on their face.

Secrets of digital celebrity: how to get famous the easy way

When Guy Kawasaki was asked how to get internet famous, he had discouraging news. There is no easy answer, he seemed to say.  You have to follow thousands of people. You have to reply to all your email and Twitter traffic.  Yes, he said, I’m “internet famous” but it took me 25 years to get here.

But some people came up easily. The 1990s was the internet’s Cambrian era, so there was an immense amount of noise and commotion. Now that everyone was in the game, it was hard for anyone to rise. But a few did. And some of those few did not appear to be working hard at all.  They were not scrupulous about their twitter traffic and email.  They got digital celebrity the easy way.

So what’s the easy way?  Let’s take three case studies. There are several more. But these are three that impressed me most. 

As the TV show Mad Men as a center piece, Bud began to tweet in the voice of Bud Melman (pictured) as if from the mailroom of Sterling Cooper.  He gave us an insider’s view of the agency.  The Melman character went from a slender proposition to deep plausibility in the 5 seconds it took us to figure out what the proposition was.  Bud (both of them) had insinuated himself into the storyline. He made himself necessary reading for fans of the show. This was fan fic that actually commandeered the original. It was transmedia that was in some ways more interesting and imaginative than the show.  (AMC thought so. They came at Caddell with lawyers blazing.)  Most of all, Bud showed what digital technology could do.  What, in effect, it was for.  For the price of a Twitter account (then as now $0), he was famous.

With “Bud,” Bud found had found a way to hack old media with new media. The message was clear.  Old media might continue to control a big piece of contemporary culture and it would always have more money, more institutional heft, and perhaps more eyeballs, but with tiny investments some people could help themselves to some of the proceeds. It felt like something out of Prohibition, when small bandits managed to liberate one truck from the 100 trucks big bandits were sending from Canada to NYC.  

Talk about ROI.  Bud won fame for the price of a good idea and a really cheap delivery device.  

Jonah Peretti won fame a different way.  He asked Nike to customize his shoes with the word “sweatshop.” Nike refused.  An exchange of emails ensued in which Nike insisted that “sweatshop” was slang and therefore forbidden.  Peretti replied it was standard English. And then he published the emails. And won himself a piece of immortality.  This is one of the characteristics of this fame, that it uses resources that don’t look like resources at all. An exchange of emails as the path to stardom. This was new.  And cheap.  And forget answering all your email.  Just publish the interesting ones.  

This begins with an act of brilliance. Peretti saw that he could use Nike’s customization for his own purposes, against Nike, and as a way to draw attention to a big issue and indeed a guilty secret that lay at the heart of the Nike proposition. It’s an opportunity right there in front of everyone. Most of us are incapable of anything more imaginative that “Grant’s sneakers” or “Left” and “Right.”  Peretti saw a way to hack the customization that Nike felt made them just so very you know current, “with it,” and “on the ball.” The conceit exposed them. Peretti made them pay.

Kevin Slavin won his stardom with a gaming idea. I never saw any of the games that came out of his company Area/Code. It was enough to hear him talk about his proposition at a PSFK conference. He talked about kids running through the streets of NYC pursued by monsters that were imaginary in one sense but entirely real in another. He called these “invisible characters moving through real-world spaces.”  

There is something so clever about these cases you instantaneously go, “Oh.”  Your heart and your head is glad.  Previous generations found fame in other ways, writing books, starting companies, distinguishing themselves in some arena or other.  (Think of Stewart Brand’s The Whole Earth Catalog.) But all of these were effortful compared to what is happening here. What brought them Caddell, Peretti and Slavin fame was virtually all concept, not much more than a really brilliant idea stretched over a balsa wood frame. It was, and is, path to stardom because this was all it took to demonstrate that you were someone who grasped “it” (the intangible kinds of value and engagement now possible in the digital space) while the rest of us were struggling to get our blogging software to work.

Anthropologist like this sort of thing for the same reason that linguistic like puns.  We can see the cultural (linguistic) mechanics at work. But I think it’s clear that virtually everyone saw these events, these hacks, as clever as anything and they rewarded the creators with admiration that rose to the level of stardom. And remember how hard this was in the 1990s.  Now that everyone was more active and visible, it was hard to see anyone. We want to avoid a post hoc “oh, but that was obvious.”  There was nothing obvious about climbing out of the blizzard of invention going on in that cultural moment. Or this one.

Some will say, “Oh, but this really isn’t celebrity of anything like the kind we care about.  I mean these guys are not film star famous.” True enough.  I would argue this is a higher grade of celebrity.  If you want to be film star famous, you have to trade away your privacy. You will be followed around by the paparazzi.  People will make their living inventing falsehoods about you. This celebrity is costless.  Highly profitable but almost entirely costless. 

We can think of these as “ingenuity bombs” in the manner of a seed bomb.  You take a really great idea.  Coat it in just enough materials to get it started.  And then hurl it into the world.  And stand clear.  Actually, stand close.  You are about to be covered in glory.  

For more on this idea see my book Culturematic.

post script: apologies for the precious version of this post. I am working from Mexico City and my internet resources are constrained.

Cultural arbitrage

This video by Ingrid Michaelson, called Girls Chase Boys, uses this video by Robert Palmer called Simply Irresistible.

If intellectual arbitrage is the movement of meanings or models from one academic field to another, cultural arbitrage is the movement of meanings or models from one part of culture to another.

So Michaelson moves the theme, the meme, the dream out of Palmer and uses it for new purposes. Men become sexual objects (where before it was women).  Michaelson describes an independence from men (where before it was Palmer claiming a “dependence” on  women). The idea of a sexual object is put in play.  Our culture changes course…a little.

This is a complicated maneuver.  A cultural artifact is being created out of existing cultural materials.  With a twist.  Meanings are being lifted, changed and reapplied.  (Something burrowed, something blue.)

Sampling is the simplest example of cultural arbitrage.  Jay-Z took a show tune from the Broadway production of Annie and dropped it into his song “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem).”  This is not the first thing you would expect to hear in the music of self proclaimed “Marcy Projects hustler” but it worked beautifully, giving a strange vitality to both the song and the sample.

Michaelson had finished her song when she saw the Robert Palmer video and went, “oh.”  Somehow you just know at once that something when transplanted will give off new meanings.

The academic world has spend a lot of the time thinking of cultural arbitrage as a matter of “appropriation.”  Who owns the original?  Is this originator properly acknowledged and compensated?  This is an important question…though I am not sure why we felt we had to devote the whole of the 1990s to talking about it.

But the bigger, more pressing question is how to take advantage of  cultural arbitrage.  The Onion does a fine job.  After all, most metaphor and a lot of humor turns on arbitrage.

If I may quote myself, here’s what I said in Culturematic about what may be my favorite example of arbitrage:

Some years ago, The Onion pictured Alan Greenspan and his Federal Reserve Board team destroying the penthouse of the Beverly Hills Hotel.  In their “coverage,” The Onion gives us a dispassionate treatment of televisions being kicked in,  mattresses hurled from the balcony and the inevitable police intervention.

“Monday’s arrest is only the latest in a long string of legal troubles for the controversial Greenspan, who has had 22 court dates since becoming Fed chief in 1987. Economists recall his drunken 1994 appearance on CNN’s Moneyline, during which he unleashed a profanity-laden tirade against Bureau of Engraving & Printing director Larry Rolufs and punched host Lou Dobbs when he challenged Greenspan’s reluctance to lower interest rates. In November 1993, he was arrested after running shirtless through D.C. traffic while waving a gun. And some world-market watchers believe the international gold standard has still not recovered from a May 1998 incident in which he allegedly exposed his genitals on the floor of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The Tokyo case is still pending.”

Thus did The Onion bring together two things: the dour keeper of the economy and the self-indulgent chaos of the rock star.  It performed a careful act of transposition.  Every line of The Onion “story” is lifted from a typical newspaper report.  Journalistic details are lovingly preserved.  (“The Tokyo case is still pending.”)  Only the names and occupations are changed.

Some of the power of cultural arbitrage comes from that double movement it inflicts on us.  As when we read this passage, the meaning takes and then fails.  We transfer the meaning and then stop transferring it.  We say, “Yes, got it.  Greenspan as a rock star” and then we say, “No, this is impossible.  I can’t think this!”

Arbitrage is an engine of creativity.  And often the trick is to bring together parts (aka meanings) of our culture that rarely go together.  As in the case of this account of the Fed on a rampage.  It takes an outrageous act of imagination to glimpse the possibility.  And then we delight in the difficulty of thinking it.

But some cultural arbitrage comes from much smaller, more subtle acts of comparison.  Finally, we can collapse this strategy to the vanishing point.  As when Stephen King talks about the horror of discovering that everything in a home has been replaced with a perfect replica.  No real difference, accompanied by a whiff of oddity, this is the small act of arbitrage, but it carries, as King shows, big effects.

Popular culture is in the arbitrage business, as one actor is cast against type, or a picture is made to migrate across genres.  Morning television is in the arbitrage business when it puts Charlie Rose, Gayle King and Norah O’Donnell in the same studio.  It’s the differences and the emergent harmonies that make this show work while others struggle.

Speaking of TV, here’s another outtake from Culturematic.  It shows a casting machine for NCIS.  The idea here is to see what difference a different set of actors would make.  The sweet spot is in the middle of the chart.  (Don Cheadle territory). The alternatives close in are insufficiently different to release much frisson.  The ones far out (towards the bottom of the chart) are too different for the narrative to hold.

recasting NCIS

We spent so much time debating appropriation that we have yet to make a systematic study of cultural arbitrage.  But this is one of the workhorses of contemporary culture.  And with conscious study we can make it still more productive.

Midori House: a culture accelerator

303px-TylerBrule

Intelligence gathering, pattern seeking, culture watching, early warning wanting, this is the name of the game for everyone in the creative space.

But it is one thing to gather this knowledge, and another to put it to use.

One interesting case study here is Midori House, which I visited last year.  (I am rolling it out now because I am on the road and serving up topics I have written about but not yet posted on.)

“Being Tyler Brule is a full time job,” says the intern, with a touch of irritation.  Tyler Brule (pictured) is the head of Monocle and Winkreative, this kid’s boss, and a man not to be crossed.  I wonder if the intern understands what this indiscretion could cost him.   Or perhaps, young and impossibly handsome, he just doesn’t care.

The intern is giving me a tour of Midori House.  It stands in a London courtyard, about 90 feet long, 40 feet wide, and five stories high.  It’s about the size of a  ferryboat or small cruise ship.

I am here to be interviewed on the Monocle radio station.  This surprises me because I thought Monocle was a magazine.

And Monocle is a magazine, quite a famous one, in fact.  But it is also a design studio, advertising agency, strategy consultancy, and, yes, a radio station.   Typically, we see these 5 functions spread over 5 separate companies.  Bringing them altogether into so small a space would, in the old days, have brought a charge of indecision or promiscuity.

These days it’s a smart thing to do.

All of the Monocle bits and pieces run on the same thing: a knowledge of, and a feeling, for the state of our world.  Indeed, I found myself wondering if there was a pipe in the basement through which intelligence comes pouring into Midori House.

Let’s say someone in the design house is working on a project for Burberry, the clothing brand.  They go to the basement and pour off a pint size container called “the latest thing in luxury clothing.”  Someone working for the ad agency is looking for information on the way housewives think about breakfast.  The pipe provides here too.  The book review man for Monocle, is always on the look out for new books but for that great cloud of ideas and sentiments that make our culture now.

It sounds a little complicated, but there is a big idea here.  In fact, Monocle has found a way to maximize its return on investment.  What flows in from that pipe is used 5 times, as design, advertising, strategy, print on the page and words in the air.   Everything it learns, it turns to advantage.  If the print client doesn’t want something, the strategy client will.  And sometimes, a single understanding of the world pays off in all 5 of the Monocle faces.  And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what you call a robust ROI.

And this is no simple “pass through” model. Monocle accelerates what it learns.   Inevitably, the people designing for Burberry end up talking to the ad people.  The ad people reply with their latest learnings.  And everyone listens to Dan, the book reviewer, because he knows what’s happening in the world of arts, letters and ideas.

And together the Monocle team members multiply their knowledge until Midori House rises on a tide of intelligence that may not exist anywhere else in London.  And this is a city famous for its sensitivity to the new.  London is filled with watchers of culture and makers of culture, people trying to divine and deliver the new.  Accelerators of the Midori House kind, there could be something to this.

Hacking culture (an April Fool’s edition)

EmberAds like this are springing up in Toronto as people contemplate the prospect of another term for Mayor Rob Ford.

Ridicule is the order of the day.  A decade ago, this would have taken place in Toronto bars and pubs.  (In this once Scottish Presbyterian outpost, spirits and mockery used to meet every day after work.)  But, hey presto, nowadays people can do a pretty good replica of the campaign sign.

What changed?  Well, everything, mostly.  The technology is there.  Anyone can find a printer willing to bang out campaign signs.  But the important change was the willingness to ape the experts and make culture for ourselves.  People were once cowed.  Making a campaign sign, not just for politicians anymore.

When culture was official, we didn’t dare presume.  We didn’t dare make it or fake it or board it or hijack it, borrow it or make off with it, or “have a little fun with it.” We didn’t dare hack it.  Now we do.

Ember

Phil Jones inserted himself in someone else’s real estate ads.

Goofy realtor smile.  Matching shirt and tie.  Bad mustache.  Ill fitting wig, and all.  Phil missed nothing.

Ember

People have made their own  memorials on Brooklyn Bridge.

D-I-Y memorials. Hacking public space for private purposes? That’s something.

 

UNICEF hacked the vending machine

Ember

A Harvard student hacked the tour of the Yale campus.

Andre Levy, a Brazilian living in Germany, managed to hack the coin of the realm.   His art now goes everywhere.

Ember

See more of Andre’s work at talesyoulose.tumblr.com.   

The hacking thing begins, for near-history purposes, with the advent of Punk.  Irreverent fans watched a band on stage and said, “Oh, I could do that, only like, way, way worse!”

And remember that jewel of the digital world in the 1990s when  everyone was wowed by All Your Base Are Belong To Us?  I remember several people saying, “Oh God, anyone can make an ad!”

That’s another difference.  Our standards have gone up.  We can all  dispatch a campaign sign, a painted coin, even a rehabilitated vending machine.  This used to be the kind of thing that only MIT engineering students could pull off.  Prankster acumen, even this is being democratized.

The spirit of hacking is everywhere.  It manifests itself even in your niece who bangs out NCIS fan fic effortlessly and with no sense that she is trespassing on anyone’s creative patch. Every consumer is now a producer, or near enough.

Everyone is in possession of the skill and the gumption to hack culture.  It’s just a question of imagination.   More and more, the public world looks like an opportunity for intervention.  And for the rest of us, everyday will call for the wariness we exercise on April Fool’s Day.  Could this be what it seems?  Or is my culture being hacked.

Post script

Thanks to Leora Kornfeld for letting me know about Toronto campaign signs.

Speaking of hacking Toronto politics, there is a great experiment taking place on Twitter.  It’s the work of someone (I will name him if he lets me) who has taken the name of Bert Xanadu and the persona of the Mayor of Toronto circa 1973.  Follow him as  @moviemayor.  It’s like Groucho got a Twitter account.

For more on hacking culture, see my book Culturematic.

Recasting culture (and especially TV)

Ember

 

 

 

 

 

There’s a small trend in the works.  People are daring to recast popular shows on TV.   In the image above, Entertainment Weekly dares imagine the new detectives for True Detective.  Here Ryan Gosling and Denzel Washington are proposed as replacements for Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey.  (Apparently, HBO and or Nic Pizzolatto had always planned a modular approach for the starring roles.)

Digital Spy undertook the same recasting, proposing Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart as the new True Detectives.  This would count as irresistible TV, in an era of irresistible TV.

Grantland took the thing a step further, proposing a fantasy league for Hollywood.

Ember

 

 

 
There is a quite wonderful book called Culturematic that suggests a way to recast NCIS.

recasting NCIS

 

 

 

 

 

The idea is everywhere.  Ok, not everywhere, but this is a gusty little trend breezing its way through contemporary culture.

This shows a new order of participation in culture.  It’s hard to imagine this sort of thing happening in the 1950s when people took what TV deigned to give them and were grateful for it too.

But people now new and deeper knowledge of popular culture and they are eager to use this knowledge.  Exactly this sort of thing happened in the case of professional sports.  The inventors of Fantasy Football believed that only sports journalists would want to participate.  What they didn’t see was that sports fans had read so much sports journalism, that they too were itching and able to participate.

This relates I think to yesterday’s post on Pharrell’s Happy video where I suggested that crowd sourcing talent is not always successful.  But here when we ask people to engage not as actors but as critics that the chances of success go up.  Its as producers and directors that we are most interesting, productive, and engaging. 

We should also observe the presumption at work here.  One of the reasons that viewers in the 50s wouldn’t engage this way is that it was presumptuous to do so.   Creative decisions were things made by experts in big cities, people and worlds away from their own.

But now we are, to use the Tudor phrase, “over mighty subjects.”  We take for granted our  right to second-guess creative decisions.   Our knowledge of culture is not passive but active.  This means that even as we consume culture, we expect to produce it.  If only in our heads. If only in the conversation we have with friends and family.   Anyone who finds a way to engage us in this way (we shall keep an eye on Grantland’s fantasy league) is creating value for us and value for themselves.  (Thus do anthropology and economics intersect.)

Flash Lit at the Boston Book Festival (secret document released)

FlashLit from the Boston Book Festival | IndiegogoI’ve been trying to raise money for the Boston Book Festival, specifically a project called Flash Lit.

Apparently, I’m not good at this.

I present for your delectation and criticism the document I send to several people in the marketing world.

You, reader, have several assignments.

1) Please let me know what I did wrong with this pitch.

2) If you like the sound of this project, please come make a contribution at Indiegogo.

 

Dear Eric,

I am on the Visioning Board of the Boston Book Festival, and they are working on a project I’d like you to participate in.  I think there is a marketing/sponsorship opportunity here, but see what you think.

The Boston Book Festival (BBF) is calling the project Guerrilla Storytelling Flash Lit.  To celebrate the Festival (in October), BBF wants to send actors into Boston bars undercover.  The idea is that the actors will be indistinguishable at first from every other patron at the bar, but eventually two actors will raise their voices ever so gradually as they play out a famous scene from a novel, play or movie.  Eventually, their voices will subside and things will return to normal.

It’s a little like a smart mob, only more literary, or at least more talkative.

The idea is to win exposure for the Festival, to make literary creativity visible outside the halls of the Festival, in a sense to return some of the creativity invented in bars to the place they got started.

The Festival will use several bars, some upscale and downtown, others downscale and around town.

I think this event works best as a subtle marketing play for the Boston Book Festival and its sponsors.  The idea is to make the event come and go like a mirage.  So no big posters or public declarations.  Everything works by word of mouth.  People planted in the crowd and the bartender will be standing by to help explain that they think “this has something to do with the Boston Book Festival and [sponsor’s name here].”

I like the guerrilla storytelling Flash Lit project for a lot of reasons.  It’s is a pretty spectacular reinvention of the commercial message, and a dandy way for a brand to enter the life of the consumer.  It helps “re-enchant the world” to use Max Weber’s language.  It’s an exercise in “experiential marketing” to use Joseph Pine’s phrase.  It is a way to generate word of mouth and to participation in the new “conversation” that is marketing (Cluetrain Manifesto).  It’s also a chance for the brand to be part of the new great wave of interest in storytelling that we’re seeing everywhere in the marketing world. In short, Guerrilla Storytelling Flash Lit feels like an opp with some oomph. It’s a way to make the brand vivid in the life of the consumer and the culture.

Our assumption here is that everyone who has been present for one of these events will have to talk about it.  And tell their friends.  Finally a meme that really does act like a virus! The less the event is explained, the more speculation will follow.  The more eager will be the buzz.

Given its breadth and sophistication, it feels like [Eric’s firm] is a natural partner for this experiment.   And I wanted to see if indeed you think [Eric’s firm] might want a first crack at sponsorship.)

There are three faces to the value being created here.

First, this investment can be justified and perhaps written off as a philanthropic gesture.

Second, it can be justified for the publicity. (Details below.)

Third, this is marketing history in the making. (I will be in place over the week the storytelling happens, in as many of the venues as I can get to, and I am happy to write this up the experiment, gratis.  If you can make it to Boston, we can do this work together)

I believe this is one of the futures of branding.   I think we can imagine a time when spirits brands routinely sponsor public events of this kind, bring new life to pubs and bars, a new heightened expectation of “what’s going to happen tonight.”  Spirits have been selling the “excitement,” “enchantment,” “magic” of night life for a very long time.  This reactivates and reinvents the claim.

I think there is a big “first mover” advantage to be had here for the brand that sponsors this event.  To be a partner in the birth of this kind of marketing, to get the early learnings, to stake out this ground, must I think deliver big benefits.

Three questions:

1.  What are your thoughts on the project?

2.  Do you think [your firm] might want to be involved?

3.  To whom should I direct the pitch?

The participation fee is  modest, around $30,000.

Anyhow, I would love to hear your thoughts and if you think [your firm] might be interested, I’d be grateful for the name of the person I can pitch.

Thanks!

Grant

Post scripts:

A description of the Boston Book Festival

The Boston Book Festival celebrates the power of words to stimulate, agitate, unite, delight and inspire. In 2012, the Boston Book Festival brought over 25,000 people to Copley Square to enjoy a day packed with presentations by such luminaries as the Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel, Pulitzer Prize winners Junot Diaz and Richard Ford, and nearly 150 other world-renowned authors and thought leaders as well as a street fair, live music, workshops, open mic, Writer Idol, and kids’ sessions and activities.  Publishers Weekly called the Boston Book Festival “one of the best in the country” after its second year.

A description of additional benefits of sponsorship.

ON-SITE PRESENCE

• Full-page ad in 10,000 Festival Program Guides

ADVERTISING

• Logo on all print advertisements (2 million+ reach)

• Logo on 200 MBTA subway cards

• Logo on 10 MBTA subway platform posters

• Acknowledgment in 8–10 radio spots on WBUR

• Acknowledgment in 8–10 radio spots on WBZ, WODS, WBMX

LOGO PLACEMENT/NAME MENTIONS

• Logo on 10’ x 14’ banner on façade of Boston Public Library

• Logo and link placement on BBF homepage (54,000 visitors in October 2012)

• Logo featured on 1000 promotional posters distributed throughout New England

• Name mention in all BBF-generated press releases and wherever sponsored events are listed

SOCIAL MEDIA

• Name/website link on 4 email blasts to BBF list (5,000+ members)

• 6 tweets to our 6500 followers with name mentions and 2 day-of tweets driving traffic to booth

• 2 Facebook posts with name mention

HOSPITALITY

• 12 invitations to exclusive cocktail party with BBF authors/presenters Friday night before BBF

• 4 VIP All-Day Access Passes (preferred seating at all events, all day long)

• 6 VIP Single Event Passes (preferred seating at one event)

Acknowledgments

Daniel Jones of the Boston Book Festival is the creator of Flash Lit and the Indiegogo website.  The image I have used above is taken from the video on the Indiegogo website and shows Adrienne Chamberlin.  This video was created by  John Lavall and Kate Kelley of Delvo Media.  Thanks to Shanae Burch and Tyler Catanella for their performance of a passage from Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway

A secret artist in our midst

I live in a little Connecticut town called Rowayton.  We were briefly the Oyster capital of the world.  We also played midwife to the first business computer.

But nothing much has happened in the last 50 years.  

Until now.  

We have a talent in our midst. And that talent is turning our train station into an art gallery.  

Here’s what I found a couple of days ago while waiting for my train to NYC.

Here’s a closer view.

It’s corny to say so, but it made me think of this Da Vinci self portrait.

I don’t know if these photos tell the story, but this image has been placed on the platform by a process of dripping / pouring that deprives the artist of absolute control.  Its a technique that forces a loose hand working in a single session.  Virtuosity gives vivacity. The face that comes up out of concrete (of all things).  A knowing, unforgiving, bird-of-prey gaze.  

And it commandeers a handy thought bubble: “mind the gap.”  What, you mean the artistic life of little Rowayton?  Consider it minded!  Occupied and then some.  

Several months ago, when the dreadful Donald Trump was everywhere on screen and in print.  This image appeared on an ad in the station.  

The artist removed Trump’s photographed face and inserted a Dorian Gray revelation of the man within.  Porcine Donald.  And what a pig he is.  

Someone with artistic detective skills might be able to determine whether Mind the Gap comes from the same hand as Dorian Donald.  And, as you can guess, I am really hoping it does.  And not just because it would be wonderful to think that someone has turned our train station into an art gallery.  

It’s all very Culturematic so naturally I’m thrilled.  But, look, I’d be thrilled in any case.  I spend some part of the spring talking to Peter Spear and Rainer Judd about a project that would encourage the eruption of art in small town America and here someone drops this under my very nose.   

It is a Culturematic because it converts a train station into an art gallery.  Culturematics are almost always opportunistic and cunning in this way.  But it also turns our train system, Metro North, into a delivery system for art lovers everywhere.  As long as someone can find the line, they can count on effortless and precise delivery!  

Let me know you’re coming and I will put on my docent costume and meet you there. Gallery station memberships are reasonable so don’t forget your credit card!

Automated anthropologist (some thoughts)

Roughly a week has passed since my experiment in San Francisco and some thoughts are in order.

For those who are new to the enterprise: On July 16, I installed myself in SF and invited people to send me instructions via Twitter.  I promised to do pretty much anything people asked me to do.  

It was a disaster.  And not in an interesting way.  But in a “how could he get this so wrong” way.  

My plan was to be truly automated, to do in real time whatever I was instructed to do.  If someone said, “turn right” that was what I wanted to do, assuming that it did not put me in the path of an oncoming trolley.  If someone said, “burst into tears and wait for someone to come to your aid” I intended to do that too.  (More on motives and objectives in a moment.)

I failed at the automated thing.  The fact of the matter is I’m a nervous nelly.  So I cheated. I took assignments sent me by email with me into the day.  And then I asked my assistant Maria to decide which of the tweets received we would act on.  (Maria Elmqvist is just graduating from the Academy of Art University.  I had written to Cameron Maddux there to see if he knew of a student who could help out.  Maria volunteered).  This too destroyed the randomizing quality of the undertaking.  (Again, more on the point in a moment.)

In the press of the moment, old habits prevailed.  I have done a lot of ethnographic interviews in the street.  And before I knew it, I was interviewing people.  This created some interesting moments as when it become clear that a would-be respondent had just told me indirectly ‘to fuck you and leave me alone.’  Then the media found us, and that lead us to Jonathan Bloom, a really interesting guy who works for ABC7 in San Francisco.  We started chatting and it turns out that Bloom is helping reinvent the world of TV journalism and I wanted to find out more about that.  Then he started driving us from place to place.  And by this time, my head was spinning and I was thinking, “So why did I decide to do this, again?”

So why did I decide to do this?

First, Automatic anthropologist was a culturematic and every culturematic is a hack of culture.  It creates an event designed to engage, provoke, reveal culture.  

In this case, turning yourself over to the direction of other people might be expected to raise questions about agency and autonomy.FN1  Specifically, “Who’s in charge?”  And “How can someone surrender control of the self to other parties?” 

The Automated anthropologist was designed in haste.  Suddenly, I had a free day in SF and I thought, “now what?”  I am just finishing a project for the Ford Foundation in which the question of individualism surfaces almost constantly.  So I was thinking about autonomy and what it is to be a free standing individual.

As Americans we are deeply devoted to the idea that we are in charge.  We make choices. We craft lives.  We are self inventing.  The idea of voluntarily giving up this agency and autonomy strikes us as odd. (And to the media, it turns out, irresistible.) Outside of S&M dungeons and other romantic encounters, giving up control is actually unamerican.  We define ourselves by the idea that we are self defining.  

The fact of the matter is we are only partly choosing, in charge and self inventing.  We are deeply constrained and defined by social rules, cultural meanings, political forces and economic realities. I don’t make too much of this.  I am not one of those social scientists who think that because we are sometimes determined by forces outside ourselves, we are wholly defined by them.  Choice makes an extraordinary role in American life. But there are moments, ghoulish, quite scary moments, when we glimpse the limits of our autonomy and I wonder if the automated anthropologist could become one of these.

More simply, I think some people heard about the automatic anthropologist and thought, “Great.  A monkey on a string!”  It was as if they had wandered by and discovered that someone had left the door to selfhood wide open, with the keys still in the ignition!  And they had an “evil genius” moment.  

“Ah ha!  My agency will inhabit his agency.  I will make him do things that embarrass him.  I will force him to hold himself up to ridicule.  Finally, my chance to play the puppet master!” Americans are deeply opportunistic (I mean this in the technical sense) and this looked like one hell of an opportunity.    

A higher objective of the undertaking was magic.  Culturematics at their best have a way of “reenchanting the world,” to use Max Weber’s phrase. In place of the rational, the routine and the routinized, they are designed as a way to make something wonderful happen. This is what I’d been hoping for.

Perhaps the most compelling objective of the exercise was novelty, creativity, innovation, to pile up the words we use so often these days.  One of the paths to innovation is randomness.  And we see a passion for this these days in our passion for improv and experiment.  And the Automated Anthropologist looked like a way to use randomness to march me out of the world I knew into a world I didn’t.  We are self defining.  We are captives of our own little gravitational fields.  

These fields are the proverbial “boxes” we are always claiming to be trying to get out of, but it’s hard.  Many of our choices have hardened into habits.  It is very hard to escape ourselves and I thought that automation and the real time feel of advice from others might walk me straight out of the world I construct for myself into something new.  (We talk grandly and often about empathy, but this is, in my opinion, merely a matter of letting difference into consciousness on a day pass with an armed guard.  The chance of assumption-rocking transformation is remote.)  

The learning, then, is clear.  If you are going to do an event like this, you have to be scrupulous and disciplined.  You have to stick to the plan.  And you have to follow it wherever it takes you.  No cheating.  And that means you can’t do any of your own documentation. Leave that to someone else.  Your job is to be completely automated…by others…all the time.  

The learning may also be “don’t sent a nervous nelly on a mission like this.”  Or maybe that’s just a note of personal criticism.  

A note of thanks.

Sometime in the 1990s, while living in the Danforth neighborhood in Toronto, on Saturday mornings, I would wander up the record store near the Danforth subway station and fell into conversation with Dave Dyment there who introduced me to the art of the Fluxus movement and Yves Klein (see Leap, pictured).  I would not have undertaken the Automated Anthropologist without this instruction.  

Footnote

FN1. Cliche alert. I blanche a little when I write this. How many exhibit catalogues have told us that the artist is “dealing with the whole question of agency.”  (Plug “whole question of agency” into Google to see what I mean.)  This has become a kind of boilerplate, the thing curators says about art without saying anything more about the topic, thus betraying reflexive behavior at the moment they wish to be critical.  With some powerful exceptions of course.  

References

For the Storify summary of the event, have a look here.  

For the book from which the project stems, have a look here.  

The Automated Anthropologist (details here)

Today, Tuesday, July 16th, I will be in SF doing what every people tell me to do.  It’s an experiment, a culturematic.  

Starting at 9:00 West coast time, I will be in Union Square ready to act on your directives.

Please send those directives to @grant27 on Twitter, with #autoanthro as your hashtag.

In between acting on real-time directives, I will try to act on the suggestions you have sent over the last couple of days. Thank you for those!

You can follow the events of the day by searching for #autoanthro on Twitter. (I like Tweetdeck as a way of keeping track of my Twitter searches.)

We will take photos and video and post the former on Twitter and the latter on YouTube. (Thanks for the suggestion, Kate Hammer.)

We will post our location in SF using Glimpse with links announced by Twitter.

For those who miss events tomorrow, I will post a compilation on Storify in a week or so.

USA Today has given us early coverage (for which many thanks, Bruce Horovitz!).  You can find the details here.  

Thanks to the help of Cameron Maddox of the Academy of Art University’s School of Advertising I will have the assistance of a recent graduate, Maria Elmqvist. Thanks, Cameron and Maria!

Thanks to everyone for their support.

Best,

Grant

For background, here’s the email that first announced the project a couple of days ago.  

Over the course of Tuesday, July 16, I will do whatever you tell me to do. Assuming of course that it is within the bounds of legality and morality(ish).

I am going to San Francisco this week.

I am giving a talk on Monday and come back to NYC on Wednesday.

That leaves the whole of Tuesday to …

Well, that’s the question, what do I do on Tuesday? (I should have booked a get-together, but things got busy and I never got around to it. Apologies to friends in SF, Eric and Ed especially.)

So this is my plan.

To put myself on automatic pilot.

Over the course of Tuesday, I will do whatever you tell me to do. Assuming of course that it is within the bounds of legality and mortality(ish).

Please tweet your instructions to @grant27 on Tuesday over the course of the day.

I will tweet the results, text and photos, with the hashtag #autoanthro.

I haven’t quite figured out how best to capture and sequence the requests you send me. And I can’t promise to do everything that is proposed. But I’ll try. I will.

Feel free to embarrass me. I believe myself to be one ill-chosen word away from social catastrophe in any case.

But the real object is ingenuity. What effects can you set in train in an American city by directing an anthropologist on automatic pilot. Think of it as a rolling Rube Goldberg event. Small events and larger narrative arcs are both welcome. (Everything from “Turn right.” to “Find someone to tell you the story of [x].”)

If the Twitter feed stops suddenly or you never hear from me again, well, we’ll call it a long term culturematic.

Thanks for reading and thanks for any directions you send me on Tuesday! Grant

Wok+Wine, eating as a sociological activity

You are up to your elbows in jumbo shrimp. You’re shelling and that makes a mess. You’re eating with your hands, and that really makes a mess. You are surrounded by people you don’t know, talking about stuff you don’t always grasp. “What,” asks a voice in your head, “am I doing here?”

Wok+Wine is an experiment in social chemistry. Peter Mandeno, one of the founders, wanted to see what would happen if he brought together people with diverse perspectives and divergent interests. What would happen, he asked, if you put a VC, a material scientist, a fashion designer, a teacher, and an author at the same table.

Good things, apparently.

Please come to HBR for the rest of this post.  Click here. 

Jump Ship Rat and other great moments in metaphor

I’m reading a book called Cultural Hijack: Rethinking Intervention and on page 282 I found this poem in which a group of artists compare their organization to the rat. 

I reproduce it here without permission. Because it is so very, very brilliant, and your introduction to Jump Ship Rat, their work, and the book in question.

Jump Ship Rat
ability to move in any direction
with speed and agility
and fit through the narrowest of entrance/exit points
or to make them appear
ability to recognize when the ship you’re on is in trouble
to survive
to be held in wildly different regard
to be vilified
to be used to understand the human condition
to be able to startle human senses
to be open to misinterpretation
to be clearly recognized and understood
to have power and strength in numbers
to make a distinctive noise
to be heard
to be part of the night
daytime appearances to be committed to memory
public consciousness to be affected
to become immune to poison
to survive many efforts to be eradicated
to be mythologized
and exaggerated
made folklore
warning to society
pied piper is Santa Claus
occupation of disused spaces
unswerving pursuit of life
celebrating what others disregard
living in slums and palaces
the underground home
great fucking tunes
social shifts
cultural exchange
time changes
mean time
jump ship rat
JUMP SHIP RAT
JUMP SHIP RAT
JUMP SHIP RAT

For more on this group, see their website here.  

To order the book (and you should), see the Amazon page for same here.

My Culturematic talk given at TEDxHarlem

Here’s my TEDxHarlem presentation.  I talk about the state of cultural innovation, how its changing and how Culturematics are one way to do this innovation now.  

CLICK HERE.

 

Fed Ex as a game engine

This is the delivery schedule I got this morning from Amazon.  I’m waiting for a pair of headphones.  As you can see, these are “out for delivery” and should arrive today.

I looked at this and thought, “but surely there’s a game waiting to happen here.”  It would take a detailed knowledge of Amazon delivery routes and membership in Amazon’s “free delivery” club, but it should be possible to game the system.  (I should leave this to the likes of Kevin Slavin and Jamin Warren, but lets see how far I can get on my own.)

Using FedEx as a game engine opens several possibilities.  For instance, we would see how close we could come to making two packages pass in transit.  Could we make two packages run through Maspeth, New York at the same time?

Here’s what we know:

1) The system is out there and moving packages in any case.

2) We can discover where a package was at any given moment.

3) We can use this data to work the delivery system.

4) This mechanical system could be used for some other purpose.  We can set objectives and competitions.  

This is a culturematic in the spirit of Bill Winkenbach’s Fantasy sports invention.  Bill said, look, the NFL throws off all this data.  Let’s use it for another purpose.  Let’s use to create an alternate sports reality.  

So working the system as a system is really just the beginning.  We could treat packages as game pieces on a chess board.  We could treat them as balls in a pinball machine.  We could set up one of those flash boards that pinball machines have and run up numbers as someone succeeds in sending a package to Maspeth, then Hartford.  Oh, damn, he missed Stratford!

FedEx as a game engine.  That’s the idea, I think.  

Making a culturematic of yourself (the Nick Sherrard way)

Everyone constructs an identity on line.  

Some do it with wit and panache.  

Others, mea culpa, are more plodding and less interesting.

This morning I laughed out loud when I read Nick Sherrard’s description of himself on Twitter.

Note: CCTV refers to the system of cameras that blankets the UK.   We see Nick standing one of the few places in Britain that does not appear on CCTV, aka the moral high ground (at sea level).  

(Post script: thanks to Barbara Monteiro, Connie Perry, and Sarah Fogarty for a great conversation yesterday.)