Daily EM

Wow, that was a very idea-intense presentation, jumping from women rights to colony collapse disorder in one breadth, so don’t blame my notes – the pace was really very fast-moving!

So Tiffany Shlain, the famous film-maker and the founder of Webby Awards, is the second speaker on Day 2 here at the Idea Festival in Louisville.

Shlain starts by thanking the organizers. Her first time in Louisville, her first time in KY. Fires up her presentation on a Mac. Very friendly and the audience seems like her.

“A Declaration of Interdependence” is the name of her talk as well as her new movie. She has a picture of the founding fathers as her title slide.

She says that the 21^st century is going to be about linking the dots, and discovering the multitude of ways in which we are interdependent. Understanding how things that happen on one part of the world affect what happens on the other side interests her a lot.

Thanks to the Internet, we get a better understanding of our interdependence. She has high hopes for the Internet’s power to improve our understanding of these complex processes. She is interested in how our actions affect everything else.

She says she’s been fascinated with links and connections, she sees them as bridges between ideas ad people. The new film she’s going to tell us about has one of the links to the disappearance to the honey bees. She asks about how many people followed that story – many people in the audience raise their hands.

In her movies, she’s usually looking at travel, China, toxins, crime, terrorism, our obsession with youth, reproduction rights, and a host of other issues. The new film will tie those ideas together; she shows a really complex graph of interdependence, which reminds me of some of the graphs I’ve seen which traced the linking patterns between red and blue blogs.

She proceeds to say that her talk is going to have five parts

1. Her background

2. A short film

3. Topics she explores in the new film

4. The creative processing

5. Q&A

Tiffany’s background: she’s from Bay Area/SF. She says there is an IdeaFestival every day there. She had a very good time with her father, who gave a talk at Idea festival last year and who is very keen on experiments. She’s always been interested in technology. She says that technology is just a tool to make you do things quicker and better. He favorite tool is actually a pencil. We shouldn’t think about technologies as some distant thing, ti’s sometimes we use every day. She shows her first Apple and says she was really fascinated with it, before the Internet was really around. Tiffany is a Russian Jew from Russia, very fascinated with it, despite many family prohibitions.

Tiffany wrote a paper in 1988 with a colleague from Iran called “UN in telecommunications and software”, — sounds pretty much blogging of the early age. She was invited to be a student ambassador in the Soviet Union and talk about technology, which was a very interesting experience (students in schools had no of the fancy tools she wanted to talk about). Went on to Berkeley to study film and then start making movies about it.

In the early 1990s, she started working in the CD-Rom business, which was really cutting-edge then (producing a CD-Rom for Sting was one of the projects). In 1994 she saw the Web and realized it’s going to change everything. She then started working for a computer magazine and founded Webby awards. Talks about her experiences giving Webby awards, which was as mall alternative thing, which changed a lot after Internet grew bigger.

She started a good rule at Webby’s (five-word-or-less). Even Al Gore said just five words: don’t recount this vote.

She became really interested in exploring why do we need to be so connected. She mentions a restaurant in New York which has a phone booth to make/receive calls; it seems that we are rediscovering old ways of dealing with technology. Shlain points to the need to have boundaries in how you use technology – she doesn’t use computers at week-ends. She gives an example of her friend who emailed a guy and said she loved him, cc’ing his family and bcc’ing his two ex-girlfriends. Things have changed a bit, says Shlain, smiling.

Her first film outside the Webby’s was about reproductive rights for women and she produced it in 2000. Film came with activist toolkit and web-site used to engage the next generation. So she realized she can combine the Internet and her love for film-making.

Soon after she got pregnant and started wrestling with her identity problems (being a Russian Jew, the Holocaust, etc). So her exploration used Barbie girl to explore it (her first collaboration with her husband) and formed the crux of her Barbie movie. There is an interesting connection between Barbie and the Jews that Shlain explores in it.

For the following 15 min we watch the movie, interrupted by many laughs.

After the movie is over, she comments on how similar her documentary is to the Internet, with links to ideas and images (it really is– I felt like I was browsing, not watching a movie, at some point). Her background is in experimental film, so it’s a lot of new and innovative ways to work with archives. Shlain’s rhythm is influenced by the Internet (it’s really a good movie for ADD audience, I think).

She looks at everything that has been created as her palette. She doesn’t need to go spend long time in the archives now, it’s all on the Internet.

She talks about new forms of distribution hat have been facilitated by the Internet. Her films are discussion-triggers; film is just an appetizer, the discussion that follows online and offline is really what matters most – it’s the real main course.

Social networking around movies is also something that Shlain thinks a lot about. She releasing her new film on Itunes, for example. Together with her husband, she had set up the Moxi Institute, which, she hopes, will provoke discussion in the 21^st century.

She shows a sketch of how her film looks like on scratch paper, with many arrows linking to each other. It looks like a hand-drawn MindMap or a map of the blogosphere. Next she shows a MindMap she drew in Inspiration, an old software program.

The honey bee is an anchor that takes into her new movie, where she explores colony collapse disorder (those who haven’t followed the story, 25% of honeybee population is disappearing; for a good background article on this, see this piece in the New Yorker). The reason why she Shlain is so interested in honey bees is because it allows her to explore a multitude of topics: from environment to global economy, from women’s rights to technology, from advancement of society to Einstein. Always good to end Einstein, says Shlain, as he said many smrt things, including those about bees. “No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man”.

What’s relevant and what’s not in the age of Google is a tangential topic that Shlain asks us to explore.

Suddently, Shlains turns to a new topic. The second largest export from LA by FedEx is sperm and eggs. This allows Shlain to explore so many topics: entertainment, beauty, genetics, reproduction, commerce trade, etc.

Another topic Shlain draws on is the link between beuaty and youth (she wonders why so many girls in fashion magazines are so young), which brings her to botox, which she compares to bees’ stings. She asks, what’s better: to have botox or to wear burkas. Funnily, she also finds the similarity between a burka and a beekeeper outfit. It’s a true tour-de-force of creative thought on stage now.

She shows a slide of Mercury – who was god of spped and commerce – and compares that to the Internet. Poetically, he also says that Mercury is also a metal which poisons us. That’s an interesting take on how Internet is poisoning us– Andrew Keen should take note – that was a very good metaphor (unlike most of his).

She shows a picture of 2 million plastic bottles (the number used in the US used every five minutes). But she also points that there are hazardous health effects from those plastic bottles (they have a damaging effect on the quality of sperm). One can see where she’s going with the bees idea.

She’s wondering what’s happening to the ecosystem (particularly, fish) with so many of us flushing their pills down the toilet.

Then she proceeds to discussing crime and mentions “Freakonomics”, and the crime reduction example that was mentioned there (the impact of Roe v Wade on women’s rights and hence on crime). Then she briefly ventures into eugenics and how it differs from genetics. She points to the explosion of in vitro reproduction and the sudden appearance of many twincs in the Bay Area (she wonders what the social ramifications of this would be).

She then talks about the impact of China’s one-child policy as many children were boys and the girls were put up for adoption, mostly abroad. What’s the impact of having so many men in China?

She shows an image of a woman impregnated with planet Earth. Shlain’s objective is to show how much interdependence is there between all the social processes happening on our planet. She also has many new ideas on how to solicit feedback from other film-makers, so one may expect a healthy among of collaboration and remixing.

She now gives a tour of the mind-mapping software that she is using– a 3D program that allows her to navigate and move the links in 3D. Something is wrong with the projector, so she gives up and she’s out of time anyway. The End.