bibliostructures

Earthrise by Apollo 8 astronauts

The first sample bibliostructure I’m creating is a manifesto as much as an example of new binding techniques I’ve developed. It has at its heart an extension of the conversation on mythology between Joseph Campbell - who’d devoted his life to studying how myths connected up between cultures and across time - and the journalist Bill Moyers. Campbell died a few months after recording the final conversation and the series, The Power of Myth, was shown on public television in America in 1988. It caught at a public hunger for a sense of ballast in a time of great social and technological upheaval.

Joseph Campbell pointed out that the horizon for mythology had expanded with the photographs of the earth taken from the moon’s orbit by the Apollo 8 astronauts in 1968. We were able to see how all life was interconnected and none of the things that divide us, on the planet’s surface, are visible. What we need now is a mythology for the whole planet, Campbell said. The details would be different in each region but the substance would be the same at a planetary level.

We now have, in our mobile phones, communications tools that emerged from these space missions. The satellite mapping and imaging systems, and voice and image telephony systems in mobile phones are descendants of the systems that were created to stay in touch with the equipment and astronauts on the Mercury and Apollo missions. The perspective of our age is being able to “zoom” between the image of our earth and the details of what we see around us in our daily lives, we fluidly shift between these “scales of experience” the writer Steven Johnson has observed. His publishing platform, Outside.in is a conceptually powerful site that geotags posts from individual bloggers all the way up to large media organisations like the New York Times. Readers gather information through a radar, first looking at the information just around them, then in their neighbourhood, their city, then everywhere else. If the Power of Myth were being made today it might be called “The Fifth Level of Zoom”, where the information has expanded out into the spiritual realm.

While humans were boldly going into space, Dr Robert Ballard was creating a great age of exploration in our planet’s oceans, finding life at the edge of the geothermal vents that might explain how life developed on our planet, geological evidence of a great flood that may have inspired the Noah’s ark story, and the wreck of the Titanic, which highlights the twentieth century’s doomed absolute faith in technology. He was also using remote imaging and communications to extend his reach into areas that humans physically can’t go in the ocean’s depths. He’s now widened the capacities of his exploration equipment so that schoolchildren can go on missions, from their classrooms.

Ken Goldberg is an engineer and artist whose projects were the first telerobotic art installations on the internet, using the concept of telepresence, to question knowledge and social interactions if they happen at a distance. He set the tone with his early Telegarden, which was a garden plot tended by a robot arm controlled by individuals all over the world that became a true community garden. He is now the Director of Berkeley’s New Media Centre. Its mission is: “To understand what is new about each new media from cross-disciplinary and global perspectives that emphasize humanities and the public interest.”

We are in a new age philosophically, but more importantly, geologically. Scientists have found evidence that the activities of mankind are driving changes in nature, in the weather patterns, geological features and in the way animal populations develop. We are officially in the anthropocene era. My grand vision is to bring together Steven Johnson (in the Bill Moyers role of questioner) and Ken Goldberg and Robert Ballard, who frame their explorations with touchstones and references from all periods of mythology. (Robert Ballard explicitly sees his explorations as extensions of the heroes journeys mapped by Joseph Campbell). They would speak, over dinner, at the Australian Museum in Sydney, at a table near a model of the Thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger). Lately the Thylacine has become a symbol of the plight of vanishing species. It became extinct in the early part of the twentieth century but has caught the popular imagination: the model’s nose has been patted so much it’s denuded of the synthetic fur in the way that Cary Grant’s footprints at the Graumann’s Chinese Theatre have been worn away. The projects of Robert Ballard, Ken Goldberg and Steven Johnson catch at how something crucial is slipping away from us, and use their tools to allow us to synthesise many strands of information across cultures and disciplines and through time. The bibliostructure will be a snap-together hardcover transcript of the conversation (which I’m creating, as a draft, from interviews that all three have given that are available over the internet.)

Ken Goldberg gave a lecture recently at MIT’s Media Lab, whose research projects in the 1970’s gave us some of the important features that now allow us to use computers and the internet easily and intuitively.  Ken’s lecture focuses on how thinking about humans use technology leads back to having a better understanding and connection to the natural world. “Ken Goldberg will present the manifesto of the Berkeley Center for new media and propose a controversial definition of ‘media.’” MIT said. “He’ll then report on experiments and questions raised by robots and social networks, ranging from ouija boards to human “tele-actors,” and tell a true story about how invasions of privacy led him and his students to study how robots can assist in monitoring the natural environment. He will describe a robotic system they have deployed to assist the search for the ivory billed woodpecker, a bird of extreme interest to birdwatchers, ornithologists, and conservationists whose last confirmed sighting was in 1944.”

Right now we’re dreaming of ways to use our technology to focus back on life, to heal the planet and save its creatures along with ourselves. That we have the curiosity and will to explore and the intellectual rigour to appreciate what we’re finding, is crucial. “I was a graduate student and K. O. Emery, my mentor, had me present to this august body. Very scary. My knees were knocking”, Robert Ballard has said. “These were all the big gods of the earth. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Princeton, but they have the old classrooms that are just like an operating pit. You stand there and you look up, and it’s sort of intimidating. I got done and a very preeminent scientist — I won’t say who he is, because he is still very preeminent — stood up and said, “That’s cute, but tell me one significant thing a manned submersible has ever done.” We hadn’t. I didn’t have an answer. I was standing there frozen, and another colleague stood up, and he said “That isn’t the problem. The technology is not at fault; we haven’t dreamed of a way of using them.” Out of that came Project Famous, and the first manned expedition.”

It might seem like a crazy time for me to re-launch a company making physical books that exist in the boundary where abstraction meets materiality, but many of the great social inflections of innovations in the technologies and companies that are successful today were created at the end of the dot.com boom. And now, as venture capitalists Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham have noted recently, the flow of innovation has reversed, from the consumer up to corporations. “At some point, I said that the vector of innovation has changed,” Brad Burnham said. “It used to be that innovation started with NASA, flowed to the military, then to the enterprise, and finally to the consumer. Today, it is the reverse. All of the most interesting stuff is being built first for consumers and is tricking back to the enterprise. I suggested that one reason this is happening is that the success of a web service is more often determined by its social engineering than its electrical engineering.”

I can now make small projects that include technology that are practical and usable immediately rather than theoretical case studies. And an individual like me now has access to the way venture capitalists are assessing what went wrong with today’s market and how strong companies can be created in these bleak times. Fred Wilson inserted this presentation from Sequoia Capital on his blog.

This bibliostructure also has a soundtrack, the Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album Nocturama.These are powerful love songs concerned with the enduring value of family and strengthening love by facing mistakes and old demons and celebrating flaws. The song Nocturama raises the question about the natural world but it remains a question. The song was left off the album and appears on the Bad Seeds B Sides and Rareties set. The album concludes with a song that features all the humans and creatures in the world walking together, aflame with the love of God in their hearts. It was recorded in 2002 and when Cormac McCarthy's The Road was released a couple of years later its message of humanity being carried forward through acts of love and self-sacrifice in extremely bleak times, brought Nocturama to mind for me. Nick and Warren Ellis are writing the soundtrack for John Hillcoat's movie adaptation of The Road.

"There's an interesting thing happening in films," Nick said recently in an interview in San Francisco. "There's a whole rash of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic films and with each one they seem to be less science fiction and more just a kind of numb reality. And this particular film, The Road, is incredibly moving and it's moving because it's showing what happened afterwards, it's a father and son walking through this blasted landscape, and the boy was born after the apocalypse and he's never seen anything else, and occasionally, very occasionally, through the film the man remembers life before this thing - you don't even know what it was - and you see the world the way it is now, in all its color, and everything's just covered in ash in the film, and it's heartbreaking. It's heartbreaking to know what we actually have and how we really are prepared to just fritter it away. It's a most beautiful film not only because of this relationship between the father and the son, but because the power this film has to say what we're actually sacrificing, in the different things we're pursuing in this world, we're sacrificing color."   

I'm writing a small appreciation of Nocturama for the sample bibliostructure but the music will also be available in the book. A radio tag, an infrared tag, perhaps even a simple scratch off redemption code for i-Tunes will be pasted into the text. But when these bibliostructures are in production the tag will be able to be detected by an iphone/ipod which will launch itunes and the playlist that goes with the book. 

Joseph Campbell's conversations were peppered with quotations from the writers who shaped his age: T. S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and also the writings of Freud, Jung and Schopenhauer. He made reference to the music of Beatles and the "Star Wars" movies by George Lucas. It's artists who keep the great human stories alive by retelling them in their time, in a context that brings them alive in way that's newly relevant, Campbell said. Nick Cave's extensive projects are vessels for mythology in our time, and Nocturama is a sweet celebration of the enduring power of love and compassion. It's undervalued and unappreciated but its calmness and hard-won peace-of-mind are a tonic for these uncertain times. We face problems honestly and triumph by joining together to solve them. When Astor Piazzolla released an album that critics found difficult to appreciate he said that he was proud of it, that this was the album that he'd give to his grandchildren to explain to them what he creates. Nocturama, similarly, is something Nick might consider an heirloom.