One Day On Earth: A Timecapsule of Humanity

How to become a pixel in the collaborative portrait of the world.

In every moment, billions of human lives around the world are unfolding in vastly different ways, filling the space-time continuum with a myriad of experiences, with great loves and great losses, with triumphs and tragedies, with conflict and compassion, with unremarkable mundanity seen through a remarkably rich array of lenses. One Day On Earth is a new multi-platform participatory media project rallying documentary filmmakers, students and ordinary citizens around the world to capture 24 hours in the life of the planet.

On October 10 this year — 10.10.10 — people in every single country across the globe will record footage telling their stories and peeling away at their lives, which will then be collaged into a two-hour feature-length documentary to be released theatrically.

To become a part of this micro-timecapsule of humanity, sign up to participate in the project and take a peek at many who have already joined around the world.

Besides being a brave experiment in collaborative storytelling, the project is a bold effort to find out who we are, as a culture and a civilization, and what we stand for in the grand scheme of human existence. Will we like what we see?

via GOOD

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

The Genius of Design: A BBC Design Retrospective

What plastic chairs have to do with German partisanship and how women use the kitchen.

UPDATE: Unfortunately, the films have been pulled from Vimeo. Semi-fortunately, you can now catch the series, with questionable legality, on Chinese video portal Tudou, in English. We’ve swiftly navigated Mandarin drop-downs and updated the embeds below.

UPDATE 2: The Genius of Design is now available on DVD, sweet!

Last year’s cinematic design obsession was indisputably Objectified, director Gary Hustwit’s fantastic documentary about industrial design and all the ways in which it touches our daily lives. This year, the BBC is bringing us The Genius of Design — a new five-part documentary series exploring the broader history of design, from the Industrial Revolution through the Bauhaus of the 1920’s, the swinging 60’s, the fetishism of the 80’s, to today.

Though a “design documentary,” the series touches a diverse cross-section of disciplines, from art history to architecture to cultural anthropology.

From celebrity-status designers like Wedgwood and William Morris to the anonymous talent responsible for iconic designs like the cast-iron cooking pot, the series offers a remarkably wide-angle view of design not only as a creative discipline but also as a social facilitator. Treats include interviews with legendary designer Dieter Rams and archival footage of early industrial design production processes.

The first two hour-long episodes are available for free on Vimeo — and we guarantee they’ll be some of the best time investment you’ve made this year.

What makes the series particularly compelling is the ease with which it bridges historical context and present-day relevance, breathing a refreshing appreciation for the place and power of design even into those of us most immersed in it already.

The remaining three episodes will be released over the coming few weeks — so keep an eye out for an update.

UPDATE: All parts have been released and, thanks to Chinese video portal Tudou, we’ve embedded them below for your enjoyment.

PART 2: GHOSTS IN THE MACHINE

PART 3: BLUEPRINTS FOR WAR

PART 4: BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY

PART 5: OBJECTS OF DESIRE

via whiteboard journal

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

Remix Culture Spotlight: Walking on Eggshells

What legal anachronism has to do with Bob Dylan, Picasso and Family Guy.

We’re big proponents of remix culture here because at the core of our mission lies the idea that creativity is merely the ability to combine all the existing pieces in our head — knowledge, memory, inspiration — into incredible new things. Last year, we featured a brilliant panel with Shepard Fairey and CreativeCommons founder Lawrence Lessig titled Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, followed closely by the excellent documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto.

Today, we bring you Walking on Eggshells: Borrowing Culture in the Remix Age — a new documentary from Yale Law & Technology, offering 24 densely compelling minutes of insight into various facets of intellectual property in the age of remix. From appropriation to sampling to creative influence to reuse, the film is an anthology of conversations with some of today’s most notable remix artists and media theorists, exposing the central paradox of contemporary copyright law: How can something originally intended to incentivize people to create serve to hinder new forms of creativity?

You’re not gonna tell me ‘oh, that’s not creative because you’re using someone’s sampled piano note’ There’s no question that at some point using other people’s recordings is 100% your creativity, and at some points it’s 0% your creativity. Then it’s even trickier because sometimes it’s just this recognition — you recognize that this fits, and isn’t that recognition something amazing that maybe no one else recognized?” ~ DJ Earworm

Let’s just take Bob Dylan or somebody like that, whom we take for granted. Does he have a grocery list, an inventory of all of his influences, all the people he has plagiarized and taken from and sampled? These are things that are part of creativity. They are previous things, previous artworks, previous entities. They already exist. Nothing comes out of your ear, out of thin air.” ~ Joy Garnett

For those of us living on the remix side of things, the film’s thesis is hardly groundbreaking. But what makes it important is that it adds another voice to one of the most necessary and urgent creative conversations of our time, building on a narrative that will continue to bend an antiquated law until it breaks and makes room for a more inclusive, era-appropriate conception of creativity.

via GOOD

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

Market Maketh Man: Distortions of Democracy

Equilibrium, apathy and what John Stuart Mill has to do with medical marijuana.

You may recall filmmaker Temujin Doran from The Art of Protest, a cunning short documentary about the democratic deficits of today’s political protests. Doran has just released his latest film, Market Maketh Man — an ambitious analysis of several models of liberal democratic doctrine — and today, we sit down with him to talk about democracy, innovation, and the cultural responsibility of filmmakers.

What do you think will be the single most important social or cultural shift, trend or innovation to define the course of democracy in the next decade?

I think that most people are confident in the power of the internet to be a tool that champions our individuality and be a strong force for a more democratic, pluralist society. In some ways this is defendable; social networking, blogging, and online forums can very quickly marshal together like-minded people with potential to bring about dramatic governmental change.

Never before have these tools been so prominent in election campaigns, and in the future they will increasingly define these events and perhaps too, the course of governance. But I think in the coming decade, the internet may be revealed as something that has in fact homogenised society, and stunted our freedoms.

Our thirst for individualism in our lives has become, in a sense, the new conformism; and this has made us predictable. It will be interesting to see how politics and business will attempt to exploit this.

What role do you see documentary filmmakers playing in the past, present and future of democracy? How has this role changed over the past decade?

Perhaps the biggest change in this role is the increasing number of people can do it. It used to be a somewhat privileged position; but thanks to the affordability of film equipment nearly anyone can be a video commentator or journalist on matters that they find important. Via the internet, they can also reach a wide audience. But is this always a good thing? I find it a very troubling question, as it is something that I am also directly part of.

In the same way online commentary functions, it seems perilously close to the world of celebrity culture,; in which an individual’s opinions are marketed as media commodities.

If you look at news channels, they now all rely heavily on eyewitness videos shot from mobile phones or hand held cameras, as well as emails and texts from viewers — what they call “user-generated content.” News groups flaunt this as a kind of open democracy, but it can dangerously simplify the complexities of the modern world with melodramatic “human interest” angles.

How do you think capitalism has altered the vision for and practice of democratic rule?

For much of the western world I think Democracy will always be seen as the route to liberty, but what capitalism has done is to change the meaning of liberty, change the notion of what it is to be free, in both the eyes of the politicians and the electorate. It has replaced any sense of altruism, with selfish individualism, and established the “empire of the self,” turning the world we inhabit into one enormous advert for the life we are apparently lacking. In doing so it has handed the powers of authority to systems of control outside of government, and paralysed the ability of politics to transform the world for the better.

I think the most important thing to understand is that, in many ways, the greatest proponents of the capitalist framework have now become its audience – in short, us.

For more of Doran’s work, including drawings, photography and other films, see Studiocanoe, his creative project. And for a closer look at the evolution of capitalist propaganda, be sure to revisit the excellent BBC four-part documentary, The Century of the Self.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.