This is an experimental work where I combine three versions of the song Heartbeats by Jose Gonzales with the advertising meme of the bouncing Sony balls intercut with characters from Halo 3 repeating the same movements.

Will we ever get to a point where we’ll be used to reading media this way?

In Murketing today Rob Walker published a post about the anti-graf zealot Fred Radtke aka Grey Ghost. Radtke is well known in the graffiti scene in New Orleans for covering up graffiti. These square blocks of neutral color have become tags unto themselves. This is further evidenced when Grey Ghost only partially covered up a Banksy N.O. work. If he truly hated graffiti then he would have covered everything. Instead he has put his story touch on this tale and entered into dialogue with Banksy. 

def: Mash Media Storytelling - using appropriated media to tell a story through mass media channels.

This notion is largely inspired by Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky aka That Subliminal Kid and his work on compiling Sound Unbound.

Here’s an excerpt from my thesis:

In Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture, author, conceptual artist, and musician Paul D. Miller addresses, “the remix – how music, art, and literature have blurred the lines between what an artist can do and what a composer can create.”  In editing Sound Unbound, Miller asked “artists to describe their work and compositional strategies.”  What I will do in the following pages will do what Miller has done for music, for storytelling.  I will analyze storytelling strategies and how participatory media has enabled the remix or mash-up of stories, which has created an evolved form of collaborative storytelling that uses appropriated content to reach a mass audience.

Wordle is a great visualization tool that helps in this quest as in scraps URLs for keywords then visualizes them. This word cloud can be seen as a visualization of how I am being perceived over at JamesChutter.com

Grab a notebook, let the video pre-load and turn off all interruptions. This one is worth freeing up some brain space to absorb.

Ben Okri puts it so much better than me:

“The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.”

I’m worried that as a society we are focusing way too much energy on perfection without sharing our imperfections.