Declaration of Interdependence. A new film by Tiffany Shlain
September 24, 2007
This image was Tiffany Shlain’s starting point for a new film, currently in production entitled, The Declaration of Interdependence. In a workshop at the Headland Centre for the Arts in San Francisco at the end of last year she began to form and map the associations emerging from the original tag she gave the image: “natural and unnatural selection”
“By tracing the absurd and profound connections among seemingly disparate social, cultural and political issues, this film reveals a network of cause and effect that alters our global condition….Connecting disparate elements like fertility/infertility, crime, botox, bacteria, corn, AIDS, poverty, love, dress codes, computer code, and genetic code, this film, discussion and internet project aims at exposing the dynamic complexity of our actions in the 21st Century.”
Tiffany’s early short films can be found on You Tube. They’re a collage of found images and archival footage spliced with images she’s created. Tiffany describes her films as ‘fast paced’ but it’s the smooth glide of exhilaration not an edgy adrenalin rush. The Tribe – an essay on “what it means to be an American Jew in the 21st Century” –added extra elements, narration, bits of performance, animated dioramas using dolls (in this case Barbie, the iconic doll created by a Jewish American woman) and “avant-garde visual techniques”. They have elements of humour as well as poignancy, an approach that Tiffany’s husband Ken Goldberg, an artist and scientist who co-wrote The Tribe, has described as “using humour and play to disarm our preconceptions.”
Ken is a pioneer of telerobotic art projects conducted over the internet and these installations, that create an art project as a way of commenting on the tool and critiquing it while it’s being developed, will be wrapped around the experience of the films they’ll be producing with their new company, The Moxie Institute. It has a still-to be-announced structural mix of non-profit services (a ‘think tank’, white papers) and the sale of the films, which have a strong social message “focusing on the power of film and the web to make social change”. Ken and Tiffany are investigating ”the intersection between these worlds and how the rules are changing. We hope to share the ideas that work and form bridges with leaders in the respective industries to achieve better financial and social returns.”
Ken’s projects have had a social component that’s brought people together to carry out a task as a community, at a distance. The Telegarden was a plot of dirt attached to a robot arm that could be directed to plant seeds, water, and weed the plot. It became a community garden with all of the joys and disputes that local civic projects bring with them. The Teleactor was one person, directed by many others from many different locations, over the internet. In 2004 Ken created a project called Demonstrate, a state-of-the-art robotic web-camera trained on UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza, a place where free speech demonstrations took place during the civil rights era. Anyone could access the camera over the internet and the project began privacy issue debates at Berkeley. Ken’s next project in a similar vein, last year’s Baldessari’s Bubbles, re-visited the subject of surveillance cameras and privacy. Quoting John Baldessari’s art project that placed dots over people’s faces, Ken’s web-based camera had floating dots that obscured people’s faces, developing what he calls ‘respectful cameras’. “By obscuring the facial details in the still photographs, Baldessari effectively denied the viewer full access to the image to emphasize the constructed aspects of photography and perception” the project notes said. “This installation links Baldessari’s aesthetic concerns with contemporary issues in politics and technology.”
There are now many film-makers taking on big environmental, social, humanitarian, and cultural questions. At the recent Sundance Film Festival Tiffany co-hosted a ‘think tank’ on the intersection of film, the internet and social change. Highlights from The Movies That Matter panel were intercut with an interview with Tiffany from the think tank.
Directors, writers and producers on Monday’s Movies that Matter Panel have influenced everything from AIDS policy, to the phase-out of PVC packaging, to the global warming debate. Participants included: Sean Fine War / Dance, Judith Helfand Everything’s Cool, Rory Kennedy Ghost’s of Abu Graib, Eric Schlosser Fast Food Nation, Gayle Smith (The Center for American Progress), Diane Weyermann Participant Productions, and Brian Steidle (subject of The Devil Came on Horseback), Helene Cooper of the New York Times (who became an anti-Apartheid activist after seeing Cry Freedom) moderated. While everyone agreed that the movies can matter, there were a variety of approaches to how and why. We’ve all seen the effects of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. My mom’s cat knows about it. Weyermann noted, “The idea was to try to reach as many people as possible to incite change.” Participant Productions clearly carried this out successfully through non-profit partnerships and savvy marketing. To head off doubters, a “bible of science” was provided to press along with the film’s initial release. A year after the Sundance premiere, “The debate about whether global warming exists is over,” said Weyermann. “Now it’s ‘what can we do?’”
Report from Treehugger.
Tiffany’s movies don’t have a plot they have a perspective, where they are philosophically matters as much as what they are. Natural Connection, a short film Tiffany made in 2001 begins with the camera going in through an eye, and the way that the images slide together, morph into one another, and spark off one another makes it seem as if we’re watching the process of thinking, impressions deepening into ideas. Questioning the permeable borders between art and science, considering the reasoning of the scientist, something observable and measurable, and the mystery and intuition that fuels the artist, is also something that underpins all of Ken’s telerobotic art projects. And Tiffany’s father, Leonard Shlain, has written several books that study the intersection between art and science. His book Art and Physics proposes, “…that the visionary artist is the first member of a culture to see the world in a new way. Then, nearly simultaneously, a revolutionary physicist discovers a new way to think about the world.” I think of Tiffany’s movies as demonstrating what happens when this seeing and thinking collide.
The movies are symbolic. They don’t tell a story. Presenting the process of thinking as a film has parallels in other symbolic arts. I asked Dana Gingras of the Holy Body Tattoo about the language of dance, how I could better comprehend it. Dana and Noam Gagnon, the dancer she formed the company with, believe that the how one moves through life marks one indelibly, it’s something soulful as well as physical. So a dance piece can be inspired by how people actually move, can be real life made into art rather than dancing a story about life. Jazz is also a symbolic artform, and the musician Wynton Marsalis has said:
“Everything in the world is like music: how you dress, how you speak, architecture, furniture — everything. I like to listen to how people talk — what they choose to talk about, the pacing of their voice, how they build up to what they’re saying. People’s voices are very musical in conversations, what they [say] for emphasis.”
(This quote was clipped by the photographer, Dayna Bateman, and is posted at her site.)
Ken and Tiffany created a book and flash cards to go with The Tribe and described the film as “the appetiser” and the discussions as “the main course”. The discussions and communing that might be provoked by The Declaration of Interdependence include nature. The research notes for the film quote John Muir, a nineteenth century naturalist who founded the Sierra Club. ”When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it’s attached to the rest of the world.” Muir believed that people needed to consider themselves a part of the natural system and that nature needed to be preserved for its own sake as well as for the spiritual comfort of humans.
This isn’t a fashionable environmentalism: Ken has always considered his telerobotic art projects to be aligned with the earthworks of the 1970’s, Robert Smithson’s monumental land-based projects, and Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field. Science, construction, and manufacturing collide in these projects in the way that Ken’s scientific projects, as a professor in the engineering Department at Berkeley, collide with his art projects. For instance, his thinking about issues of privacy and surveillance is something he’s applying to the wilderness as well as urban settings, with a web-based camera that observes nature, while scientists collaborate to control the filming, over the internet, at a distance from the site and each other.
The internet is its second phase with the number of connections and density and volume of information currently being valued: twenty thousand friends on mySpace, three weeks worth of songs on an i-Pod, three million entries returned in answer to a Google search for ‘festivals, short films’. Tim Berners Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, is predicting that the third phase of the internet will be about meaning: a small community of close companions densely interlinked, a tightly edited collection of songs that one genuinely listens to, a Google search returning a handful of results that completely and perfectly satisfy. He speaks of intelligent databases and finely tuned machine intelligence adding finesse to the markup languages behind websites.
How such systems will be built, and how soon they will begin providing meaningful answers, is now a matter of vigorous debate both among academic researchers and commercial technologists. Some are focused on creating a vast new structure to supplant the existing Web; others are developing pragmatic tools that extract meaning from the existing Web. But all agree that if such systems emerge, they will instantly become more commercially valuable than today’s search engines, which return thousands or even millions of documents but as a rule do not answer questions directly.
In its current state, the Web is often described as being in the Lego phase, with all of its different parts capable of connecting to one another. Those who envision the next phase, Web 3.0, see it as an era when machines will start to do seemingly intelligent things. Researchers and entrepreneurs say that while it is unlikely that there will be complete artificial-intelligence systems any time soon, if ever, the content of the Web is already growing more intelligent. Smart Webcams watch for intruders, while Web-based e-mail programs recognize dates and locations. Such programs, the researchers say, may signal the impending birth of Web 3.0.
John Markoff. New York Times. November 12, 2006
Ken’s academic research includes artificial intelligence programmes and intelligent databases but he also values skepticism, being able to question the capabilities of the internet as well as what’s found there. “Well, you know the expression ’suspension of disbelief’, right?” he asked in an e-mail. “You see a movie or start reading a novel and you suspend disbelief. Pople also get into a mode of accepting things they find on the internet at face value. I’m trying to facilitate the resumption of disbelief.”
Dr. Robert Ballard, the deep sea explorer works, like Ken, with telepresence. These days his deep sea explorations are conducted from his own studio, controlling the undersea robots over the internet. He’s also made his equipment available to schools and students are able to conduct their own projects over the internet, from their classrooms. Like Ken he believes that machine intelligence doesn’t count for much if it’s not tethered to human intelligence.
Current deep-submergence technologies will surely seem quaint in a decade. In even less time, today’s communications and Internet systems will be as outmoded as transistor radios. All of this is great for the future of deep-ocean exploration. But I do have one major worry: Where will the explorers come from? Today’s children aren’t ready, especially in the US – where science and math education remains woefully inadequate. Will we help them get what’s needed in mathematics, history, and geology? Will they have the skills necessary to become the next deep-ocean scientists, engineers, oceanographers, or deep-sea archaeologists? Will our children and grandchildren be curious and imaginative enough to continue searching out the deepest, darkest, most mysterious corners of our world? Will we fill in the blanks on the map in my office? If we can’t train the explorers of tomorrow, the best technology in the world isn’t going to make much difference.
Robert D. Ballard. Wired magazine. December 2004
Maybe the intelligent networks of the future will be human networks, communities, using this more malleable and sophisticated technology more wisely, with the value being weighted towards people connecting with each other in the real world, not relying on the machines, and stillness and reflection becoming prized as much as rapid reactions. Along with film projects that engage and create communities there’s a gathering network of ‘hyperlocal’ websites that are sharing their local wisdom globally. Outside.in is based around Google’s mapping capabilities, and Placeblogger is a portal. But people are also using technology to get smart enough to turn away from it, and be able to turn it off. Of her time working on The Declaration of Interdependence at the Headland Centre for the Arts Tiffany wrote in an e-mail. “It was blissful and untethered from any technology. If you’re looking for a New Year’s resolution, I recommend making time to unplug. It reminds you that as seductive as it is to connect, it is just as powerful to be alone with your own mind.”
Why do we need to think of technology as separate from us, separate from nature? Aren’t silicon chips made from sand? Is technology nature?
Is the fundamental relationship between our computer code and our genetic code?
If technology extends our minds, what does it amputate?
Does the umbilical cord hardwire our desire to be wired?
Where does the brain end and the mind begin?
Is the next evolutionary step to connect our minds through a network?
What are the consequences and benefits of distributing intelligence over a network from one to many?
Why do we initially struggle so much with new technologies and then so quickly become unable to imagine life without them?
When will we learn the importance of both connection and disconnection?Tiffany’s synopsis for Natural Connection.
