I made this trailer from my footage of the amazing playtest last night.

The game imagines the planetarium as a large, player-controllable spacecraft. A multi-player control deck at the center of the theater will offer a small crew the chance to navigate the spacecraft together, piloting through treacherous asteroid belts. The crew is an unassigned, free-form team that works together to pilot the spaceship, with various parts of the ship spread out over the theater while being guided by a on-board computer system that is voiced by Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields. For the one time event, Greg Fox will play a live sound track. All space ship modules have been hand made by Mike Anderson.

The Fall of Bin Laden Salon

Photo by Bay Ismoyo/Getty Images

Upon the death of Bin Laden, we looked at photographic coverage of both the compound where Bin Laden was killed and the reaction to the news globally. Images of screens, newspapers and people watching revealed how much the event was a global media phenomenon. [ Archive of The Fall of Bin Laden Salon ]

The Great Recession Salon

Photo by Michael Williamson/The Washington Post

The Great Recession was a largely invisible event, so the salon discussion revolved around how it was rendered visual through depictions of loss, destitution and perseverance. [ Archive of The Great Recession Salon ]

Occupy Wall Street Salon

Photo by Louise Macabitas/Reddit

For a Salon on Occupy Wall St, we drew from a broad range of sources to look at how image making and circulation became central to the most successful social movement in the United States in recent memory. [ Archive of the Occupy Wall Street Salon ]

Upcoming: Campaign Mania Salon

Photo by Jewel Samad/Getty Images

For the upcoming Salon on the Presidential Campaign, the panel will discuss what photos imply about the campaign, as well as the depth, breadth and nature of the media’s visual coverage. I hope you can join us on January 29th.

Here is raw footage I shot at two recent Babycastles events. Babycastles is an independent videogame arcade production group and general pervayor of independent game culture. As the Babycastles Archivist and Documentarian, capturing video of events is only a small part of my responsibilities, but it’s definitely the most fun part. Babycastles enthusiasts far and wide are enjoying the unedited takes of events.

QWOP THE SCREEN ⋰ Highly Physical Videogames

A collection of highly physical videogame installations. Games that deliberately make it awkward to see the screen, as well as games that get rid of screens entirely. This was the funnest Babycastles opening I remember. Curated by Doug Wilson, Bennett Foddy, and Matt Parker. October 7th, 2011 at 285 Kent Ave.

BABYCASTLES 285 KENT CLOSING PARTY

The party celebrates the the arcade’s six-month run in Williamsburg on November 4, 2011. Babycastles is not over. It’s just transforming. The night featured performances by Inspectah Deck and Colt Seavers of the Wu Tang Clan, Ava Luna and DJ Dog Dick. A tournament of J.S. Joust was played. The winner took home a copy of Katamari Damacy signed by Keita Takahashi. Games produced by the Parsons/Babycastles Game Jam were available to play. Minorities could sign up as bone marrow donors as part of the “Amit Gupta Needs You” campaign.

The most enjoyable part of this work for me is learning about the innovative collaborations, platforms and funding models that have emerged in recent years to make social impact games a reality. I’m building a program that will make these developments transparent to festival attendees interested in embarking on similar projects. This will be the 8th Annual Festival, and never before has there been such enthusiasm for games making a real world impact. The opportunities to produce social impact games are mushrooming. The 8th Annual Games For Change Festival will be the best opportunity to find out what has worked, what hasn’t and where all this is heading.

There has been a lot of great coverage of the festival line-up so far. One of my favorites comes from GamerTag Radio. Here’s what they have to say about Games For Change:

It’s a shame that often, when popular media covers the gaming industry, they can only point fingers and find fault with our beloved past-time. Can violent games be harmful? Sure…maybe. But are groups like Games for Change using the positive aspects of gaming to impact the world? Absolutely.

Check out the festival site for more information on the program and to register. The full press release on the line-up is available here.

As always with the Salons, when you get a group of visually adept people discussing a small selection of charged photos, amazing insights result. Below are a few of my favorite quotes from the salon. Read more quotes in the archive post.

“This image shows us the level of commitment. Everyone here is willing to be vulnerable and confront the reality of the powers that are beyond them entirely.”

- Michelle Woodward, Photo Editor for Middle East Report

Laura El-Tantawy / Burn Magazine – Egyptian anti-government protesters sleep on the tires of a military tank stationed on Tahrir (Liberation) Square.

“This is a corollary to the tanks in the square. It’s like they are saying, ‘You’re got your tanks, we’ve got Facebook.’ they even made it out of rocks, the same rocks that a couple days later or a couple days before became projectiles.”

–Michael Shaw, Editor at BagNews

Tara Todras-Whitehill / Associated Press – Anti-government protesters take pictures of protest art in Tahrir Square, the center of anti-government demonstrations, in Cairo, Egypt, Sunday, Feb. 6, 2011.

Photo by Jonathan Ystad.

Check out the presentation below. Other presenters included TED prize producer Bonnie Calvin, Adventure Project founder Becky Straw, artist Eric Forman, and Purpose strategist Lee-Sean Huang, among others.  

Purpose had attendees photographed for submission to TED prize winner JR’s Inside Out Project. Here’s the set of portraits I contributed:

Sleep No More takes place in The McKittrick Hotel. To enter, you go through a pitch black labyrinth which empties out into a 1930s jazz bar. To go beyond the jazz bar, you must put on a traditional Venetian style mask (see a photo here) and get on the elevator. The masks help maintain the solitary atmosphere while at the same time making the mask-less actors stand out from the audience members. You are pushed out of the elevator in small groups on different floors.

The opening scene (if you can find it in time from wherever the elevator man dumped you off) is a silent, slow-motion banquet in the ballroom. The tense meal ends with the 12 actors scattering in different directions. The audience scatters, too, as they break into small groups following different characters through the hotel. You must decide who to follow, if anyone.

Since the audience can roam freely, every detail of the set counts. Reading through papers in a desk, turning over discarded toys in a child’s room or examining photographs on the wall reveal depth and complexity in the story. Movement in space can also function as movement in time. Going from an infant’s room to the adjacent graveyard scene with an abandoned black cradle makes it clear that the child didn’t make it. I walked through these rooms just after watching the still-pregnant mother fight with her husband in an elaborate choreographed struggle atop the kitchen cupboards.

This is probably the most ingenious aspect of Sleep No More. The set is non-linear and interactive. Moving through space will move you to different times in the narrative and the more you dig through the set’s details, the more you learn about what is happening. The performance itself, though, is very linear. The impeccable timing of characters crossing paths to speechlessly engage in scenes with one another moves the story along to a dramatic ending. You could be following a character who was just left one scene and see them enter upon another scene in progress with perfect timing to begin an encounter there.

Here’s an example — at one point, I followed a character into a rave-like bacchanal. After about 10 minutes, he leaves the scene and I along with maybe ⅓ of the audience members watching follow him down the hall to a dark bar. There is a man there alone. The character from the baccanal fights him and, after a long struggle, smashes his head in behind the bar and goes back to the baccanal. Almost the the audience members follow, but three of us stay behind in the bar. A bartender shows up moments later to clean up the mess when suddenly another character with a bloodied face enters from the opposite side of the room and confronts the bartender.

Another example — a man is asleep in a bed.  His lover shows up. They engage in a violent struggle, which the audience members have to constantly shift to avoid. The fight clearly arouses the woman. He leaves in a huff. She undresses and stands crazed on the edge of a full bath tub in the middle of the room. Eventually she puts on a dressing gown. All this time there are muffled thumps and banging on the floor above, and I worry that I am missing something more exciting elsewhere (but what could be more exciting?). Her lover comes back, running, frantic and bloody. He strips and gets into the bathtub to scrub the blood off. She comes to help him.

Minute actions and individual encounters heighten the intimacy of experiencing scenes up close and in the round. You can read over a character’s shoulder as he types out a letter or watch every delicate motion of stringing a locket on a chain. The only opportunity to hear a character speak is through a one-on-one encounter if they pull you with them behind a closed door.

And when when it’s all over and you talk with your friends afterword about what you experienced, you won’t believe them and they won’t believe you.  There was so much to see. It was all so spectacular that it’s hard to believe so much transpired in 2 hours.

It’s not surprising that a theater experience like this would have an alternate reality game to promote it. It was called Gallow Green. A website of green text on a black background offered Shakespear-like riddles.

The discussion boards of Sleep No More’s Facebook Page went wild for a week as players worked through to the puzzles together. Three of the 12 answers were offered up at live events, first one in Boston and then two in New York. One puzzle answer was found in a London cemetery. I kept up with the game and made it out to one of the New York events, which involved procuring protective amulets through individual encounters with an actor near the Central Park Carousel at night.

The second New York event entailed a banquet in an abandoned building. That was where new photos of the set were leaked to the public via a USB stick hidden in the loaf of bread (the photos of the set in this post are from that USB stick). The answer to the final riddled served up a phone number where players could leave messages to request a meeting with the Clairvoyant. Three winners were chosen for meetings. Accounts were posted on the Facebook page discussion boards.

I attended a performance on Wednesday night and intend to reread Macbeth before I go to another performance next week.  Sleep No More is running until mid-April. I couldn’t recommend it more.

• Threadless crowdsources trendy t-shirt designs
• Etsy provides ecommerce tools for crafts people and makers of all stripes
• Photoshelter does something similar for photographers
• Vimeo offers hosting space and distribution tools for video and filmmakers

While each of these sites operate in very different markets, they do similar things to sustain the community drawing on their services. Here are some of the practices that make these communities vibrant and productive:

1. Embrace the Values that Motivate Creative Production

The values that motivate people to create constitute the most important force bringing the community together. Economic incentives may inspire collaboration and entrepreneurialism, but the resilience of the community is build on personal values that brought people to creative endeavors in the first place. Successful creative communities proudly display those values and develop an aesthetic to communicate them. This is evident both in the kinds of work produced by the community and the auxiliary activities the community embraces.

Three great examples of this include Etsy’s Craftivism Blog and Vimeo’s film festival and Thredless Design Challenges. The opportunities that each of these endeavors offer speak to the unique impetus driving each community.

2. Offer Learning Resources and Update Them Frequently

Tutorials and educational features encourage learning and constantly upgrading skills. The educational resources simultaniously lower the barrier to entry by showing novices the way and sets standards high by asking members to constantly improve their skills rather than resting on their laurels.

Two examples of this are Etsy’s Shop Makeovers and Photoshelter’s ever evolving and expanding offering of free tutorials and webinars.

3. Turn Successes into Role Models to Emulate

Profiles of successful members of the community show what success looks like with insight into the path taken to get there. Such profiles can serve to communicate the value of the community to potential entrepreneurs and creatives. In the case of Threadless, many of their most successful designers used the platform to launch their design careers. This is true with Etsy as well. To deliver value to the community, role models need to get a little vulnerable by showing their process so others can emulate their success. Photoshelter uses webinars and their blog to do this.

4. Empower Aficionados

In addition to creating original content such as tutorials and featured success stories, successful creative communities provide tools for aficionados to strut their stuff on their terms for the benefit of the whole community. Sometimes empowering aficionados is as simple as maintaining discussion boards where current issues facing the community can be discussed frankly.  Other times, it entails leveraging the insight of aficionados toward specific projects.

Vibrant message boards abound on these sites, and this is often the place where aficionados make their expertise available. Threadless Critiques is an example of a specialized message board meeting a specific need of the community. If a designer wants input on their design before submitting it for voting, they can post the current design and get feedback from experienced designers, updating the post with revisions until it’s ready for submission.

5. Enable Innovation

Truly productive creative communities will quickly outgrow the forms of creative output that brought them together.  Their collective energy will spawn new business models and products. The community must embrace and innovate on these developments to keep pace with members’ ambitions.

Photoshelter is a prime example of this. They attempted to create a sales service much like a traditional photography agency to represent the photographers using the hosting service.  That effort didn’t work out, but Photoshelter continues to roll out new features for different ways to do business, such as WordPress integration through a partnership with Graph Paper Press and a recently launched print order service.

Here, I’ve looked at a small selection of creative communities. Do you know of others that also make use of these methods or that defy them? And what about online collaborations around knowledge production and education? Efforts like Wikipedia and P2PU seem to be sustained by a different set of factors. How do they compare?

The goal of the workshop was to produce inspirational videos to help Ethiopian farmers collaborate with the Red Cross in locally adapting to the risks of climate change. Wage Warage had successfully implemented numerous climate risk adaptation programs over the course of a year with support from the Red Cross. The community was reaping the benefits in the form of better harvests, more stable household incomes and better working conditions, especially for women.

The Red Cross wanted the farmers of Wage Wargaje to demonstrate the benefits of the programs to other Ethiopian farmers so that they would be motivated to proactively confront climate change as well. Ethiopia’s contribution to global climate change is negligible, but devastating droughts and soil erosion are threatening the livelihoods of many rural communities. The Red Cross is trying to prevent humanitarian disasters by teaching the farmers to adapt to the impacts locally. Participatory Video offers a means of creating visual evidence and personal stories designed by Wage Warage to reach farmers like them. They made four short videos in four days. Have a look:

What is Participatory Video?

Participatory Video (PV) is a creative process where a group or community with otherwise limited experience in producing media makes a video. The process of making the video is as important if not more important than the final product. This distinction sets PV apart from documentary film or promotional media. The reason for making the video is often linked with empowerment, be that through articulating concerns to legislators, resolving conflict within the community through a creative process, or reaching out to similar communities through mediated narrative. Participatory Video often happens through a collaboration between outside advocates or media makers and the community. Outside advocates serve as support as the community scripts and shoots their videos.

About The Workshop

The Climate Centre’s Pablo Suarez compulsively experiments with different communication techniques to help students, his colleagues in the scientific community and rural communities in developing countries understand the many interrelated facets of climate change. He put together a team to give Participatory Video a try with Wage Warage in Ethiopia with the support of the International Federation of the Red Cross and the Netherlands Red Cross. With a clear intended audience and desired outcomes that matched up with the strengths of the chosen medium, the project showed a great deal of promise, and I was glad be part of the team as the Participatory Video trainer. It was a pleasure to work with filmmaker Justin Benn to make the workshop a success.

I drew heavily from Insight Share’s resources in planning the workshop. Insight Share has some 7 years of experience teaching Participatory Video. The exercises they outline have been tested and refined in diverse contexts. I highly recommend the free handbook they provide on their site if you are considering any community media project of this nature.

The workshop ran for four days with three groups of farmers working in teams. The first day and a half of the workshop consisted of introductory exercises with the camera and planning the short videos. The following day and a half consisted of shooting. The last day was given to paper edits and screening raw footage.

Even though the community exists off the grid with no regular access to media beyond radio, let alone the means of producing media, the workshop participants took to the process quickly and confidently. They were grateful for the Red Cross’ efforts and eager to serve as roll models for other communities facing similar problems. By the end of the workshop, the farmers were independently going out to shoot B roll and redo scenes they were unsatisfied with. Everything went remarkably smoothly despite having such a short time to work.

Distribution

The video on fuel efficient stoves was screened at COP16. The Ethiopian Red Cross Society is working on distributing the films and integrating them into their training programs, which is invariably trickier than international distribution as I found researching Sudden Flowers Productions, a youth film collective in Ethiopia’s capital. The response so far from Ethiopian Red Cross staff has been overwhelming enthusiasm. We are exploring ways to train local Red Cross employees to run Participatory Video programs themselves.