People Wall

3 hours on line for this

I just received word from the Knight Foundation that my project, 1,000 Flipcams in Newark has made it to the final round for consideration.

My idea is to give 1,000 random people who live in Newark, NJ flipcams.  At first glance this might seem to be about the ‘democratization’ of the medium, but that would be old news.

I am, with this project, far more interested in how the content is ‘broadcast’, and I use the word loosely.

We live in a world that is combining two new paradigms at once, which may explain why we find so many things related to journalism so confusing. On the one hand, we are indeed experiencing the democratization of the medium on the content creation side.  Millions of people now have their hands on broadcast quality cameras and edit systems, as well as blogging on a daily basis.

But at the other end of the spectrum, we are also seeing the fragmentation of what used to be our few and very dependable sources of news.  A handful of newspapers and TV network news operations are being drowned in a thousand thousand new and unknown voices daily.

Take the election in Iraq. We didn’t get a definitive report from Walter Cronkite from Teheran. We got a steady hailstorm of lots of little snippets of media – from cell phones, from web sites, from bloggers and vloggers.

In 1964, IBM, along with Charles and Ray Eames predicted much of what was to come.

IBM built a pavilion for the World’s Fair to show off the latest of their computer creations, but more so to paint a picture of what a world dominated by computers might look like.

To do this, they built something they called a ‘people wall’. You sat in rows of seats which suddenly rose up and became a wall of people.  I remember this because as a child I visited the IBM exhibit and sat in the People Wall.

Accompanying the wall was a film by Charles and Ray Eames which explained the wall and microprocessors.

It drew an analogy between a wall of individuals, all making yes-no/on-off decisions to reach an answer to a larger question.

A kind of human version of a microprocessor chip.

Now, I think I can use the same notion of a People Wall to build a physical representation of what has happened to our world of news and media.

I will give out the cameras to 1,000 people and instruct them to create a 2-minute story about Newark and their lives. One story.  I will then put all 1,000 stories through a gigantic video wall with 100+ panels running simultaneously.

It’s the place where art and journalism come together as one.

Normally we are used to watching video stories in a linear fashion, one at a time. But now, for a person standing in front of the wall, they will experience being bathed in media.  An endless stream of 1,000 small stories all coming at them at the same time, all about the same topic, yet all different; all personal .

IBM and the Eamses were prescient beyond their knowing.  The world of thousands and thousands of microprocessors engraved onto a chip would become the way that we would process information, both on a micro and now on a macro scale.

And as each microprocessor in the end delivers a single answer to a question, despite, or in fact because of the thousands of yes/no, on/off switches; so too perhaps will the world of thousands of small media deliver a larger answer – once we figure out how to read the output.