How the essay film The Future of Art ended up on French Vogue

The Challenge: Transmedia Storytelling for Transmediale

The 2011 edition of the Transmediale festival, held annually in Berlin, had the theme of response:ability. Looking to bridge the online and offline worlds with contemporary media arts, the festival wanted to mediate the content of the event for the world at large, not only the conference attendees and festival goers. The curatorial statement was summed up in this call to action:

The net we operate in is itself a living entity, built by others. Now it is up to the power of our response:ability to put it to use!

My creative studio KS12, operating under the process label Emergence Collective, was commissioned to instigate a transmedia production process in the heart of the “Open Zone” – a site of collaborative co-creation in the cavernous atrium of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW). But our storytelling process began in the days leading up to the event.

The Videoblog

Featuring myself, my studio partner Patrizia Kommerell, and our collaborator Clare Molloy, we gave a peak behind the scenes to our growing audience. We spoiled some of our interview subjects and documented the process of gathering interviews prior to the event over Skype. We questioned our roles as artists, noting our ability to converge roles previously taken by curators, producers, or foundations and fold them into our process. And we offered a glimpse of the festival preparations at the venue as well as our micro-patronage crowdfunding. The video blog generated some additional 1.9k+ views, building momentum towards the festival.

The Quora Community

Seeing the role of social media not only as a distribution channel, but also as a medium for collaborative production, we untethered our documentary interview questions from our prep materials and posted them in the wild on the question and answer platform Quora. Leveraging the platform’s early stage status, we were able to inaugurate The Future of Art topic. We seeded the topic with just 19 of our interview questions, and very quickly accumulated over 100 answers before the festival’s completion. Today the topic remains active, with over 39k+ topic followers and current questions about AI and art.

Our Station in the Open Zone

The Premiere

After five days at the festival gathering interviews and building relationships with other exhibiting artists, integrating b-roll shot by festival attendees, and editing the film on site, the video essay was ready for its debut screening to a crowd of over a hundred festival attendees. The work had built in reach by incorporating excerpts of so many other artists’ works, freely lent to the project by means of BY-NC-SA Creative Commons licensing.

Response

The Future of Art received widespread acclaim and coverage in the blogosphere. And to our surprise, I was profiled in French Vogue as well.

Takeaways

The video sprint methodology deployed at Transmediale yielded an outsized response from the press and the public. We contributed a lasting perspective on the topic of future aesthetics, and left traces on the internet that persist to this day. The work was spotted by curators from Eindhoven, and led directly to a future project for the STRP Festival. And the following year we would take the video sprint to Wieden+Kennedy as participants in their startup accelerator.

Credits

Conceived and Edited by Gabriel Shalom
Produced by KS12 / Emergence Collective
Executive Producer: Patrizia Kommerell
Assistant Editor: Clare Molloy
Production Assistant: Annika Bauer

Featuring:

Aaron Koblin
Michelle Thorne
Caleb Larsen
Régine Debatty
Heather Kelley
Vincent Moon
Ken Wahl
Reynold Reynolds
Bram Snijders
Mez Breeze
Zeesy Powers
Joachim Stein
Eric Poettschacher

Including Video Material From:

Vincent Moon
Achim Kern
Born Digital
Daniel Franke
Christopher Warnow
Memo Akten
Ian Mackinnon
Taj Dhami
Liisalotte Elme
Zeesy Powers
Reynold Reynolds
Patrizia Kommerell & Gabriel Shalom
Aaron Koblin
Alessandro Ludovico
Paolo Cirio
Iepe
Akiz

Music, Sounds and Performances by:

The Arcade Fire, The Crowd, Daniel Franke & Christopher Warnow, Monolake, Daito Manabe, Zeesy Powers, Arlt, Ei Wada, Gabriel Shalom (8 years old), kom.post by Laurie Bellanca

Special Thanks:

Elyse Harrison, Studio Neptune, Cifarelli Art Consulting, Henrik Moltke, Beckie Darlington, Open Design City, Cara Bell Jones, Ela Kagel

CC 2011 BY-NC-SA

KS12 / Emergence Collective