-"the projectis remarkable for its magnificent endeavour of research and notable educational emphasis"
-they also found strong "potential for user participation, the effort to subtitle the videos in different languages and the project's wide-ranging concept of accessibility." Thanks for making us famous in the museum world, AAM. Let's do this again sometime.
In our first appearance in a film festival, we were awarded what amounts to a "New Media Documentary" award.Sure we were the only iPhone app in the festival, but we made it past the initial cut of 2000 films submitted to the 200 screened to 20 recognized by the judging panel. As The Guardian said, we're gearing up for our Oscar for "Original iPhone App."
I think we're gonna make cinematic history this Sunday, April 18th at the Boston Common AMC Theater. (Session 12, 9pm) We will show portions of the first iPhone app to screen at a major film festival and then have a panel/audience discussion about cinematic storytelling on mobile devices.
Check out Xconomy's take on the "Walking Cinema: Murder on Beacon Hill" feature at the Boston International Film Festival.
Untravel's founder, Michael Epstein was invited to speak on the"Film Forward" panel at the True/False film festival in Columbia, Missouri last week. The crowd (including Untravel's own Laura Piraino) reported that it was "really good." The panel looked at ways that audiences and filmmakers are getting more participatory in their films through new platforms and theatrical techniques.
No video of the panel yet but Michael got a chance to show a trailer for "Walking Cinema" and argue with Punchdrunk/BBC Journalist Adam Curtis about rampant individualism and action-producing media. Also on the panel was The Weather Underground director Sam Green and the kids behind New Left Media. It was an honor to be there and thanks to David Wilson for making it happen.
I often journey deep into the countryside and ancient mounds in search of powerful mobile storytelling. I was pretty excited by this guide developed in 2008 for America's largest archeological site, Cahokia Mounds, a 20,000 soul Mississippian community at its apex in 1000AD. They worshiped the sun and left behind a swath of sacred mounds 20 miles east of St. Louis in Illinois. Recently, there has been a series of Indiana-Jones-like explorations of the site, using cosmology and advanced geometry to determine how the mounds are laid out along an ancient, sacred blueprint. Wow!
The mobile guide, unfortunately, was really, really far from wow. Flute music and emasculated voiceover espoused dimensions and dates. Yet within this litany of facts, I found a pretty good one: the "Center" of this sun city lay on a corner of the highest mound, at the apex of two isosceles triangles (see drawing below.) Standing on this ancient apex you look west and see the mirage of the St. Louis skyline, with its 1965, 630-foot high arch--itself a series of powerful triangles.
Above: iTouch Video/Audio Tour of Cahokia (Schwartz Associates)
In my kind of Unibomber diagram below you see what I think is the most interesting site at Cahokia: the view to the observation deck at the top of the St. Louis arch where someone at the apex of a steel-girded isosceles triangle looks out at you at the apex of a 1000 year-old, sun-worshiping isosceles triangle. Both of these observers happen to be standing in the midst of precise calculations which reach towards something mystical: America's manifest destiny and the Cahokia Indians' sun god.
The artist rendering above describes 3 triangles that converge on the largest archeological site in the US. In Cahokia, IL (drawn image to the right) there is a 100ft mound, whose lower shelf was actually the center of this MIssissipian community. We know this because other prominent mounds form isosceles triangles with this point. From this center point, on a clear day, one can gaze 20 miles into the distance (see photograph to left) and see downtown St. Louis with its Gateway Arch. And at the apex of that isosceles triangle another observer sees you (unwittingly). And, of course, these two observers make yet another triangle with the Sun God looking at them from above.
MIX OF "AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL" AND BLUE REACTION TO GARAGE-TOP VISTA:
Just below the sidewalk on JFK St. in Harvard Square is a little elevator button that points 'up."
And at the top of this elevator is a flight of stairs. And at the top of these stairs is a vista over pristine steeples and S-shaped river. During a late-October sunset in 2007, I contemplated this vista with "Brother Blue". Two years later he passed on at the age of 88. He conjured up Ray Charles for us, and I think he got it all right: the song, the setting, the nation, and his self. Keep calling us from the mountain, Blue.
Brother Blue in the Cambridge Burying Ground, 2007
View from on top of the Harvard Square Garage.
That elevator button under the JFK street sidewalk.
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