Burning Shorts

In 1913 when he was seventy-one years of age, Ambrose Bierce abandoned the United States to accompany Pancho Villa on Villa’s mission to inflame revolution in Mexico. Bierce did not intend to return.

Bierce, writer and journalist, was also a soldier who barely survived the most savage combat of the American Civil War as a Union infantryman. He fought boldly at Shiloh and in other horrific battles, so he had no illusions about war. His account of Shiloh is a classic: http://www.classicreader.com/book/1165/1/.

Once Bierce left El Paso, Texas, for Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, (alas, still a fierce war zone of rivers of fresh blood and death) and Villa’s troops, he vanished forever.

Bierce is revered as a writer. “…I consider anybody a twerp who hasn’t read the greatest American short story, which is ‘Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,’ by Ambrose Bierce. It isn’t remotely political. It is a flawless example of American genius, like ‘Sophisticated Lady’ by Duke Ellington or the Franklin stove.” (Kurt Vonnegut — 2005) ” http://donswaim.com/index.html

I believe that Bierce’s disappearance was, in large part, his recognition that we all have a time to come to an end, and he understood that his time was imminent. Shortly before he went South, he wrote to his niece Lora:

“Good-by — if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart [t?]his life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs.” http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/bierce/ambrose-bierce.html

I have wondered over the years what Bierce understood about the timing of his end, and I continue to do so. However, I have a clue because it is time to bring Burning Shorts to its end. Like Bierce, Burning Shorts has had an exciting life for its era: born May 30, 2006, and vanishing May 30, 2011 at the age of five years.

In cyberspace, five years is a very long time. On May 30, 2006, a glorious flood of original online video art and entertainment spontaneously appeared, and the hungry audience rewarded talent by making a video “go viral”: a million views in a week … that sort of phenomenon.

May 30, 2006, YouTube was merely another of the many “raw and unfiltered” sites and not yet absorbed by Google, thereby making YouTube the supreme aggregator of video as Google is of search. The creative discoveries were wild and thrilling, and the mission of Burning Shorts was to find the founding geniuses of original online content and to help them connect to horizontal media forms, like motion pictures and television. So, Burning Shorts launched with a core subscribership of Hollywood creative professionals.

The history of Burning Shorts speaks for itself: it is here before you in its entirety and, now, in its completeness. Though the visitorship of Burning Shorts has doubled and doubled briskly a number of times in its five years (making a lovely, steeply upward curve of visitorship), what tells me it is time for Ciudad Juarez is that the giant aggregators, like GooTube, are now announcing They will be “curating” the best of original online content.

I have many thoughts about this “new” effort by the giants: mainly predictions of cycles of failure before They get it right, if ever.

However and like Bierce, though, I prefer simply to vanish, declaring Burning Shorts a dedicated effort to capture the finest original online work, to feature it, and to celebrate the innovation and art that appeared for the World in the First Five Years.

Here then is the First Five Years–as we discovered, critiqued, and rejoiced in them, of such creative work–and here they will remain as an emblem and a history of what creativity erupted and how it felt before the giant aggregators expanded their empires to control this territory. I evacuate, vanish, perhaps like Bierce. He preferred to finish his life, riding into a Mexican Revolution with Pancho Villa. “It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs.”

No “old age, disease or falling down the cellar stairs …” for Burning Shorts!

Yet, Bierce inspired Vonnegut. Perhaps Burning Shorts will provide an historical/creative foundation for intrepid souls who dare continue the mission and motivation of Burning Shorts in their way. If so, you have my support and aid always.

Five years feels right, complete. Five years in Web2.0 is surely at least seventy-one in Bierce’s world. Also, the first Five years may prove useful in the future, as our media and hence our literacy moves, in my view, from narrative to spectacle … and into the control of fewer and fewer creative minds. Seen any good movies lately?

The dedication of Burning Shorts was deeply heartfelt on May 30, 2006, just as it is this May 30, 2011. So long as this work and I endure, the dedication remains always deeply heartfelt and a humble gesture of my gratitude to those to whom it is dedicated.

 We present Xtranormal, a complete online video-production digital animation software package site. http://www.xtranormal.com/index

This Issue presents both sample of Xtranormal (a resource we discovered of amazing potential) and substance as Burning Shorts Theater employs Xtranormal to move boldly in a new direction, thus illustrating our motto here: “ALWAYS READY:  NEVER PREPARED.”

Burning Shorts Theater Xtranormal, First Series, or “BSTX1”, Episodes One through Four (1-1 through 1-4)

BSTX1-1 Burning Shorts Becomes Xtranormal and Her Majesty Introduced

BSTX1-2 Hail New Metaphoria!

BSTX1-3 Calliope Recites Crow

BSTX1-4 Her Majesty Enlists Burning Shorts

In earlier times, artists invoked the Muses. In these times of Web2.0 blurring toward SomethingNextPoint0, I see media in which the Muses make only drunkenly staggering, wildly unpredictable, rare visits.

So … I declare here: I shout in text!

Wake up! Spread the word! Resist those who promise online empire to everyone under the terms “SEO”, “SMO”, and, collectively, “Make Tons of Money Online While Doing Nearly Nothing.” Alas, these promise-makers extend from the Monarchs of Digital Media Industry to shabby scammers world-wide. The academics are in this, too, to slice their piece. As the eternal lesson goes, the hunt continues by the predators to part the victim from the victim’s money or, of vastly greater value, the victim’s TIME.

Then what? Wake up, and … That is the subject of this Issue. I propose: three words to guide us in this sequence. The first reportedly is the initial word of Confucius’ Analects: it is the Chinese character, the word-picture, for this single idea: “Study”. That is Word One and First in order.

Word Two is from a unique entity in the history of our journey, “Big Blue”, the earliest important computer company, the original IBM. The corporate motto: “Think”.

Word Three: “Create”.

So, until I spot a Muse, I propose as we strive to lift and expand quality and creativity in digital media …

Study. Think. Create.

I have talked the talk. I must walk the walk. I must at least stagger …

I have studied an artistic form or pattern in digital arts for roughly twenty years. I call the form “spiral” or, perhaps, “recursive”, though neither term is fully accurate. The audience proceeds interactively through a computer screen world of mystery more than puzzle. (This theme, Mystery versus Puzzle, obsesses me increasingly in digital media and beyond [ah, if Wittgenstein thought less of “games” or puzzles and more of “mysteries”, he may have been a large contributor!]. More, I hope, on this steeply daunting topic anon).

Specifically, the audience travels through the computer-presented work in a circular or recursive or spiral pattern. Nearly twenty years ago this design paradigm first amazed me in Cyan’s Manhole. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manhole . As I worked with Cyan during the Myst–Riven Era, I enjoyed this earlier work, which I believe Rand Miller made for his daughter. Round one goes through the rabbit/ “man” hole in loops or laps and each such circulation affords one the thrill of discovering the rich and deep environmental world of the circulation. So, in the sense of widening discovery and artistic appreciation, I see the form or pattern as a spiral: both circular and progressively wider. As I said, this description is not fully accurate, but it is a start. I am waiting for a Muse after all.

Much later, I discovered the swooping joy of Zune Journey, a lovely work of promotion actually for a Microsoft product, that takes the spiral form zooming through the “Z-axis”. Manhole has a more third person viewer design to it; Zune Journey is first person and yearns, in its very elegant design (and spectacular art), to draw the audience deeper and deeper, wider and wider, faster and slower, backward and forward … The discovery of this aesthetic leap from Manhole to Zune Journey thrilled me, and it is yours to consider if you wish in Burning Shorts Issue 14: 2007 Ends with a Zune! http://www.burningshorts.com/index.php/2007/12/buring-shorts-issue-14-2007-ends-with-a-zune/ .

Most recently, I discovered the next such work I present here, but with a rebelliously large aim in mind: to focus attention on Study, Thought, and Creativity about forms and paradigms of interactive art. More on this briefly below. That next such work is appropriately named “Zoomquilt2”, at http://zoomquilt2.madmindworx.com/zoomquilt2.swf .

And Zoom one surely does. The work captivates; yet, I leave the rhapsody of artistic review and commentary, I hope, to many others. Here, I invite the joy of beholding Zoomquilt2 and its progression from earlier forms to be a catalyst for Study, Thought, and Creativity in the neglected forms and paradigms of interactive art.

I resist temptation to complain here of the Woeful Wasteland of form and paradigm in digital media arts from beginning to present. Rare exceptions appeared, like Electronic Arts Psychic Detective and other brilliant works from the Brothers LaFong, Michael Kaplan and John Sanborn, (as with their greatly controversial Dysson fiction). LaFong made form conquer content. They took the disfavored game form of “branching” design and reshaped branching to a single convergent end. When Nobel Laureate in Physics (he discovered “quarks”) Dr. Murray Gell-Mann heard from Mr. Kaplan of this design, Gell-Mann happily observed, “It heals itself !” Yes, yes it did.

Here, I shout in text that we must intensify attention to the forms of digital media and all post-linear arts! The endless disgorging of shooting gallery/firstperson-shooter forms, sports sims, and “free running” forms (like Sonic the Hedgehog) of games. Even with hybrid fantasy role playing/social networking as in the currently popular Worlds such as Warcraft and other multi-player online “games”, the forms are so stale they have crumbled, in my opinion, into generic monotony which does not tire the businesspeople who collect and savor the rich revenues of this monotony.

I shout in text here: we must intensify attention [attend intesively] to the forms of digital media, and I walk this walk not alone. No Muse yet. So, I must fuel and fan the flames of Burning Shorts with the human Muse. I resort to the supreme weapon of mass creativity, the Sonnets of William Shakespeare, as those same poems are presented online. Consider, then, my respect for this online form of presentation in service of the master: how artfully collected and annotated the Sonnets are at 

http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/60comm.htm

(I use Sonnet 60 as illustrative of this outstanding site.)

To paraphrase Dr. Gell-Mann, we have a chance “to heal” the disturbing condition of digital media arts by studying, thinking, and creating in the context of what the artist Shakespeare did with that uncompromising, complex, ornate form the sonnet. Merely to write basic English in this form surpasses my ability and that of most writers I know. Shakespeare elevated the sonnets to glory and mastery. Hallelujah! [I shout again in text.] His Sonnets are stars to behold for inspiration in search for fresh and enduring online forms of artistry.

Commerce seems to have no need to study, think, and create great new forms of digital media arts. The money pours in and in and in … Academia, in my experience, is barely ridiculous and tragically unfunny slapstick in its efforts in this and so many important areas of the humanities. So, as always, the hope rests in the emerging artist, and I rededicate this Burning Shorts and my efforts to the founding mission: study, think, and find those who create for the benefit of us all.

”So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late …” –Bob Dylan

Thrill and Terror …

 Yes, I felt thrill and terror when I learned of Stumbling: http://www.stumbleupon.com. Nowhere has this rare combination of feelings been shown than in the video which appeared as the first presented in the first/inaugural issue of this Burning Shorts, early 2006.

Our first video is a wordless, visual poem of thrill and terror. Like all great poetry, it reveals more in each new context. This Issue announces that we surely have arrived in a new context. Here, to begin again* and to prepare to address the new context, is our first video. Ever.

“Surf’s Up“

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-234319193104279565

So, to these feelings of thrill and terror, I add: Urgency … hence, the wisdom of Dylan and the warning of Reubens about seizing the moment in the words and painting above. (*Where have we been editorially? There are answers for another time. For now, this Issue reignites the engine, fires afterburner, and levers thrust vectors. One other factor: during our editorial hiatus, traffic to Burning Shorts continued to surge steeply as it has done since birth and during earlier periods of intense editorial attention. We took this as an invitation … And, with our “motto” and our Stumble upon SU, here we are.)

Urgency means: The moment is now. Our motto: ALWAYS READY/NEVER PREPARED. We must walk the talk.

When I first learned of StumbledUpon or “SU” as the site’s logo refers to it, I felt both thrill and terror. SU tracks web surfing and, as wonderful Pandora (www.pandora.com) does with music, SU uses an engine to interpret page landings, and then SU infers other “stumbles” or kindred pages, delivering them inexhaustibly for the audience to behold at each click of the mouse. Given my sour view of humanity generally, my terror was that this fascinating—yes, thrilling—site would fast swirl and suck down a vortex into moral and intellectual sewage.

Gloriously, my terror was absolutely unjustified and unfounded. Why? In an expression of epistemological genius, SU guides the visitor through a “questionaire”, an artfully crafted series of topics and subject choices that inform SU of the visitor’s web surfing as well as personal preferences. The questionaire shapes “stumbling” not downward into sewage but upward to surf across an endless, thrilling wave of stunning discovery.

I remain in humble awe of the wholeness and effectiveness of stumbling, and I submit it is of such potential importance, we reignite this enterprise, Burning Shorts, to add our support and tribute.

Once again: http://www.stumbleupon.com…and, we of Burning Shorts are once again ablaze.