Sunday, June 01, 2008

Getting Real (ity-Based Imaginative)

I've spent the majority of my waking brain cycles of the past 192 hours or so attempting to shift my internal executive committee away from the "I love it and it's awesome so let's do this," meta paradigm to, "What's something people will be interested in, what can I do to get them interested in it, and how exactly am I going to get from point A to B of people buying this in le real world." At first push it's like the green party shoving Sisyphean against a juggernaut of a society/politics terminally entrenched in its own reward-feedback systems.

"What? Who cares what the audience thinks. They're a lot of braindead, uncultured bathwater if they don't appreciate my Art. No, it's not 'just noise', it's polyrhythmic, Jakartan 43 tone variations over quantum-formant wave shifted late Romantic modalities with... Whatever, I'm not about to compromise my auteur genius for these iKids." Like sixth century Irish monks held up in the monastery as chaos breaks lose just beyond the walls, tossing bits of culture out at the barbarians for any poor soul out there who may care to listen.

But eventually, you graduate from airy-fairy college land or the price of gas hits $4.05 pg (went up four cents yesterday) or you have a heart attack or your precious superpower collapses and suddenly you feel the gears slipping. Nobody actually gives a shit about your Quixotic tour de force. Or your talent, or, even, your Great Ideas -- the only salient item is "How is this no-name going to make me money?" and/or "What can you give me that is worth parting me with my money?" And then you're scrambling. Grabbing friends by the collar crying for help as they walk away with internship acceptance letters, trillions of your debt, or the greening edge in future power. They frown a moment's regret, then turn away, on to bigger futures. Tiny, Balkan countries whose names, let alone capitals, you never bothered to learn in history class are pointing and laughing at you on this Skype thing while you're still trying to figure out how to use an internet forum. You're stumbling frantically, with bloodshot, twitching eyes, through all corners of the internet, trying to figure out how things came to this, and what the hell has been going on out there in the real world since whatever point in the worldline you departed to Neverland.

But the first rule in business is, as veteran home-builder and Brain State Technologyies entrepreneur from Arizona, Jim, told me at an interview for the neuro-technician position: Think positive. Think in terms of solutions to problems, not the problems of solutions. Not the ways something "can't" be done but the ways it "can", and then see which one is the optimum. Not lamenting how cosmically fucked we are but creatively and proactively working to discover and implement the path to the best possible world. You know, for ten dollars extra, you can make your plane trip one with neutral carbon impact?

So, with that in mind, I've been voyaging all throughout the physical and neon ocean to see what I can do here. I've been doing a lot of research and learning about Web 2.0, SEO (search engine optimization), and everything else. I've been checking out other videos and music, just trying to figure out what sort of content and delivery methods work, trying different approaches I started an account with Revver, a video sharing site similar to but infinitely better than Youtube. Revver "connects makers, sharers, and sponsors of internet video in a free and open marketplace that rewards them for doing what they do best." Revver essentially does "Adsense" for videos and also gives the sharers of the "Revverized" videos a percentage as a win-win incentive to help grow the network. I've been learning SEO, sharing and promoting like mad myself, I think I've checked out about a hundred different social networking and sharing sites over the past week, trying to find possible avenues. The Water Music video went over surprisingly well with environmental/green groups, and I got a lot of positive feedback there. With online communities like forums it's really all about getting the approval of the village elder or the first poster to say something positive, then everyone just jumps in line to praise you and virus your video around (or flame you into nonexistence if you fail).

I 'm also working on my Twilite Minotaur as well as Junk Magic's music site; setting up online stores so listeners can buy the tracks right there, promoting around MySpace and elsewhere. I'm planning to work on videos for the other Junk Magic songs we've got thus far.

I'm also helping my friend Nick with an awesome flash game he started in a narrative game design class (one I incidentally took before as well) centered around the idea of a game you actually need to listen to and use your ear to beat, unlike these meteorically popular "music games" which just boil down to button-press timing. We're hoping that if we can get a good solid set of levels fleshed out with the help of a good artist, we might try and get this into the Wii store.

At any rate, I, like the people I've shown Revver and the game to thus far, think there's some real potential.