[Jonathan Harris tells three stories about his fourth grade teacher, Baz

1. What make a great teacher?
2. How to engage your audience
3. On death]

"Fast and agile like a bird, slow and ruminant like a cow. Jonathan Harris says his new project is designed to be a narrative alternative to the data mayhem that fills the web.

Unlike his much-lauded past project, We Feel Fine, Harris says Cowbird is not about cataloguing diverse, fragmentary statements. He wants it to be a place where people can go deeply into the "ecstatic truth" of human life."

"Combining elements of computer science, architecture, statistics, storytelling and design, Jonathan Harris’s online projects create large-scale living portraits of the human world—portraits that both simplify and complicate our understanding of it. Jonathan discusses his recent work and poses intriguing questions about what kind of space the digital world is becoming and what that world is doing to us as individuals."

[I find myself on a Jonathan Harris binge about one a year. This time sparked by an article: http://designmind.frogdesign.com/articles/the-never-ending-story.html . Hadn't seen this video before.]

[The passage he reads in the video was originally posted here: http://www.number27.org/today.php?d=20100319 ]

Harris: "I think that’s something stories can do—prepare their way of finding meaning in this madness and bringing some order to the chaos.<br />
<br />
…creating a space that’s more about slowing down and contemplating and being introspective is a prerequisite for getting people to tell stories that have impact.<br />
<br />
…Cow Bird is basically a storytelling platform that people can use to tell stories online using photos, sound maps, timelines, videos, and casts of characters. It’s geared towards long-form narrative…when many different people tell stories, the system automatically finds connections between them and weaves them together into a kind of meta-story…The platform automatically analyzes all the text in your memory, figures out your cast of characters, and connects it to previous stories.<br />
<br />
…one of the pieces of this system I’ve been building is that to tell the story you have to dedicate it to somebody, which creates a gift economy of stories."

"When Jonathan Harris ( http://number27.org ) turned 30, he began a simple ritual of taking one photo a day and posting it to his website before going to sleep, along with a short story. He called this project, 'Today'.<br />
This is a short film about Jonathan's project, made a few weeks after he stopped it, by his friend, Scott Thrift: http://mssngpeces.com<br />
Jonathan's 'Today' project is viewable here:http://number27.org/today.php?age=30 "

"Cats are like a witness," he said. "There are cats everywhere, hiding in the shadows and staring out at you. In my life it seems that every time I do a dodgy thing there has been a cat. If you could see the whole biosphere, cats would be like surveillance."

"world becomes increasingly Gibsonian—Bigendian—when you’re reading the books. [examples]…<br />
<br />
So, if Gibson was originally writing “on top of Firefox”, he’s now writing on top of Twitter…<br />
<br />
Gibson’s been talking a lot lately about atemporality, this idea that we live in a sort of endless digital now. In “Zero History” we have an echo of “No Future”: everything compressed into the present…<br />
<br />
Network Realism is writing that is of & about network. It’s realism because it’s so close to our present reality. A realism that posits an increasingly 1:1 relationship btwn Fiction & World. A realtime link. & it’s networked because it lives in a place that’s that’s enabled by, & only recently made possible by, our tech connectedness…<br />
<br />
Future scholars of Network Realism will have to decide if info visualisation & projects like We Feel Fine fit…I suspect not, because I want to keep this to lit…but I suspect there’s a connection. Perhaps in data griotism or whatever we end up calling that."

"As I looked around at the faces, they looked like they all really believed it — that they really believed there was a father up there, waiting to welcome them home, and I couldn't decide what I thought of that. Part of me thought how sad it was that they have been brainwashed into thinking the point of this life is just to prepare for the life that comes next. I thought what a marvelous tool Christianity can be for keeping people tame and under control, because here were all of these people gleefully singing along and bobbing their heads to the fact that they will soon die and go to a better place than here, and that this expectation of a better life might keep them from really living this one. This seemed amazingly sad to me. But then another part of me felt that they were the wise ones to accept death so happily, regardless of where they got the idea."

""It seems like anytime I go on a trip with someone, we end up breaking up right afterwards," I said. "But for me, I don't think it's because the excitement is gone. For me I think it's something different. It's like, there are these gaps between everyone. Every couple, every set of siblings, every parent and child, every group of friends, and you don't really know how big or small the gap is, because there's all this fog in the gap so you can't see into it. You start to imagine a bridge in the gap, hiding in the fog, and you're pretty sure it's there and if you ever really needed to you could go across the bridge. But when you take a trip with someone, and spend so much time together, all that fog blows away, and you can finally see the gap for what it is. Sometimes the gap is much smaller than you thought it was, and you grow a lot closer. Sometimes it's much bigger than you thought, and then you grow apart or break up."…"

[via Sebastian who also sends this along: http://aliedwards.com/2009/05/working-through-creative-fear.html ]

"Eventually I discovered for myself the utterly simple prescription for creativity: Be intensely yourself. Don’t try to be outstanding; don’t try to be a success; don’t try to do pictures for others to look at - just please yourself." –Ralph Steiner

"If only everyone could learn to look more like themselves." —Jonathan Harris http://number27.org/today.php?d=20091026

"I asked him what was the secret to being a great teacher, and he said, “Well, you’ve gotta bring yourself to class every day. Your whole self. Your problems, your opinions, your stories—all of it. When you’re a full person, your students see you as an equal, and they trust you like they trust each other." —Jonathan Harris quoting his fourth grade teacher Ronald Bazarini http://number27.org/wb-baz.html

"A genius is the one most like himself." —Thelonious Monk
http://robertogreco.tumblr.com/post/75776357/

"Day three in Los(t) Angeles, still squinting at the too bright light, and still feeling, like the city itself, too scattered, too manicured, too perfect, too flawed, too impossible, too something. I see the well-primped young girls from far away, hoping to land a role. I see the well-preserved middle-aged women, hoping to land a man. I see the well-dressed suntanned men in collared shirts, sitting at streetside cafes like little Napoleons, smoking cigars and clutching their phones, hoping to make a deal. I see the dreamers, trying to get their dreams into someone else's screenplay. I see the normal people wearing baseball hats and sunglasses, trying to look more like celebrities, and the celebrities dressed the same way, trying to look more like normal people. If only everyone could learn to look more like themselves."

"This series of vignettes is based on a talk I gave on October 27, 2009, at UCLA, as part of the Mobile Media Lecture Series, organized by Casey Reas. It’s mostly about the current state of the digital world (as I see it), and some thoughts about what that world's future could be." [But it's not just about world building, it applies to all creative acts.]

"City ideas have to do with a particular moment in time, a scene, a movement, other people’s work, what critics say, or what’s happening in the zeitgeist. City ideas tend to be slick, sexy, smart, and savvy, like the people who live in cities. City ideas are often incremental improvements—small steps forward, usually in response to what your neighbor is doing or what you just read in the paper. City ideas, like cities, are fashionable. But fashions change quickly, so city ideas live and die on short cycles.<br />
<br />
The opposite of city ideas are “natural ideas”, which account for the big leaps forward and often appear to come from nowhere. These ideas come from nature, solitude, and meditation. They’re less concerned with how the world is, and more with how the world could and should be."

"I asked him what was the secret to being a great teacher, and he said, “Well, you’ve gotta bring yourself to class every day. Your whole self. Your problems, your opinions, your stories—all of it. When you’re a full person, your students see you as an equal, and they trust you like they trust each other.”" …<br />
<br />
"“I was trying to impress the audience with smart answers to life’s big questions,” he said. “It was all hype. But then I realized I didn’t have the answers to life’s big questions, and instead of writing plays that pretended to, I had to write plays that simply asked the right questions. I had to bring the audience up on stage with me, include them in the answering.”"

"[I]t was the best class I ever had anywhere at any age. It was basically a grab bag of things that people should know, but things that people often never end up learning… The class was a crash course in things that are usually picked up slowly and by accident, like lost coins, over the course of your life. This class was so memorable because it was so little like school, and so much like life. School is basically a way of keeping people occupied — a theatrical set piece designed to take up time and spit out consenting consumers.<br />
<br />
Any adult knows that what he really knows he did not learn in school. The gradual accumulation of experience is really how we learn. But unlike school, life is unpredictable, so it would be dangerous to leave the teaching of life to life. Just think how much would get left out of the curriculum, and how hard it would be to standardize tests!"

"Childhood drawings from 1989, labeled (in Mom's handwriting) "Favorite stuffed animals", photographed with matching subjects 20 years later. Clockwise from bottom left: "Fish", with matching fish; "Dog", with matching dog; "Bear", with matching bear; and "Bunny", with matching bunny mysteriously absent. Something terrible must have happened to Bunny."

"Sometimes I think about moving to a new town. I mean, leaving behind my old life and opening up shop in some new place, if not for the rest of my life then at least for a long time and in earnest. Big cities make this daydream easier to imagine and small towns harder — because, just as all happy families are alike but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, Tolstoy might agree that all big cities are alike, but every small town is strange in its own way. … I wondered what it would be like to move here, for the people in that coffee shop suddenly to become my friends, my potential future spouses, my future kids' teachers, my drinking buddies, my neighbors. Until you commit to a place, you can inhabit the anonymous nether-regions of ghostliness, floating into and out of coffee shops and communities without any compulsion to talk, tell stories, charm, make nice, or make friends. … I wonder how you finally learn to settle, and what that takes."

"These days, new things become old things so quickly, and novelty so easily disintegrates into triviality. With new ideas (especially beautiful ones), you want to spread them far and wide like gospel, so all can share the joy, but at the same time you want to keep them private and preserve their beauty so you can do something with them before they become trite."

"By anybody's count, I was having what one might call a Very Good Time. But as the day bore on, the tug of nature grew stronger and stronger on my heart, and all I could think about was getting back up into the mountains. I guess you could call my ailment escapism, but I wonder whether that tired quasi-Buddhist maxim of needing to learn to exist happily in any setting isn't at least a little bit bullshit. Places exert a stabilizing or stultifying energy upon us, and the force of that energy seems proportional to our sensitivity. Life is short, places abound, and some of us are sensitive, so why not find places that provide the kind of energy we need?"<br />
<br />
Also: "I prefer the housekeeping philosophy of keeping only those things that provide essential utility or essential nostalgia. It can make for a sparse house, depending on your sentimentality."

"I do a bit of that myself, but I keep what I perceive to be a more valuable, important morgue file: one made of the best writing on the web I come across. I take this list and revisit and reread it every 4 to 8 weeks. You could almost consider it a playlist of text: it’s very select (I artificially limit it to 10-15 articles), I typically read them all in one sitting, and the order and pacing is very purposeful. Most revolve around what it’s like to be making things in 2010, and a lot of the people that I respect the most have pieces in it. It’s almost a pep talk in text form. I visit it when I’m down, when I’m lazy, when I’m feeling the inertia take over."

"Here he presents "We Feel Fine," a project that scours blogs to collect the planet's emoti(c)ons, and the "Yahoo! Time Capsule," which preserves images, quotes and thoughts snapped up in 2006. And he premieres "Universe""

"Jonathan Harris distills the Web’s infinite avalanche of thoughts, facts, and feelings into exquisitely framed portraits of humanity."

"The following six maps deal with an array of major current world issues, from the serious to the seriously frivolous. They were developed for the INA by Jonathan Harris of Flaming Toast Productions."

""Phylotaxis", created for Seed by artist Jonathan Harris, illustrates the delicate balance between science and culture in our world."