connecting*the*dots

Tompkins and Adamson at the Austin airport

Well, it took me until today to be able to write my goodbye to Austin. Man, that town and conference kicks some serious ass. Some of my favorite moments from this past week:

• Bruce Sterling’s closing remarks on the state of the world. I’ve never been moved to tears by a public speaker before… I’ve a new favorite author.
• Running into Doc Searls after the Sterling presentation, and chatting with him for an hour about everything from our shared past in Jersey and Greensboro (my current residence) to our love of basketball to our vastly different experiences with the KKK (mine is through my brother’s documentary, you gotta ask Doc about his) and then hitting up a BBQ joint with Doc, Marc Canter, Nancy White and Jerry Michalski.
• Experiencing Kirby Dick’s This Film Is Not Yet Rated and Alan Berlinger’s Wide Awake at the greatest theatre experience I’ve ever come across, the Alamo Drafthouse.
• Adam Greenfield’s ubiquitous computing presentation. (Adam is so very articulate and cultured, I can only hope that experience design is taken more seriously within the world of ubicomp than it is within the web) and Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability presentation. Two very similar topics, yet two very different presentations.
• Finally meeting Tish Grier, Will Giese, Thomas Vander Wal, Peter Merholtz, Tara Hunt and Chris Messina in person after months of blogging, commenting, plazing and flickring each other (did I say flickring?). And yes, I can confirm without a doubt that missrogue and factoryjoe are the web 2.0 version of Bonnie and Clyde.
• Hitting up the town with Khoi, Chris, Ralph and Jeff. We were robbed of the SXSW Web Award for Best Green / Non-Profit site (mediamatters.org) damnit! So we drank more.
• I only ran into one former collegue/friend at the conference — Dan Saffer — but I think I made a handful of new ones along the way.

I had a blast. And I’m looking forward to next year already.

It’s not that Alan Berliner (writer, director, editor, producer) can’t sleep.

His creative clock has him on the graveyard shift. When the sun goes down and the shadows of the day disappear into the cloak of the night, the world pauses for him to search, discover, find meaning in it all. It’s his time to capture the previous day’s cultural images and remix them into his library of meaning.

It’s his time to create.

Some would say that Berliner is obsessive compulsive. Sure, maybe by the definition of a pedigree expert needing to prescribe another individual’s place in the world a fitting label and a career extending dose of pharma.

I’d argue that he sees the world through his eyes, which isn’t as common of a feat as one might surmise. Berliner takes the time to categorize nearly every sound, image and video that he comes across, and the evening is his obvious extention of his rebuild process; creating new context from ideas and producing his vision for the screen.

Wide Awake is his meta-documentary, exploring all of his flaws and brilliance, as it relates to his health, childhood, wife and newborn son (an especially insightful and beautiful display of viewing life through the eyes of our children).

Alan, if you ever come across this post, you gotta go play with flickr. You’ll love it.