Greetings humans, Monki here, partially hungover from my first night at SXSW 2009.
This has the makings of a fantastic year at SXSW. The crowds seem a bit less nuts and the people have all been pretty laid back so far. Hopefully that will keep up. Oh, and the free drinks have been flowing. Only at SXSW will you find a party called "Pastries and Pasties!" Gotta love that. Nothing better than boobs and cupcakes.
This is the first year I've been a part of the interactive portion of SXSW as well. I've been graced with a gold badge so I can get in to all sorts of trouble...interactive trouble. It's going to be interesting hitting the interactive stuff during the day and the film stuff at night. I can imagine this will be an exhausting week by the end of it all.
My first day of SXSW 09 started with a panel on web-design. It could have been dull, but the presenter used some interesting metaphors to compare the evolution of web design to the evolution of film. He posited that we are still in the infancy of design and that the majority of websites out there are just "dead trees," a reference to the newspaper industry.
Using clips from Georges Melies' "A Trip to the Moon" he went on to show how the first couple of decades of film were pretty much just stage plays put to tape, much like how the majority of internet sites are just digital newspapers. He then showed off a clip from "Birth of a Nation" to show how Griffith took new tools (cross cutting, close-ups, etc.) and put them all together to make something new and unique. An interesting idea and a pretty sweet way to make something like web design a bit less dull. Not too shabby for my first interactive event at a SXSW.
From there I went over to a panel hosted by a group that creates ARGs (Alternate Reality Games) for community and corporate events. I've been a big ARG fan and I'm always curious to see these things work.
The Go Game (the group presenting this panel) has actually created an ARG that anyone can participate in during SXSW. I've only skimmed the surface so far of it, but it involves challenges, scavenger hunt missions and even face to face confrontations with strangers! Awesome. It's called "Running with SXSWissors" and you can play along right here. You earn points as you do missions and the top five folks at the end of the game will get a free badge to next year's SXSW Interactive festival. Not bad at all. You can play along with your web-enabled phone wherever you are. If you do register, make sure you let them know that Monki referred you.
After all those shenanigans, I finally caught my first film. I headed towards the Alamo Ritz to check out "New World Order."
New World Order is a documentary about the guys who dare to question what most people would call "reality." This is a film about the 911 "Truthers," the conspiracy theorists, the Alex Jones' of the world...and what do you know, Alex Jones is all over this movie.
Alex Jones is either a hero or a nutjob depending on who you are talking to. If you haven't heard his daily radio show on the internet, or his local show here in Austin, you've probably unknowingly seen him in films like Waking Life or A Scanner Darkly. (Animated versions of him at least.) He is of the "9/11 was an inside job." ilk. A hugely polarizing character.
This a documentary in the purist sense of the word and I thought it was fantastic. The filmmakers could have easily made this a hokey, "look at these nuts" type of film, but instead they present their characters with an unbiased take. I can imagine the difficulty in creating a balanced film with this subject matter, but these guys pulled it off.
Andrew Neel and Luke Meyer, the directors, are also the guys behind the fantastic film "Darkon," which was a big SXSW hit a few years ago. Before the film I was curious about their choice of subject matter for this one, but during the Q&A they mentioned how, like the LARPers featured in Darkon, the "Truthers" are really just another sub-culture of people, so it wasn't as big of a jump as most thought it was. Makes sense to me.
Check this one out if you get a chance. If anything, for one scene between a husband and wife singing a hymn while footage of 9/11 rolls in the background on a television. A very surreal moment.
From there I went on a whirlwind of Mexican food and various alcohols before ending up on a couch next to Jason Segal. Strange. And then in a drunken genius moment I think I was a dick to Paul Rudd. So, Paul Rudd, if you are reading this, I apologize for being a dick. My bad.
Alright folks, tons more SXSW to come, until next time, back up the tree I go!
-Monki
