FEED
In our new “digital ecology,” it seems we are all producers. Our capacity to create and feed information, content, images, and identities from and to one another is now an experience and extension of the body so ubiquitous that not to do it can leave you feeling hungry and alone. A blank screen is like an empty stomach: no feeds (RSS), no tubes (YOU), no culture.
We live in a world where anyone can be a content provider, and content is constantly “consumed,” millions of bytes of it. I know a little something about consumption; I’ve tended a parallel career in the food business for over twenty years, with more than a decade at the venerable Chez Panisse Restaurant. (I’m a recovering waitress who deeply appreciates the perfect peach, the just-foraged mushroom, and seared wild salmon with micro-arugula.) I learned about “slow food” from Alice Waters herself. The Slow Food Movement was founded on the principle that the industrialization of food was leading to the annihilation of food varieties and flavors. Wider distribution of products (content) to the hungry comes at the steep cost of transforming food into feed.
Slow foodists believe that culture is shared in the slowing-down process; going from raw to cooked within family and community is the ultimate expression of humanity. Grabbing fast, cheap, chemical-laden food on the run denies a just society, preying on rich and poor alike. We are left addicted, fat, and bereft—and we come back for more.
In the vast media garden, the big guys (Google, You Tube, Current, Yahoo) have been very concerned with the modes of distribution, controlling and monetizing the feeds. There is little doubt that soon their collective energy will turn to the modes of production; they will start being concerned about the food.
As a student of ethnopoetics at Oberlin, and then of film at San Francisco State, I came to understand a global hunger for stories, a communal need for the shared transmission of cultural knowledge and mystery. At BAVC, our young producers tell powerful stories from their own experiences, the quality and authenticity of their expression mediated through the newest digital tools, and more importantly, through processes that enable creative and social empowerment. I am consistently struck by the beat of their timelines, the pace of their narrations. I slow down for this kind of engagement—the many educated bodies in darkened computer classrooms, amidst the blue light of the projector and the sea of flat screens. We support and critique one another framed by the backdrop of an inner-city once-upon-a-time that reflects and unifies their diverse authority. I don’t want these kids uploading their stories before they are ready. But this is my problem, not theirs.
Before their voices mature, their content will be a web feed, an RSS, a key word, a tag; podcast, blogged, and googled beyond recognition. Will they be able to resist (and should they?) the anonymous and unencumbered re-articulation of their stories? This may be the essence of the feeding frenzy, where You Tube and its clones are the Image Superstores, the über-popular, democratized wasteland of video “feed.”
The slow foodists may have been on to something. Check this out: on their website, they say, “We consider ourselves co-producers, not consumers, because by being informed about how our food is produced, and actively supporting those who produce it, we become a part of and a partner in the production process.” It’s a revolution. Or a mission statement for a very cool media arts center. All I know? I am hungry for the stories, and even hungrier for the new ways of telling.
