Living in the Pod

One of the coolest parts of blogging is when you come
out with some outrageous, off-the-wall impossible
idea, half expecting a mocking, flame-fed rebound,
only to discover that there are lots of other weirdo’s out there thinking
along the exact same lines!

Such was the case when we blogged our dream of being
able to capture sound and video directly to a tiny, portable hard drive.

Our
original idea was to record video on to the tiny, portable
hard drive we are habitually carrying around these days, but it turns out the iPod
drive is not fast enough to capture raw, uncompressed video of decent
quality.

Thanks to the ever-resourceful Steve
Garfield, our attention
was drawn to the the soon-to-be-released FireStore
FS-4 Portable DTE
Recorder, which is not actually on sale yet but which is being introduced
in Boston tomorrow at a special party at Faneuil Hall. This little beauty
features a high speed 80 gig hard rive and uses something called Direct-to-Edit
Technology, which allow direct recording in QuickTime DV. Details of
the product are HERE and details of the party are HERE. (thanks Steve)

But this whole film and record on the fly business has
got us thinking about where all this podcasting and video blogging is
going. At the rate components are shrinking we are now only a few years
away from the point where a person can be wired invisibly as a mobile
human recording node, capturing virtually everything that person sees
and hears as they live their lives.

Further, it dawned on us that the mobile recording device
is only a temporary stop-gap until the transmitting technology and bandwidth
permit live feeds to a dedicated internet channel. With the equipment
available for, say, under a thousand dollars, and a channel directly
into the lives of each of these human nodes, a new media will be born,
and a new art form. The ultimate moblog.  A live feed from inside
the head of a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand lives scattered
across the globe.

Of course, most of the early adopters will feature absolutely
boring, charmless, dramaless lives which will be interesting only to
a handful of relatives or voyeurs. And inevitably, a new brand of reality
Porno will dominate a significant segment of the new channels.  But
we firmly believe that eventually a new breed of Media Star will emerge
with lives so gripping and bizarre that the raw footage of their every
move will constitute art of a completely new sort.

It is true, as several of the more perceptive souls
who have heard this still-evolving screed have noted, that EVERYONE’S
life is art. However, 99.9% of that art would be unwatchable to others,
or even to the protagonist, without serious editing and technological
enhancement. But here and there, undiscovered
gems buried in the rockpile of humanity, are people who were made for
this media.

They would be completely different than the insipid
human eye candy that pollute our screens today. They would not have to
be beautiful,
or glib, or graceful, because the camera would never be on them.  Rather, they would be the camera,
they would lead interesting lives, be surrounded by photogenic people, spectacular land or cityscapes
and dramatic situations, see things that few were privy to and sit in
on conversations with real weight and implications. The audience would
be at first the vanguard of the Blogosphere, but soon, though the convergence
of technology and fascination with the concept, popular lives will be channeled
into computer monitors, plasma TVs, PDAs, videophones and media players
around
the
world. Millions will be hooked.

Life imitating art? Art mimicking life? Technology eradicating
the line between the two? We know our own life will never make the New Media
cut, but what we wouldn’t give to watch the Bush Twins channel for a while….