Accused! ds106 on Trial

It’s been 12 or 13 years since its inception and I must say it’s kind of wild that ds106 won’t die. That’s gotta say something about how awesome it was/is/will be, right? I guess it really is #4life!

Few people have done more over the past decade to keep this course chugging along than the great Paul Bond. So, when Paul approached me with the idea of putting ds106 on trial at Reclaim Open, I was in. Paul and I have worked together over the years on a few classes, and ds106 was just one of them. We co-taught the True Crime course as well as the Internet Course at UMW, both of which were laboratory experiments in the spirit of the hallowed ds106. So when Paul framed the session as a trial we immediately went back to our True Crime roots.

Paul decided to frame the session as a sensational trial using the Aesthetic of the colonial American trials often predicated on a public display of shame and condemnation. Paul wrote the script, created the awesome trial poster above, and essentially did all the work. He was to be the accused, Martha Burtis the ornery judge, I was type-cast as the boisterous prosecutor, and the audience played the jury. It was really quite fun.

To promote the talk, Paul not only hung the poster in the main conference area during the art fair, but we also staged a short, impromptu performance wherein Paul was seated near the poster and I gathered the attention of the group loudly and started listing his crimes against ds106, while imploring attendees to join the session later that day to find this miscreant guilty of….

• The infiltration and usurpation of the ds106 course
• Unauthorized coat-tail riding
• Slothfulness in the presence of an evolving web
• Remixing without a license
• Engaging in online pirate radio broadcasts
• Promoting “blogging” and other vulgar forms of authorship
• Enabling cultural commentary through media manipulation
• Behavior unbecoming of a well ordered web

I mean, that list of abuses is pretty awesome, no? Paul is pretty awesome, and once again he delivers for ds106 because he’s definitely guilty of being #4life! You can see the entire session below:

Both the impromptu public shaming and the official trial were loose, rough, and a total blast, much in the spirit of ds106. But what was even cooler was the response from the audience calling for more art, dammit. It was even floated that the whole trial was just a ruse to re-engage some of the original ds106 crew to get the band back together. I can neither confirm nor deny any of this, but I will say after seeing what Michael Branson Smith did with the A.I. Levine session at Reclaim Open Paul, Martha, and I decided we are interested in creating a class for Spring 2024 that would essentially be a ds106 course focused on AI. Any folks interested in collaborating on such a project? Any schools willing to throw a course at it? Or have us teach a course for your campus? Let us know.

Dr. Oblivion!

A ds106 focused on AI means we may be able to coax Dr. oblivion out of hiding to run this course. He was always a staunch champion of interrogating the contested future of digital storytelling, so it may be high time!

It’s Father’s Day, and I want my cake!

In Italy Father’s Day is recognized on St.Joseph’s saint day, which is today. And I have to say given Joseph’s role in Jesus’s birth, there’s a strange subtext to the day here Anyway, I spend much of both the Italian and American Father’s Day quoting from the first episode of the horror omnibus Creepshow (1982), which is appropriately called “Father’s Day.” It’s a story of a wealthy, homicidal patriarch that is murdered by his daughter after having her lover killed in his ongoing campaign to control her love life. It’s an awesome episode, and everything is narrated by the bored, dissolute heirs of this fortune while they’re waiting for their great aunt Bediliah to arrive to celebrate Father’s Day, which happens to be 7 years after she murdered the pater familia.

Creepshow: “I want my Cake, Bediliah”

The line repeated throughout the episode is by the tyrannical patriarch, who belligerently cries, “I want my cake!” while banging the table with his cane. And that’s what I find myself saying again and again on this hallowed day. I often preface this demand with some context, “It’s Father’s Day, and I want my cake!” And once I get it I say, “It’s Father’s day, and I got my cake,” the latter being a reference to the end of that episode, but no spoilers here. Anyway, I’m not sure why Creepshow continues to be a huge touchstone for me on a regular basis 40+ years later, but it is. The other thing I find myself exclaiming histrionically when the occasion calls for it is “I can hold my breath for a long time!” which is a quote from the third episode of Creepshow called “Something to Tide You Over.” You just have to see that one, which is my all-time favorite.

Creepshow: Lost Reception

Also, while we’re on the subject of Creepshow, it’s worth noting the “Father’s Day” episode also features a young Ed Harris doing an impressive series of disco dance moves:

A Young Ed Harris doing the sprinkler move

I love Creepshow, and all these GIFs were actually taken from the bava archive during the heady days of the Summer of Oblivion. I went on a little Creepshow tear in June 2011, and the tale of the blog confirms that. Speaking of GIFs, I’ve been watching a bunch of Yasujiro Ozu‘s films recently, and I got an idea for an interesting GIF project for my house. I ordered the Blu-ray and will be trying to make really high quality GIFs from Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon (1962) because I think that film is one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, and like the first episode of Creepshow, it is all about fatherhood I’ll try and write about my Ozu GIF project once a figure a few things out, but until then 2011 is a little something to tide you over