Boing Boing is just about my favorite site. The site, which was a blog long before somebody ever coined that term, used to use the most amazing tagline in their logo. Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things. And my gosh that is actually an understatement. Clearly "geek" focused, you can get your fill on comic books, steam punk, tons of posts about art, alternative lifestyles, and science articles that would make DarkSyde proud. Boing Boing flat out rocks!
With that said I assume everybody by now has seen pics of OWS from Thursday with 99% projected on the side of the Verizon building. Well one of the co-founders of Boing Boing, Xeni Jardin tracked down the guy that made it happen (Mark Read) and conducted a long interview with him. Heck Rachel Maddow picked up the story and interviewed him on her show last night (the video is here).
But the pictures don't really convey the complete message that he ran in a loop for most of the night.* It was:
99% / MIC CHECK! / LOOK AROUND / YOU ARE A PART / OF A GLOBAL UPRISING / WE ARE A CRY / FROM THE HEART / OF THE WORLD / WE ARE UNSTOPPABLE / ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE / HAPPY BIRTHDAY / #OCCUPY MOVEMENT / OCCUPY WALL STREET / list of cities, states and countries / OCCUPY EARTH / WE ARE WINNING / IT IS THE BEGINNING OF THE BEGINNING / DO NOT BE AFRAID / LOVE.
When I read that tears start to well up. A summary of the interview with Mark and some of my thoughts afterwords.
*And if the video I embed below the fold is any indication, with less than 2,000 views, most of you have not seen it.
See nobody really knew this was going to happen. As somebody said in the comment section of the Boing Boing article:
I was on the bridge last night, holding my LED candle. And to turn and see that projection, the "bat-signal", was seriously the best, most uplifting thing ever. You heard cheers go up as group after group got to the point on the bridge where you could see it, and section after section experienced the wonder of it, and the pride of being part of something so much bigger than the individual.
Now I strongly suggest you read the entire interview, but I'll try to summarize it.
Mark Read was at a OWS Action Coordination Meeting several weeks ago where the group was talking about what they were going to do on the 17th. As the meeting ended a guy named Hero, who didn't get a chance to speak, said to Mark, "We need a bat-signal. The 99%." Mark said he could do that (he says in the interview he had no clue how he was going to do it at the time).
The Verizon building was quickly selected, cause as Mark says:
I knew I wanted to throw it on the Verizon Building. Everyone who lives in New York has looked at that big monolithic structure. For some of us, every time we look at it we think of how cool it would be as a projection surface.
But he had no idea where he was going to get a projection system or the software to run it. It didn't take long. Folks at Dawn of Man said here is our Sony 12K Lumen Projector and all the software you need.
The next problem was where would he set-up the projection system? Now this is both a very cool and sad part of the story. As a non-New Yorker I'd kind of assume somebody living across the street from a huge Verizon building in this part of the city, well they might be part of the 1%. This is actually what Mark found when he was putting posters up trying to find a location:
Opposite the Verizon building, there is a bunch of city housing. Subsidized, rent-controlled. There's a lack of services, lights are out in the hallways, the housing feels like jails, like prisons. I walked around, and put up signs in there offering money to rent out an apartment for a few hours.
[.....]
Her name was Denise Vega. She lived on the 16th floor. Single, working mom, mother of three.
I spoke with her on the phone, and a few days later went over and met her. I told her what I wanted to do, and she was enthused. The more I described, the more excited she got.
Her parting words were, "let's do this."
She wouldn't take my money. That was the day of the eviction of Zuccotti, the same day. And she'd been listening to the news all day, she saw everything that had happened.
"I can't charge you money, this is for the people," she said.
[.....]
She was in there tonight with her 3 daughters, 2 sisters. The NYPD started snooping around down on the ground while the projections were up, it was clear where we were projecting from, and inside it was festive.
"If they want to come up they're gonna need a warrant!," her family was saying. "If they ask us, well, we don't know what they are talking about!
They might have had tens of thousands dollars in hardware and equipment, but the projection system was set-up/put in place with duct tape and a broom stick. I guess it is true, when there is a will there is a way. Just so fucking cool across the board.
When asked where the copy came from, he said he just wrote it. Taking phrases, like "Mic Check!" that were being used with OWS. But his favorite line is also my favorite:
"It's the beginning of the beginning." I loved that one. So frequently, things happen in the world that make it feel like we're at the beginning of the end. But "the beginning of the beginning," what a radically optimistic statement that is.
For "old school" R.E.M. fans you might recall their fourth album Life's Rich Pageant opens with the song "Begin the Begin," which Michael Stipe has called "a song of personal, political activism," has a refrain that says:
Lets begin again, begin the begin, lets being again.
When I first read those words, "It's the beginning of the beginning" this R.E.M. song was the first thing I thought of, heck it has been on repeat the entire time I've been writing this Diary. It has "officially" become the soundtrack of OSW for me.
Now I will end this Dairy with a few of the comments left on the Boing Boing story, cause they are better than anything I can write:
She wouldn't take my money.
Throughout the United States a million conservative heads just exploded.
Cops have their military LRAD for projecting audio, #OWS has the bat-signal for projecting ideas.
I'm 81 years old and tears welled up in my eyes from the emotion of what this act of courage, love and hope by our progeny says to me and my generation. Bravo!!
Fist in the air, tears in my eyes. Fuck yes.
Awesome. I don't know how he resisted making huge shadow puppets.
Anyone else get this new feeling of global goosbeumps? I swear I could almost FEEL the energy running from those words to the people's hearts to mine and back again..... "the beginning of the beginning." Wonderful.
"The medium is the message" has more meaning now than ever.
Bee yoot. Using the power of a giant corporate surface against itself is so Zen.
That was made of photons and win.
And because I said Boing Boing is a "geeky" site, you get comments like this (and there were a lot of them BTW), which I hope puts a smile on your face this Saturday morning, cause the guy was serious and it started a long conversation on this topic.
I think something like this could be done a lot easier with lasers, you can't project a full color video with lasers like you would be able to do with this projector, but lasers are brighter and can thus project on to surfaces a standard LCD or DLP projector can't do clearly.
A green diode laser with an X-Y rig and a computer would be a lot smaller than the DLP projector used here, some systems could even fit in a backpack, imagine going from building to building, as soon as the police think they know where you're set up, you're a few blocks away. Better yet, how bout an X-Y laser rig mounted on a multicopter, fly from building to building.
It is the beginning of the beginning .... do not be afraid .... love!!!!!!!