Welcoming Speech

I had only a limited amount of time with the new incoming class this week, but if I had been the speaker at an opening ceremony here's the short speech I would have given.

Welcome to Hampshire College, I'm glad that you are here and maybe more importantly to you, oddly enough, I'm glad that I'm here. As a student you want all of the support workers here to feel that way and generally I think that's true, we do feel that way. We like both the college as an idea and we like you, Hampshire students, as clients, colleagues, and friends. Some of us have been Hampshire students ourselves and some of us even have had our own children become Hampshire students, so we're invested personally and emotionally. I think that amount of attachment to the college is unusual in support staff and you benefit directly because of it. So with that degree of attachment in mind I want to offer you as much insight and perspective as I can that bridges the daily troubles and the cosmic nature of life.

While Hampshire offers you great opportunities many other people will speak to you about that and yes, I will too, but later. Now I'm more interested in problem solving. Hampshire, as any institution, is not without problems and you will experience some here. What you do about them is what separates the amateurs from the pros: the people who drop away unhappy and the people who flourish and prosper. If you have a problem, not just a difficulty, but a real problem tell someone about it, but choose wisely the person to tell. In fact deciding who to tell will often lead to solving your problem. Talking to the wrong person is a diagnostic, a proof, that you don't know how to solve your problem, you might as well be talking to a wall and often it feels just that way. Hopefully the person you address will realize your situation and help you find the correct person to talk with and in doing so will direct you to the possibility of a real solution.

Telling someone you have a real problem helps you directly in two ways. First it's simply therapeutic. You'll feel better even if nothing changes and honestly that is the most frequent outcome. You've stated your case, some one has listened to you and it ends there – you walk away. Secondly no one else may even realize there is a problem. Again, even if nothing is resolved you've started the process of simply having people notice the situation. If several people speak up about the same problem it will be addressed, but each one of you have to vote with your actions to insure that eventuality. If you don't speak up the failure is on your part. This is a way all of you, working as a group, can steer the course of the college. It's how you, as a collective, have the most power and authority to direct the thinking and behavior of the institution to your benefit. By not speaking out you forfeit a great deal of your power as students. Think of it as citizen participation, an easy and powerful way to vote.

A related classic problem at Hampshire is exemplified by the phrase "the Hampshire run-around". That is being shuffled from one department to another with no real answer seemingly being given. The correction to that kind of situation is easy but not obvious. The problem lies not in incorrect answers, every one tries to tell you the right thing, but in an inappropriate question. I always ask staff not to immediately answer a students question, but first to validate the question. That takes a little more time in back and forth conversation, but in the end both of you will know more about each other, which is always a good thing and more about your real question. If you're asking the wrong question the answer is moot, it's always  going to be wrong. Who ever controls the question controls the answer, but remember that's you. You're the one asking the question. Be sure it's the question you want answered.

The next thing I need to tell you is a little sobering. You live in a dangerous demographic. Ten years from now one of you will be dead, mostly from car accidents.  What does that mean to you personally? Other than not getting into a car ever again, I think it means have a good time now. Think short term. If you have a crush on some one tell them. If you ever wanted to play the piano do it now. If you want to go to Paris do it now. Work hard. Play hard. Enjoy life fully because you may never have another chance. Wow.

But wait, here's the next actuarial fact – almost six of you will live to be close to one hundred years old. Not just barely alive, but active and healthful. What does that mean to you personally? I think it means plan for the long haul. Live a healthy life. Always think long term. Invest in yourself and the society in which you live. Don't take foolish risks. See the future ahead of you as a real event.

And of course, the rest of you are somewhere in the middle of all of that. A little of this a little of that all mixed together in an unknown proportion with unknowable outcomes.

So there's a dilemma for you to work on – the balance of life – between the short term and the long term, both are your reality, both situations should alter your thinking. However, the fact is that no one else has a clue about what to do either. This is the first time any of us remember being alive, well most of us. We're just making it up as we go along, with a little help from some books we recommend to each other. So finally I'll end as I started, welcome to the world, welcome to Hampshire College.

Would that help you as a new student understand more about Hampshire College and maybe life in general? Maybe, maybe not.

gunther

The Semester Starts

Tuesday morning the new incoming spring class showed up for a brief tour. They were great and I was very surprised at how many of them were transfer students. I'm always happy to see a transfer student because I know they, as a group, do very well at Hampshire. They have the advantage of already having left home and resolved those kind of emotional problems associated with departure. It is a drastic lifestyle change moving out of the only home you've ever know and in with a smorgasbord of strangers.

Just finding your way through the day can suddenly be quite daunting. Do you actually sit and watch your laundry or do  you walk away and hope it's still there when you come back. Who would want my wet laundry anyway? Isn't that creepy? So transfer students have done laundry already and maybe some have even paid an electric bill. That's always sobering – the cost of just living, not even doing anything. Having had that as a previous experience allows you to move on to more important problems and dilemmas. Today they all seemed happy and eager, ready for the semester to start.

It's hard to tell new students what Hampshire is really like. First, it's not what you think it is regardless of what you actually thought it was. It's subtler and more internal than you might imagine. No one here is in competition with anyone else, but you are always worried about the quality and quantity of your own work. That's the competition here, your work measured both in pounds and weightiness.

That same afternoon I shot a one hour long interview with a final semester Division III student who has been working in the labs. She spent last year in Afghanistan working on an unusual television program. In the process of the interview I discover she proposed the show herself to Afghani television, found funding, and while traveling around the country helped produce it. The show is like finding a new pop singer on American Idol, but with business entrepreneurs as the singers – they don't sing, they show their business plan. What's your business plan look like? Now she's documenting the results in a video documentary and describing the process in the form of a handbook (both on and off the web) for other countries to try out. I'm impressed.

Beginnings of semesters are always promising, but it's always nice to see at the same time real results of what Hampshire students do in the world and then start the semester.

Convergence: the great transformation

I talk a lot about Red camera and our relentless move into the newest future on the block – electron cinematography.  It used to be that convergence was thought of as the merging of your television with your computer, so in the end you had no television but your computer thought it was one. Yes, that's happening, but on the viewing end. It's what's happening at the other end of the media chain that's the big news – shooting and editing. Photography and video are fusing together, first in the physical form of DSLR cameras that shoot in high-definition video. 

Now my little Lumix still camera has always shot video and not too badly at that. My daughter bought one first and I was really surprised by the quality of the video and bought one for me too. OK, hers is sexier than mine and to be honest my wife bought it for trips and I just carry it and use it more. It's nice to have a camera small enough to always have it in your pocket. 

In the old days when I shot on film I always had a half-frame 35mm camera in my pocket. When I first arrived at Hampshire back in the 70's you could always tell who was a Hampshire student on the bus because they carried a camera and most likely a half-frame. The most popular one was a Bell&Howell with a wind-up spring drive. They had a nice wrist strap so you could have it in your hand all the time ready to shoot. That was the whole point of half-frame cameras – you could get 72 exposures on a single roll of 35mm film. Yep, we all shot a lot of film then and I still have all of that film. It's archival. Where will all of your digital images be forty years from now? One year from now?

An even further aside – an old girlfriend though I was a really interesting guy because I carried a hand gun. She was disappointed when she found out it was just a half-frame camera. No, it didn't last. It's hard to measure up to that kind of image when I'm just a normal guy after all.

But the big difference between the Lumix family of cameras and the new DLSR HD video cameras is that they shoot full frame HD (1920 x 1080) and you get all the controls of a still camera at the same time. Are they ready for prime-time? No, not yet, but they're moving along quickly and there's a big market for them. Red camera cancelled its models last year and did a remake on them because of this trend. Now theirs shoots stills also, but they've moved way beyond HD and work in the 2K to 8K image size range. They even have a 28K camera in the works, though I have no idea what you could do with that after you shoot images the size of a house.

But that's the trend, the fusion of still photo controls and sensibility, with the philosophy of film, in the body of a video camera. You end up in Final Cut Pro cutting your video that looks like film shot with a photo camera. That's real convergence. So what we see for the future is we're going to work like we've always wanted to, but at much higher resolutions in the field and in the edit room and then distribute on some kind of Blu-Ray disk format. Remember what Steve Jobs said about Blu-Ray – it's a big box of pain (or was it hurt)(turns out it was a bag, not a box). So we have still yet another frontier to cross before all of this is settled in and we're back to working in a way we will call usual.

gunther

History, perceptions and personal experience

Today is the 25th anniversary of the MacIntosh computer from way back in 1984. This video of Steve Jobs proudly showing it off is very revealing about the state of computing in those early days. What the Mac did then was not much compared to today, but the real comparison was against what other computers did at the time, which was even less with much more pain attached. We need to remind ourselves of that historical perspective. Don't compare history against today, but against the values and capabilities of the time. That's why they're all clapping so much.

My first computer was a Zeinth running some form of DOS. I bought it through the school and I had spent a lot of time asking people for recommendations. It was horrible. I had to have the manual on my lap all the time and I was always disappointed with the printing of my work. Using it was like trying to give yourself a migraine headache. Finally I just gave it back to the school and walked away. I didn't care how much money I'd spent on it I just wanted it to stop.

Then I got a Mac.

Wow, I did more work in that first week than I had the whole time I was using the Zenith and it was fun instead of painful. The world then divided into two groups – people who were using PCs and people who were using Macs. You felt sorry for the PC people who seemed to be self delusional about even noticing the differences. Over the years when Windows came out the PC people all said, see it's just like a Mac, but it wasn't, it wasn't at all, but they couldn't see it. Then when I asked for help with my computer I always got a twenty minute lecture why Macs were inferior to PCs. Finally it was too much and I started learning and doing repair work myself. It was easy and still fun. I no longer needed the IT people to yell at me. I was independent.

Over the intervening years we've all come to get along better, but there's still that perception gap, an inability to fully see that the user experience is primary, that it isn't at all about the hardware or the sever but the experience, that sophisticated software is actually easy to learn and fun to use, that a computer helps you more by doing less, that it's the work you make that's important not the machine, and finally that the best advise comes from your own understanding not from someone else's perceptions. My only wish is for you to have as much fun working as I do, but remember, it's all about the work and how you get there is up to you.

gunther

Red Camera – Red-Dot: Backing Into the Future

Hi, we're the people who run the media labs in the basement of the Hampshire College library. You seldom see us, in fact you may never have been in the labs at all, so you'll really never have seen us. That's too bad. We're here to help Hampshire students using media find their way. We don't care what your concentration is. We don't care what you're making. We don't even charge you a lab fee. We only want you to be able to do your work (it's all about the work) – and maybe push you a little in a couple of directions you might not have though of, but in the end we'll back off and let you do your thing.

I'm back to trying out working in this form of communication, not just as a blog, but specifically using Google's Blogger software. Our "official" Hampshire web pages have languished a little due to the fact the the web application, Red-Dot, hasn't been the easiest software to run. In fact we gave up on it over the summer and haven't been back since. I've found that it's not unusual for "enterprise" software to be intrinsically hard to use and I have the option that it all basically sucks. While that may seem a little harsh my normal day is spent using some of the best software in the world so it's hard to come down to the level of corporate enterprise software that has a bad time built into it. Life's too short to use lame software.

So what's the point of all of this? I'm trying to show you what we have to offer, what my thinking is, where we're going and also let you talk back and tell me if I'm wrong about stuff and find out what you're thinking about too.

So what's hot currently? Well, the running joke has been our raffle on when the first Hampshire student will shoot a Division III project using a Red Camera – a year from now, two years? It turns out it's this semester – it's now. Some joke huh? That's what we're experiencing. The realities are appearing faster than our theorizing, faster than what we would expect in this ongoing transition from older forms into the no-tape, ultra-high-definition, progressive, 24 fps, electron cinematography world. Yes, the world of media is stranger than we know, but maybe you are too.

gunther