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I was goaded into going to Burning Man this year with an offer to edit the Daily Playa, a camp-produced newspaper. Of course I accepted, and it didn’t take long for me to start scheming up an escape from the tiny rectangles of InDesign, &c. Of course the solution involves receipts and a 4x6 photo printer.

Yesterday, my co-conspirators came over and we mocked up a test page:

This is a photograph of an 11x17 sheet of paper, with patafix-attached receipts and photos. Here’s Kate on my floor starting to come to terms with the New World Order:

For Aaron, the core insight came all at once:

He was holding a 4x6 photo printout trying to understand how many columns it would span, and asked in despair, finding the photos an awkward 2.6 columns, “how do we make them smaller?” When I told him he could cut the photo, only then did the Shackles of the Screen let up their glowing hold and the whole world of possibilities opened up to him—you didn’t need permission (“features”) from a software package to do things, you could just do them. Aaron then went straight to the receipt printer and typed up a feature on “the affordances of physical media.” 

A few puzzles remain for this project (headlines, editing, &c), but doing layout together was lots of fun—much more so than any (of the many!) InDesign session I’ve led[0]. 

* * *

This morning I had a Skype session with a collaborator, and since I still had the photo & receipt printers set up, I used them to keep a physical “trace” of the call:

As soon as I hung this up it was obvious that I should have recorded the call and used the receipt as a non-linear laser-scrubber into the audio. It’s interesting to consider how my notes differ from a transcript, and what sorts of in-betweens might be possible—maybe a highlighted transcript would be ideal? Or a transcript with markers (that could just be sharpie circles/underlines)?

In any case, I’m getting very excited about ditching the filesystem paradigm (in the dust of our escape from the tiny rectangle). 

-RMO

[0] It was also fun because there was a bagel baking session. That’s where the subject of this e-mail comes from—bagels are delicious because they’re “half-baked.” (Before baking, they should be boiled in malt-laden water.) I’m not sure if the baking/boiling metaphor has any meaning w/r/t physical/virtual, but the water makes the whole process sticky and delicious. 

There are a few bagels left over. If anyone is up early in the Mission and wants to join, I am hosting 8:30am breakfasts all week (391 Valencia, at 15th).