Video Games

BAKU
Fall 2014

Video Games
by James Panero

Loren Munk is New York's guerrilla film-maker supreme.

One day, when art historians take stock of the 2008 Whitney Biennial, the first artist to come to mind won’t be someone who appeared in the exhibition. It will be the artist who was thrown out of the exhibition for recording it with a tiny digital camera and posting it on YouTube. “The ironic part is they can film you with their security cameras, and you don’t give them permission for that, but God forbid you are there getting pictures of the art,” reflects this social media provocateur.

Working under the pseudonym James Kalm, since 2006 Loren Munk has made more than 1,000 videos just like 2008 Whitney Biennial Busted. They all start the same way: a shaky glimpse of a bike locked on a New York street, a pan to a gallery or museum door and a heavy-breathing voice-over announcing, “This is James Kalm, the guy on the bike, welcoming you to another half-assed production.” Then with a cut, or maybe not, we watch in point-of-view style as the camera takes us in, glances around and moves in closer to look at individual works on display. All the while, a wry voice leads us through, giving us first impressions, striking up conversations and sometimes striking out with gallery security. “People told me this is the stupidest thing they’d ever heard of,” Munk says of when he first explained his video project to friends. “I heard that, and I said, ‘Man, I’ve hit a gold mine!’”

The reason art historians of the 2008 Whitney Biennial will one day think of Munk is that, frankly, there is no better record of the exhibition than his half- hour-plus video walkthrough. Munk posts everything he films free on YouTube, either as the ‘James Kalm Report’ or ‘James Kalm Rough Cut’, and if you can’t remember what appeared to the right of the lift on the fifth floor, just tune in. Beyond that, his 2008 reportage has become something of a turning-point for a form of radical art documentation. “If you are showing exciting art that has cultural significance, by discriminating against all those people who can’t see it in person, you are holding back society,” says Munk.

Back in 2008 the Whitney thought otherwise. “Excuse me, sir,” says a guard fve minutes into the clip. “They are telling me right now that you are using that camera. Sir, if you don’t stop now, they are going to come over here and take you out of the building. OK?”

“They are going to take me out of the building?” Munk asks.

“Turn it off, please. The camera. Last time I ask you.”

Next thing we see is Munk’s feet being escorted down the stairs, as he explains to the viewer how he was just threatened with a lawsuit and copyright infringement. “This is James Kalm getting kicked out of the 2008 Whitney Biennial,” he concludes, offering his trademark sign-off: “Thanks, Kate,” a nod to his wife. He later returns to film four more segments, vowing to leave his camera on while declaring it a performance piece called The Camera is Off.

“That ended up being one of the biggest videos up to that point,” Munk says. Far from landing him in court, the Whitney linked to it and soon started posting their own YouTube videos. Today, the Whitney invites Munk to all its press previews and director Adam Weinberg comes over and shakes his hand. “It has gone from something they were throwing me out for six years ago, to something they now view as valid.”

Compared to the polished look of TV news, Munk’s videos take a bit of getting used to, but the art world is coming round to the 62-year-old performance documentarian. His appearance at a gallery opening has become a sign of critical arrival, and gallerists now know who to look for: a tall, paint- splattered balding man wearing an old bike helmet, the only person in the room whispering into a camera.

His videos are equally distinctive. Without ever showing the host’s face, they are less like classic documentary and more like going to an art opening inside the head of a knowledgeable friend. “I want it to be closer to the way someone really experiences the art scene, grabbing the artist, swinging back, zooming in, with their buddy and a couple of beers.”

As part of his practice, rain or shine, Munk bikes nearly everywhere from his 353sq m loft in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The audible breathing, the shakiness, are there because he’s just pedaled miles through busy streets, over the Brooklyn Bridge, and doesn’t wait to catch his breath, always filming in one take. “The immediacy is important,” he says. “It is changing the way people look at video. But people still say, ‘Your shaking is making me nauseous and your commentary is idiotic’.” But as we have grown used to the look of video in the smartphone era, Munk’s work now seems ahead of its time.

As the internet has leveled the field of arts journalism and newspapers have cut back on coverage, a freelancer with an online following can also hold increasing sway. By the last count, more than three million viewers have logged on to see Munk’s YouTube videos. His audience is growing internationally, too. “I’ve got people keeping up with me in the UAE, in Morocco, in China,” says Munk. “I get these letters from artists in Algeria saying, ‘I love your videos, will you look at my website?’” Even a school of Papulankutja aboriginal people in the outback of Australia tunes in. “We are 500 miles from the next big town,” their teacher emailed Munk, “but my kids can feel like they are part of the Williamsburg art scene” – referring to one of the alternative Brooklyn neighborhoods, like Bushwick, that Munk documents as often as he does Chelsea.

Loren Munk in his studio (Todd Heisler/The New York Times)

Today Munk covers every corner of the New York art scene with tireless energy but never for any financial gain (he turns down offers of online advertising). “Munk’s obsession with art, art history and the New York art world is evidently more than one person can handle. So he created James Kalm,” Roberta Smith, the chief critic of The New York Times, wrote in 2011. She went on to praise him for giving “dizzying visual expression to some of what lures the art-driven to the city: the sense of possibility in the air and of history beneath our feet.”

Anyone can film a gallery opening but Munk’s films are different in that they have attracted a particular community and this has led him to find new artists, curators, critics, collectors and gallerists who have been excited by his work. 

“A key difference for Loren is the community that has formed around his video works,” says Hrag Vartanian, the editor of the Brooklyn-based arts magazine Hyperallergic, who as a curator included Munk in an exhibition of social-media art in 2010. “His generosity in his video work is clear, he doesn't have to be doing this but he does. Though, I do think doing the videos did help him reestablish himself on the art scene. All artists go through ebbs and flows in their career, and while some artists may complain when their careers dip, Loren found new ways to think about art and share his passion through video.”

If there’s a context for Munk’s films, it’s that they share something with the handheld clips coming out of war zones, and something with our culture’s obsessive digital documentation. Other artists have used YouTube but little else matches the breadth of Munk’s work.

So where will his videos end up? Probably not as something sold in a gallery, unlike an earlier generation of video art. “The old model is the opposite,” says Munk of video from the pre-internet age. “They were doing something in response to television, using technology in a hermetic, esoteric way, and you can access it only if you jump through the hoops to see it in a gallery.”

The videos have also reinvigorated Munk’s first passion for painting and have already paid off for him through his paintings, which consist of complex diagrams, maps and flowcharts of the art world. “He’s really synthesized a lot of things in his practice,” says Nick Lawrence, gallerist at Chelsea’s Freight and Volume, who began representing Munk two years ago. “There’s something unjaded and pure about it, and it shows up in his paintings. There’s a certain against-the- grain, countercultural approach in what he covers, how he covers it, in his technique. And his paintings are painted with an obsessive quality. The lines that connect in his paintings are exactly how he zigzags around the room at an opening. They are very spontaneous, very provisional.”

Munk agrees: “Often that’s the best way. I just walk through the doors and say, ‘This is pretty cool,’ and I just turn on the video and let it go.”

expanded from the print edition

Net Gains

New York's Flatiron district, main street of Silicon Alley.

CITY JOURNAL
Winter 2014

Net Gains
by James Panero

Silicon Alley rises again.

Starting up in 2011 as a cross between a for-profit vocational school and a caffeinated tech clubhouse—with open co-working space mixed with classrooms, break rooms, and broadcasting studios—General Assembly now has campuses spanning nine cities on four continents, all offering a “pragmatic and multidisciplinary education at the intersection of technology, design, and business.” In New York, where it occupies two loft floors along the former Ladies’ Mile at 21st Street on either side of Broadway, GA is a feeder school for the city’s burgeoning tech industry. Much like the 34,000-member New York Tech Meetup, a nonprofit organization that hosts monthly events at New York University, and Techstars NYC, a mentorship and seed accelerator for new tech firms, GA seeks to strengthen network ties within the New York tech community, while providing an environment entirely unlike the sprawling office parks of Silicon Valley.

“What makes New York so interesting as a tech hub is that technology and design are now intersecting with so many different industries,” says Matthew Brimer, GA’s 27-year-old founding partner. “New York is already such a big commercial hub,” he says. “So many industries have amazing creative business talent. Take a place that is super dense with these different types of talent, bring those people together, and they can start to transform these different industries—that’s a perfect petri dish for interesting stuff to happen.”

Gotham’s tech sector keeps finding ways to make interesting stuff happen, showing surprising resilience even as the New York economy has had its ups and downs during the Bloomberg years. Since 2007, billions of dollars have poured into New York’s “Silicon Alley,” which recently vaulted ahead of the greater Boston area to become the nation’s second-largest tech hub behind California’s Silicon Valley. For a city that has long relied on its financial industry to spur growth and innovation, the resurgence of the tech sector is welcome news.

In just a few years, “New York’s tech sector has emerged as an increasingly powerful economic driver for the city,” wrote authors Jonathan Bowles and David Giles in “New Tech City,” a May 2012 report for the Center for an Urban Future. “At a time when few other industries were growing in New York, more than a thousand new tech start-ups were formed in the city.” This influx of capital and tech talent has pumped new life into New York City’s economy. Data from the New York City Economic Development Corporation (EDC) showed that there were 90,273 people working at 7,147 high-tech companies in New York in 2010—a 30 percent increase from 2005. Using the Bloomberg Technology Summit’s broader definition of a “tech/information sector,” New York has 262,000 workers in the industry, accounting for $30 billion in wages—and the sector added 11,000 workers in 2012.

According to a MoneyTree report published by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, the New York area also saw a 32 percent jump in venture-capital deals from 2007 to 2011—the only increase for any U.S. region. Some of these start-ups have already been acquired by larger firms; the microblogging platform Tumblr, for example, founded in 2007 and based on East 21st Street, gained $125 million in funding before being purchased last year by Yahoo for $1.1 billion. Others continue to raise funds as private companies: the online retailer Fab.com, founded in 2010 and based in Greenwich Village, has raised $336 million; the online shopping club Gilt Groupe, founded in 2007 and based in Midtown South, raised $221 million; the online medical-scheduling service ZocDoc, founded in 2007 and based in SoHo, raised $95 million; the location-based social-networking site Foursquare, founded in 2009 and based in SoHo, raised $112 million; and the arts and crafts commerce platform Etsy, founded in 2005 and based in Dumbo, raised $91.7 million. Chelsea-based virtual-journalism firm BuzzFeed raised $46 million.

It’s not the first time that tech has surged in New York, but this new crop of tech entrepreneurs is making smart use of an old tool—the brick-and-mortar density that has nurtured entrepreneurship in the city since the early eighteenth century. The urban experience promotes unplanned encounters, often resulting in a mutually enriching phenomenon known as “knowledge spillover.” Multiple industries tie into the city’s tech revival: advertising, fashion, publishing, retail, art and culture, finance, and food constantly retool their traditional businesses with online technology. Unlike the hardware and computational focus of West Coast tech, Silicon Alley is focused on exploiting synergies among the entrepreneurs, artists, developers, and dreamers who live and work in the Big Apple.

Today, the tech landscape is different from in the 1990s, in ways that favor New York City’s native strengths. In the past, Silicon Alley relied heavily on expensive traditional advertising campaigns to sell products that often required millions of dollars—for everything from server racks to programmers—just to get up and running. But many of the components that start-ups need today are readily available, in part because the commercial Internet has evolved since those pioneering early days. Coding can be done remotely, with work bid out to programmers in India and former Eastern Bloc nations. Inexpensive, off-the-shelf solutions exist for a variety of once-costly and challenging problems. A viable app can be created in weeks for under six figures. Indeed, apps, which provide virtual solutions to real-world problems, neatly illustrate New York’s trademark blend of creativity, commerce, and technology. It’s no surprise that apps have been a particular focus of this latest iteration of Silicon Alley.

For years, critics have predicted that technology—particularly communications technology—would replace the face-to-face interactions that city life facilitates. Yet in a 1996 paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Jess Gaspar and Edward Glaeser (a City Journalcontributing editor) showed how historical advances in communications technology have, in fact, increased the need for direct human contact. The telephone, for example, extended a person’s network of connections, which, in turn, fed the need for more face-to-face interactions. Further improvements to communications technology, Gaspar and Glaeser concluded, would foster ever-larger networks, leading to ever more face-to-face exchanges. These days, technological advances have cut down on development costs and vastly expanded connectivity, and what Gaspar and Glaeser prophesied in 1996 is coming to pass in Silicon Alley.

Indeed, if the nineteenth century saw New York mapped out in two dimensions, through the Commissioner’s Plan of 1811, and the twentieth century saw New York take on a third dimension, through the development of the skyscraper, the twenty-first century, through the Internet, is rapidly mapping Gotham into a fourth, virtual dimension. New York’s latest generation of tech entrepreneurs has found success by extending the city’s real-world, three-dimensional space into an increasingly complex network, where real, virtual, and mobile density all integrate together.

Departing mayor Michael Bloomberg deserves credit for helping to expand New York’s tech economy. During his three terms in office, he made improving technology education a priority. “Since the 2008 financial crisis, no other industry has enjoyed more attention from the Bloomberg administration than tech,” wrote Bowles and Giles. The EDC has supported tech incubators and shared work spaces from the Bronx to Brooklyn. In 2011, Bloomberg named Rachel Sterne Haot New York’s first chief digital officer to oversee the city government’s web accessibility and serve “as an advocate for the digital media industry.” Bloomberg himself was one of New York’s original tech successes. In 1981, he was forced out of his position as a general partner at the investment bank Salomon Brothers. With his severance package, he set up a company to sell high-quality business information to Wall Street via computer technology. In 1987, his Innovative Market Systems became Bloomberg L.P.

The Bloomberg administration’s biggest investment in the city’s future as a tech hub occurred in 2012, when it awarded $100 million and 11 acres on Roosevelt Island to Cornell University and the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology to build a 2 million-square-foot campus called Cornell NYC Tech. Construction is scheduled to begin this year and will continue through 2037, according to Cornell, with the campus opening in 2017. At full capacity, by 2043, the campus will have room for 2,500 graduate students taught by a 280-person faculty. The city has also announced plans for a new tech campus for NYU in downtown Brooklyn. It broke up the failing Paul Robeson High School in Crown Heights to create the Pathways in Technology Early College High School (P-TECH), a partnership between the Department of Education, City University, and IBM that offers a six-year curriculum for high school students, leading to an associate’s degree in applied science and an inside track to employment at IBM. And the city has partnered with the venture capitalist Fred Wilson to create a new Academy for Software Engineering inside the failing Washington Irving High School, one block from Union Square. This past year, 1,400 high school students applied for its 125 slots. The city is rapidly developing an additional Academy for Software Engineering in the Bronx and rolling out a pilot program in 20 middle schools and high schools, offering computer-science classes in coding, web design, and 3-D printing.

Ensuring the health of New York’s maturing tech industry will require strengthening the city’s real-world Internet infrastructure and tech “ecosystem,” say tech-industry leaders. They want to see improvements to the city’s broadband pipes and, in general, a New York more fully integrated into the tech economy. New York’s lackluster broadband infrastructure is limiting growth in outer-borough neighborhoods. “Look at Kansas City, where they’ve got Google Fiber,” says tech entrepreneur Jack Hidary, referring to Google’s initiative to lay the pipelines for an Internet 100 times faster than cable-modem broadband. “It is a great case study, and has seen a tremendous influx of entrepreneurship. The lesson we need to learn from that is that broadband needs to be available across the five boroughs, not just in Midtown Manhattan.”

Sorry, Writers, but I'm Siding With Google's Robots

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
February 8, 2014

Sorry, Writers, but I'm Siding With Google's Robots
by James Panero

Copyright laws too often stifle the creativity they claim to protect. Time for a 21st-century update.

How much did mention of "copyright" increase in American books published in the second half of the 20th century? The answer is by nearly a factor of three. How about "intellectual property," a neologism designed to equate copyright with real property? By a whopping factor of 70. But what about "public domain," the term for our creative commons where the arts are replanted and renewed? The answer is almost not at all.

We know this thanks to a new program called Ngram, an offshoot of Google Books that analyzes the metadata of what is now the world's most extensive literary index. Ngram gives us a sense of how ideas have circulated over the past 200 years. And when it comes to creative freedom, the numbers don't look good.

Since the 1970s, U.S. terms of copyright have been extended and tightened at the behest of the film, music and publishing industries in a way that hurts how we can enjoy, share, study and repurpose culture. Don't believe me? When was the last time you saw Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech on television in full? As a copyrighted work zealously guarded and monetized by the King estate, it's still rarely shown.

Technology companies have emerged as the key counterweight to the lawyers and lobbyists of the content giants. And that's one reason November's victory for Google Books in Authors Guild v. Google is important.

In 2004, Google announced a partnership with Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, the University of Michigan and the New York Public Library to begin scanning their holdings, turning the printed pages of millions of books into digital grist for its search mill. The robot scanners ran their eyes over everything, from books in the public domain to copyrighted material, which under current law includes most of what's been published since 1923. The results have been a boon to the culture of ideas.

Yet since Google never tracked down the millions of rights-holders of more recent works, the initiative has been embroiled in litigation over copyright infringement since its inception—even though Google has used copyrighted books only for its search index (as opposed to showing the full text). The Authors Guild, one of the plaintiffs against Google, declared the scanning "exploitation" and a "hazard for every author." U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin in Manhattan disagreed and dismissed the group's claims after eight years of litigation, declaring Google's project a "transformative" fair use. The Authors Guild has vowed to appeal.

As a writer, I'm siding with the robots. Google Books is far from perfect: Even advocates have worried about the consolidation of scanned information, fearing it will lead to a new digital monopoly. But it brings literature into the online world, exposing a younger generation to books they otherwise would never encounter.

Google Books' legal victory can also be seen as a chink in the armor of ironclad copyright laws. Copyright was never meant to be an indefinite "intellectual property." Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Much like patents, copyright was a utilitarian measure to protect creative work through a temporary government-granted monopoly.

For the founders, that meant a protective period of 14 years with the right of renewal for another 14. Since then, and especially over the last three decades, the terms have exploded. For self-made work, copyright is now in effect for the life of the author plus 70 years. For work-for-hire, the terms are 95 years after publication or 120 years after creation, whichever is shorter.

In Congress, the terms have tended to have the curious ability to grow just as Mickey Mouse is set to exit copyright, effectively locking down America's cultural patrimony to protect Disney. The "Copyright Term Extension Act" of 1998 is commonly derided as "The Mickey Mouse Protection Act," since it extended Disney's control of the cartoon character for another 20 years. The motion picture industry has argued for even more—a perpetual copyright, or "forever less one day." But would this actually be good for the arts? Numerous studies, such as a 2007 analysis by economist Rufus Pollock at Cambridge, have shown that far shorter terms would maximize creative output.

Considering the Democratic Party's ties to Hollywood, Republicans should be the natural leaders on intellectual property reform. Conservatives such as Reihan Salam, Patrick Ruffini, Timothy P. Carney and Jordan Bloom have argued convincingly for it—but so far the party isn't listening. When Derek Khanna, a young policy analyst, wrote a white paper in 2012 for the Republican Study Committee on rolling back copyright, he was shown the door. "The Republican Party hasn't been pro-innovation," he explained to me. "Copyright reform is a vital component of a more forward-leading platform."

At the start of 2014, Duke Law School's Center for the Study of the Public Domain published a list of books that would be entering the public domain under the laws that existed through 1978. For works ranging from Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" to Dr. Seuss's "Cat in the Hat," "you would be free to translate these books into other languages, create Braille or audio versions for visually impaired readers . . . or adapt them for film." Too bad: Under current law, you can't.

"Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels," wrote the critic Northrop Frye. "Literature shapes itself, and is not shaped externally." The freedom to work with a renewed public domain should be our inheritance—if only we stopped Mickey Mousing around with copyright.