199. Experimental Interview with Kamron Sockolov: Environmental Psychology, Perception, Aesthetics, and Human Decision-making w/ Non-Profit Marketing

First of all, I am very proud of myself to state that I took BOTH pictures above. The cute little fuzzy snowy plover by Coal Oil Point (Santa Barbara), and this Very Cute But Less Fuzzy and Super Adorable Rock Crab at the Harbor in Ventura. Okay. Fine. One has a little more Cuteness and Sex Appeal than the other. No! It's not black and white! It's not Uma Thurman on the left and George [Ape] Bush Junior on the right! Hey, hey, HEY!!!

Maybe one of my points here is that beauty can be an acquired taste. And appearances can be deceiving. Humans and non-humans. I adore my rock crab so much I could kiss it on the carapace! Okay, in the name of tree-hugging! You know I'm just being biologically incorrect!

Kamron works for a non-profit in downtown Santa Barbara, and I was able to incorporate a component of the interview about non-profit groups, non-profit marketing, and the notion of aesthetics, "poster children" of the environment, and how much aesthetics drive human decision making in terms of what we care about... and whether that is really a problem or not. And then the mentality, the discrepancy between idealisms of non-profit groups (runned by independent individuals with shared collective values to solve real-world problems) versus the harsh, hypocritical realities of most non-profits (very little citizen support, receive donations from big megacorporations with agendas and desires for tax write-offs, most of the time is toward fund-raising and maintaining bureaucracy, rather than energy directly toward the problem itself, true agendas are pushed off as side projects as megacorporate well-funded agendas are put to the forefront). So much for non-profits. The crux of system inefficiency. *Sigh* It seems like this society is so huge and so disorganized, we are making jobs that don't really seem to need to exist, and all jobs that NEED to exist DON'T exist. *Sigh*

Kamron had made some amazing comments on the issue. I will be writing more on this later.

All I can say is that the last remaining frontier of research of "the environment" comes down to a systematic investigation of the Absurdity of Human Behavior... relative to the Environment, that is.... This seems to transcend all arbitrary classifications of the social sciences--race, class, politics, religion... all artificial constructs that don't really seem to exist when it comes to re-defining humans in relation to their environment....

198. Pre-Medititation for Educational/Promotional Art Video for Scott Chatevever, http://chatenever.com

Yesterday I interviewed Kamron Sockolov. UCSB graduate in engineering. Philosophically-inclined Rock Crab Consumer. NOT your typical average consumer in the grocery store. In short, it was a very experimental interview, and it went very well. THOUGH, we didn't finish. And it's my fault for making the interview too long. He put up with A LOT. Plus he just came home from a full day's of work. Thankfully Kamron and all his housemates are perhaps the most adventurous and flexible of characters I have met during my rock crab filming last summer of 2007. "You never know where the rock crab is going to take you!" is a great summary to represent our little adventure of Rock Crab Fiesta, Fireworks, and Police Bust. In all honesty, I can't wait to finish interviewing these guys because their place (grad student house + funky artist house, even cooler than the diagnostics of a typical "grad student house") is just totally cool to chill and relax and shoot the shxt about all things philosophical and about life in general. I was keeping my distance merely to objectify the interviews. If I get to know the people too well, then the interviews don't become the same.

Besides, during this time, I was self-isolating because of my traumas with graduate school transferring.

I will just say I entered the household on the "right" baseline: girl holding film camera. And that is our relationship. We have already established comfort zones of this technologically-mediated relationship, so you can really build up to do interesting things!

I will elaborate the interview with Kamron further in another blog.

The purpose of this blog here is to document a Pre-Meditation for a Short Educational and Promotional Art Video for Scott Chatenever.

http://chatenever.com

http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/organicartscottchatenever.pdf

Pre-meditation rough draft is above. I already made changes and added things to it.

Scott's art is just simply DRUGS TO MY MIND. Like good hallucinatory or TRANCE ones. I am wondering whether he is left-handed. He has an engineering side and a freaky art side. It's like there's this entire community of culture "rejects" or "independents" simply because they think holistically. They have a systematic linear left brain and a super-creative right brain, and they simply desire to exercise holistic behavior, but society just only has opportunities for overspecialized hamburger flipping.

Scott's art? Oh ya. It's SCULPTURE. Organic. Fractal. Evolution. Ecology. Fossils. Rooted to the non-human environment. You couldn't tell whether it was the real fossil or real organism or whether it was actually just Scott's art. Scary, huh?

There are computer software programs that generate fractals, but this guy basically does it with his own hands and materials for sculpture.

I wrote Scott an email a long time ago, telling him that his artwork was like he was playing God or something... designing evolution through his art. I mean... it's sick shxt. I sound like I'm stoned or something. I think any artist is playing God to some degree. Even more so than some scientists, I think. Because not only artists Create Reality, but they also warp and twist human emotions. Scientists don't do that. They only STUDY it. Lam-o. Some environmental scientists in particular I consider being Intellectual Spectators. Artists are Intellectual Interactors. They CHANGE things... in multi-layered experimental ways. Mind-altering, man.

Doing this video with Scott will satiate two intellectual hungers of mine: (1) artistic representations of the Environment, interactions between artists and the environment, and (2) patterns, fractals, universal scaling laws in biology, ecology, and evolution.

It took me 9 months to come around to committing to doing this promotional video, but I realized that making such a video is far beyond Scott's work. This can easily go on Current TV and to the Santa Barbara Ocean Film Festival. Lots of promo. I also like the project because it's SHORT. My rock crab film is daunting and long. I need to have short + long so I won't go insane.

I decided I am not going to ask any money for this gig. As long as Scott lets me use the footage for a longer Godfrey Reggio-like video on scaling laws in non-human and human societies.... One favor I will ask him is that he hooks me up with a solo musician or small band (guitar) and this guy or lady in exchange for a promo video can help me do some music collaboration.

Hmmm. The next short video I might do is maybe for a local musician guitar player. Because maybe then with a barter, he or she can team up and do a couple of music pieces together. Aha. He he he. I'm thinking intelligently now.... for once!

Though I don't have a production crew--the dreadedness of being SOLO--it turns out my production crew becomes the interviewers, the people I am filming. They start providing advice, while I start asking for it. They start helping with film equipment. They start asking questions and we go through dialogues about visual-acoustic design of film. I think not having a production crew is genius in some ways (though a trade-off in others) because then you become more involved with the people you are filming rather than have this stand-offish relationship.

In the end, intimacy makes better films.

I added a few lines to the poem / song (just to make it a two-way street type of reasoning): If it ain't manufactured / by human revolution / I guess it was manufactured / by the likes of me // but if it ain't manufactured / by my own volition / I guess it was manufactured / evolutionarily) ... "with his clever human technology...." an alien creation... maybe...

195. Rated X Interview Question List with Kamron Sockolov: Philosophical Rock Crab Consumer (to be held tomorrow)

This is just the FIRST page!
Enjoy the rest of the interview question here! Totally philosophically uninhibited! Unrestricted!

http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/kamronsockdor.pdf

Hey Kamron!
Have fun! Don't think too much about this!
Enjoy the process! Get intoxicated however you feel.
These will be the best interviews ever.

I just got done with some interview through a large agency, and it was kind of depressing how people have to be restricted in what they say simply because they represent this agency, not themselves. So, please represent yourself!
FREEDOM OF SPEECH, BABY!

See you tomorrow around 6. Might show up early. If you can find that wrench you used to open the crab. That would be great. Improvisational!

Best, Victoria

169. Rock Crab and the Evolutionary Design of Cuteness

Vic's Rock Crab. An Investigation of Evolutionary Design of Cuteness.
Vic's Rock Crab. An Investigation of Evolutionary Design of Cuteness.
King Crab by Robert Hayes in The Brave Monkey Pirate, http://www.bluebison.net/.

King Crab by Robert Hayes in The Brave Monkey Pirate, http://www.bluebison.net/.

This is in celebration of finally designing a list of questions in order to complete and "frame" the rock crab film with an organized list of questions. I will be needing to create a "matrix" of spacetime knowledge of what people know and don't know about rock crab. How certain people know very well certain pieces of the puzzle and certain people don't. And why? And how this reflects value systems. And how this reflects management and future visions of long-term sustaining fisheries.

There is an open niche space in the American Market for the design of "cute crabs." Nearly all the crab stuffed animals and cartoons were just un-cute and un-cuddly and just flat out un-attractive. Except for the King Crab of Robert Hayes, my most favorite and influential cartoonist of all time. It's all about "Bluebison" (check out the website!) and Calvin and Hobbes. Most of the rest can eat dirt. So Robert Hayes won the crab cuteness contest. Second cultural representation of cute crabs was actually the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM). I am considering in becoming a Pastafarian. It's almost like becoming a believer of "skeptical absurdity." Please visit http://www.venganza.org/ for more information on the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

[blog fragment] My father commented on "charismatic megafauna" only policy for non-profit organization agendas. "It's just human nature to fall for cute and cuddly creatures, mostly for females. For the males, you have to get those big, ferocious organisms with blood and fangs--wolves and the like--they are like "super-macho-megafauna-trucks" for the environment. They are endangered. There you go! Donate to the NGO!"

The idea of Evolutionary Design of Cuteness is very crucial, simply because the Cuteness Factor is a surface value dimension that convinces relatively uninformed audiences to donate to non-profit groups or not. Rock crab in true biological representation is not exactly "cute." So if you placed a photograph of a rock crab on a brochure, and went door-to-door to convince a lay audience to save rock crabs and donate 15 dollars to the Defenders of Sea Insects non-profit group (subsection of UO, UN equivalent for organism-centri non-profit group, their agenda cneterd around tehd declaration of humans as invasive species, incumbent umbrella organization, ) most likely people would not do it. Instead, many people fall for the the more popular biological runway model poster children: sea otters, butterflies, snowy plovers (a local Santa Barbara fave). It's not like we exactly EAT sea otters. So, basically, our own evolutionary brainwashing tremendously influences consumer decisions to donate money to a non-profit group for some environmental cause, in which the money ultimately ends up being used towards maintaining bureaucracy and people's jobs rather than solving and managing the problem itself. Many non-profits are very economically inefficient entities and exist for two reasons (1) there is an issue that needs to be addressed that is not being tackled by business, government, or academia and (2) rich people want tax write-offs so they donate money to non-profits.

Non-profits need to exist because they are entities that can easily sprout and die based on the current, fleeting issues of a given human system. They are like ephemeral weeds (weeds can be good, it's a matter of perception). But the tragedy right now is that many non-profits have grown large, incumbent, conservative, and massively inefficient. E.g. Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife, a few others I can't think of off the top of my head. As there was an essay on the Death of Environmentalism (Shellenberger and Nordhaus, mispelled?), which called for an overthrow of incumbent megafauna of environmental non-profits. Amen.

[blog fragment] Phil Freeman the rock crab fisherman has a friend who is in great agreement with me in terms of the running of non-profits. I need to find that guy and interview him.

[blog fragment] I think the goal here is to challenge people into seeing alternative beauty. Finding beauty in a typically-defined, non-aesthetic creature, like a rock crab. Or more its sublime properties, and all that a rock crab can mean. Most people find a redwood forest "beautiful." What about a land fill? Why? Why NOT? ~#~ would say.

[blog fragment] It's tragic that foundations only give money to inefficient non-profits and not individuals who refuse to construct and conform to absurd bureaucracy, who will be more productive as an individual than operating in a larger, incumbent system.

Now the questions that I skipped over are "What is the Mathematical / Spatial / Temporal formula for the Evolutionary Design of Cuteness?" and "Why does this phenomenon exist?"

The answer for the first question is the "baby alien formula." Big head, small body, big eyes, small nose, smiley mouth. Pretty standard stuff. Barbie dolls. Brats dolls. Sea otters. Dolphins (well, they have a different form of evolutionarily attractive design). Frogs from rainforests. Mini Miss Einstein the Cairn Terrier (my housemate's dog). Sanrio. Hello Kitty. Kerroppi. Pichacco. Parasite Pals. Even stick thin models in New York. It's an economic driver. It's so obsessive that stupid teenagers like myself get compulsive about Sanrio and we are willing to pay five extra dollars for a pencil with a Kerroppi frog on it rather than just a regular pencil. Shut up. I was in high school and I was stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Now I figured it out and I'm over it.

The answer to the second question is that before we humans knew about evolution, natural selection, genetics, Darwin, and Mendel's Saturday Night Live with his pea plants, mothers used to still take care of kids, without any genetic incentives. Human babies are basically parasites. They slow you down, consume resources, and pee and poop them out in an unconstrained fashion. They're just helpless living blobs. Babies are dependent on the host mother for survival. In order to compensate for the initial parasite-host relationship between the mother and child, the baby was "alien designed" and the mother's mind was evolutionarily designed to detect this visual proportionality and ultimately receive a euphoric pleasure center high for keeping this "cute little baby" alive, even though it just cries, eats, poops, pees, and sleeps. Evolutionary design of cuteness is basically a form of disillusionment for the mother such that the initial parasite-host relationship is obscured. Then I think as the baby grows up and learns more and self-sufficient, the relationship becomes more mutualistic. And the cuteness fades away most times. *Sigh.*

So that is my grand theory on cuteness.

[blog fragments] weeds, fleeting ephemeral, I am really glad I am representing organisms that are not under the mainstream popculture cuteness cult. I represent the underrepresented. Crabs. Worms. Smelly salt marshes. And the like.

[blog fragment] Evolutionary Disillusionment

142. Blue Horizons Continued: "World's Easiest Catch: Zen of Rock Crab": Failed First Attempt at Treatment

Below is the link to the above "treatment attempt" for World's Easiest Catch.

http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/hanrahanfirststreatmenttoomuchdetail.pdf

In class, Michael Hanrahan explained to us that a "treatment" for a film is a one-to-two page summary of the film project. A short-and-sweet pitch that can grab attention *snap* like that! In terms of the structure, I'm assuming within the first 1-3 sentences you would have a very catchy, summarized hook to get the reader into the document (and as a cheating mechanism, I would stamp the treatment with some form of catchy, prominent logo, as I did with my pre-production package). I would answer in a nutshell the four primary questions every single human being wants to know when trying to grab one's attention: (1) What's this about? (2) Why should I care? (3) Why should I believe you? Either (a) I have pre-existing credentials, so believe me like a subgod... or (b) The data and evidence I am presenting speaks for itself (4) And now that I'm hooked, but with a diminishing attention span to lengthy, repetitive stimuli, what are you going to do to sustain my long-term interest in this project/system?

I guess in question (4), you would go into unique and quirky technique and content that would pulse the entire story with originality.

It's really important that you keep treatments short. Like a "pitch." You may have to pitch a project at any time, any place, when you least expect it. I remember Michael saying that you may run into some notable executive in an elevator, and you do indeed have 15 seconds of his time, as the doors rapidly slide closed... slide open... and out he steps. It is as quarantined an environment you can get! The closest to a long road trip in a car! What will you do to prick his information-bombarded ear? It's best to write treatments like this. More like an extended abstract for scientific papers, except you have the license to creative verbage and visualization, not to mention the license to stimulate emotion beside rational thought. But don't overdo emotions at the sacrifice of accuracy: this is called sensationalization. And don't underdo it either, because then your treatment truly becomes an "abstract" of a boring scientific paper!

Michael gave several sample treatments (as I have posted in a previous blog), but they had various different structures, some more consistent than others. Yet the above conclusions are what seem to be more humanly universal.

So, what happened? What went wrong with the above treatment? By the time I was required to write the treatment, I was very much embedded and involved in my rock crab project. No one else in the class even STARTED their film, except for me. In this circumstance, the students had an advantage because a short, one-page summary of a project would be easy to bullshxt. For me, I struggled tremendously because I knew too much, and everything I knew was disorganized in my brain! I ended up adding too much detail. I ended up creating a document that's like a hybrid between a treatment and a preproduction package. Oh dear. This is a case when working too hard and knowing too much actually backfires. I received a "B" on this work.

I was determined to do the treatment right, so on my own, I rewrote the treatment (next blog) and was able to marginally get it down to two pages. I submitted the treatment to Michael, just to get some constructive feedback, and I actually had my treatment returned with a grade of "A"! This was most certainly not expected... and I take it Michael appreciated that I went out of my way to repeat concocting a treatment until I did it right.