Rudhraigh

So, the final Final Project post. How did it go?

Well, the short answer is awful. The long answer is really, really, really bloody awful. Well, no, the long answer is longer than that but saying that it turned out to be really bloody awful seems to be a pretty good way of summing it up. It captures the spirit of the endeavour.

So.

The short SUMMATION is that it was: really, really, really bloody awful.

The long ANSWER is: When I first conceived of my first Final Project idea months and months ago for developing the HyperNet, I immediately came up against a lot of resistance from different quarters. A lot of people said that they simply didn’t like forums, that we should use existing channels like Facebook, or some Twitter variant to interact. I disagreed, I thought that forums, while incredibly basic and in many cases limiting, were an awesome centerpiece to meaningful digital interaction. 4chan, Gamezone, Freerepublic, all forums that served as the center of a vibrant online community with real momentum in getting stuff done. In my mind, forums WERE pretty awful, but they worked. Forums were a workhorse. They got shit done that otherwise wouldn’t have gotten done. They made people into semi-anonymous Digital Avatars and Facebook and Twitter just didn’t have the kind of dedicated flexibility that we needed. Facebook and Twitter were basically a good way of sharing videos and websites, not a place to talk about creating them.

But anyway, back then, we launched a forum, and I hoped that people would be interested enough to give it a go. To try. They weren’t. So it failed.

Now, when I decided to launch the HyperNet again for my final project, I was really enthused. It seemed like a good idea. To dedicate myself to developing it as a resource, actively managing it and coming up with content that people were interested in. And I came up with a plan to do so. And I was going to execute it, but then I talked to a few of my classmates. And their response was pretty much exactly what it had been before. Why can’t we just use Facebook? Why don’t we just interact on the Hyper Island Facebook page? There are too many places I have to pretend to check already! But I disagreed. So we launched HyperForum 2.0, this time giving it a bit of publicity amongst the new students and ex-Hyper kids. And again people didn’t use it. Again. So it failed.

And then I realised that right or wrong, whether I agreed with them or not, I wasn’t ever going to win this argument. The reality is that Hyper Island is a school where maybe 1 percent of the students are native English speakers. So for the rest of the HyperKids, bothering to get involved in a written forum in English just wasn’t a viable or enjoyable option. Their written English was probably pretty perfect, but you lose a lot when you have to write instead of speak. Plus it’s a pain in the ass. Apparently. And Facebook is more than enough. Apparently.

Personally I think that this is a really interesting flaw in the Hyper model that they’re not only not addressing but actively ignoring. A good example of this would be the simple fact that when it came to the Final Projects, pretty much all of the Final Project groups were seperated by language and ethnicity. As a rule, if one of the Final Project groups had a non-Swede in it, it was either all non-Swedes or a mixture of Non-Swedes and Non-Swedish Scandanavians.

The fact is that Hyper hasn’t really come up with a good way of overcoming this barrier, as Hyper went on, the class definitely fractured into groups which is natural, but that specific groups were basically Swedes Only clubs where the people who really hated speaking English looked at you funny when you tried to make it clear that you didn’t pay a shitload of money to attend a school where a third of the class refused to interact with you. And to be honest I don’t really see how Hyper can fix this unless they just abandoned taking foreign students in altogether and put the language back to Swedish, something I reckon would actually be a really good move.

But anyway, when I was hit with this realisation, that a Hypernet wasn’t going to work, it was about the time I was coming back to Ireland. In the middle of the joyousness of finally being finished in Sweden and being home the one functional fact was that I was solidly on my own for my Final Project. And I was pretty much alright with that. It was actually a kind of an inevitability given the way things went with me in school over the last few months. It was sad that I hadn’t found anyone in school that I could really vibe with creatively, but I accepted that it was the way it was and put it down to a mixture of my own shortcomings, the language barrier and a definite lack of any kind of effective forum for common class creative dialogue. And also, and quite honestly mostly, the fact that I managed to further estrange myself from a hefty portion of my class by having a long and highly obviously vicious fight with one of my Swedish classmates in which, for whatever reason, I didn’t come off well.

So, I went home and I decided to start again. From the beginning. And this time I’d do something I enjoyed doing. Something simple. Something I could do on my own, that would be straightforward and that I could do while working my ass off to get my Visa for NYC sorted and plow through massively horrible family issues and the fall of the Irish economy. So, thinking it would be fun to make a funny video at my own expense, I decided to use a concept that one of my good friends and classmates came up with a few months ago in one of our concept development sessions. The idea revolved around a guy who basically loves his laptop so much he thinks it’s his girlfriend, introducing it to his mother, having fights, making sweet love to it, all the while not realising that this was a mere machine.

I made the video as a promotion to support the concept of a website idea I had, called goutsideandplay.com. Basically this idea was to appeal to laptop addicts who can’t think of anything to do other than play with their laptop. They found themselves surfing the web for hours on end all because their brains were totally dependent on the near sexual rush that a Youtube clip of a masturbating dog could give them. The form of the website could be something complex like a blog with content I put up as a starter for user generated content, to something simple, similar to awesomeness like whatthefuckshouldimakefordinner.com. Like, if you have a start page for your internet, you should also have an end page. Simple, eh?

So I made the promotional video for the website over the course of two nights*, edited it and sent it off to our Hyper Island Co-Worker, and really didn’t think about it much more than that. I had a lot on my mind and Sweden finally and thankfully seemed a million miles away. She asked me if I wanted to introduce the concept over Skype. I said I probably couldn’t but I’d like to and I asked her what time she thought I should be online to do so. Sadly she didn’t reply, so, although I sat online for a while in the morning, I didn’t get to introduce my video when the class watched them the next day in Stockholm. I guess I could have waited online, but I was incredibly busy that day. Like, more busy than I’ve been in three years. Now I wish I’d made time.

So they watched the presentations, and they got to mine and they had no idea about the website concept. They just watched it as it was and afterwards, one of my classmates immediately contacted me over email, telling me to “grow up”. This was not the reaction I was looking for. Apparently according to her, she and several other people in my class had interpreted the video as a kind of final, incredibly awkward, totally lowbrow attack on the classmate I had fallen out with months previously. That the classmate had walked out of the showing in rage. She thought it was in incredibly bad taste. That I was being ugly. That I was using the last word in a course I had paid over 20,000 euros to do, to be a petty asshole.

The funny thing was that the video was in no way intended to be thought of that way and considering the fact that it was someone else’s concept, I thought that at the very worst that there was literally no chance that people could think that it was anything other than a self-effacing, probably pretty poorly made slapdash effort to get something in on time because I was run off my feet with other things and honestly, had become pretty disenchanted with the standards of work at Hyper anyway.

I thought they’d laugh for a second and go on to the next one, having forgotten about it in seconds. Sadly this didn’t happen. In fact, it really, really, really didn’t  happen. For whatever reason, and I really would like to think it wasn’t cause everyone in my class was so ready to believe the worst about me, people thought I was being cruel. Really, really, really, cruel. I mailed the classmate who I had had the feud in question with, who I hadn’t talked to since, with an abject apology and a complete statement that I had never thought it would upset them and was told that they hadn’t thought of it that way at all and that it was basically my problem. Which it is. Still.

Now I’m aware of my position, and I’d like to say again that I’m sorry to anyone I upset, and although personally I still kind of think that all they would have to do would be to actually watch the video and they would see that it wasn’t meant that way, it certainly taught me a lesson. And as the Hyper maxim is “Learning by Doing”. I suppose that you could say I learned something.

I learned the following:

1) Don’t laugh at your own jokes so hard that you don’t realise your audience is sharpening knives.

2) There’s apparently nothing funny about technosexuality.

3) Saying you’re sorry is hardest when you believe that people just use it as further confirmation of your weaknesses.

4) Teenagers are right. Being misunderstood is a fucking shit buzz.

On the plus side however, I really think the Goutsideandplay.com idea’s a pretty good one and shall be spending some time over the next few weeks seeing f I can get some people interested in developing it.

*You can of course watch it below and make up your own mind:

Turn Offs. from Rudhraigh McGrath on Vimeo.

It’s weird, when I first applied to Hyper, the first step of the application process had me stumped. It may have been the months of creative malaise, it may have been sheer mental laziness but I was having problems getting a solid idea together that I could go forward with. We had to produce a unique travel concept based in the year 2030, which sounds pretty simple and also pretty awesome. I had weeks of procrastinating in only the way you can when you’re semi-sure that you’re gonna fail and have no idea how to even get started and then finally, I managed to pull something together. It was basically a concept centered around the idea that eventually the penetration of seemless recording technology will remove the concept of privacy from the public sphere. You will no longer be able to interact with other people without full knowledge that everything you do and say in their presence will be recorded and placed on something I called the HyperNet.

You can view the video here

At the time, I just thought it was an amusing piece of futristic jingo, hilariously I now think it’s gonna be the centerpiece of my Final Project.

Basically, I’ve always been shocked by the lack of continuous online interaction and discussion amongst Hyper Students. I think that because Hyper Island has no digital memory and as such, no real direction. For one thing, everything that gets produced there immediately become abandoned and irellevent in favour of the next thing and is only really considered when the students are applying for internships. And this includes the Alumni. Once you leave Hyper, your involvement in the fabled “Hyper Network” is reduced to receiving the odd mass email and occasionally sending out a notification about job opportunities.

It’s also absolutely scandalous that students don’t realise that Hyper recruits a lot of people who really don’t interact that well in a group setting, people who aren’t comfortable being the center of attention in person. In too many cases, the type of person who stays up till 5 in the morning posting on development board about technical issues isn’t really going to be able to interact on the same level as someone for whom public speaking is an opportunity to bear their soul and make real personal connections. Not having a common, properly used arena for Hyper Students to discuss things they see online, news they think is important, or just places to talk about specific instances of digital awesome, seems to me to be an absolutley ridiculous waste of an opportunity to develop your own ideas about the digital arena with a bunch of similarly motivated people.

So, my final project will be to try to create the HyperNet. I want to bring people in Hyper right now and people who have left Hyper since its inception to come together in a centralised meaningful manner to discuss creative projects, fuel passion for what we do, stretch our imaginations about everything and nothing. Or even just be there for each other, actually acknowledge that we’re all part of a network of awesome.

So, idea development starts tomorrow.

For the last month of Hyper Island, each of us happy little campers have been tasked to split into groups and do…..something. A single thing that will best exemplify the full extend of our newly aquired awesomeness. Something to reassure the world that Hyper Island remains a place of big ideas well exectuted. Something that encourages us to be creative, challenge ourselves, change the rules. Or at least that’s the theory. In practice so far it’s been a bit more like trying to remember that this is something I need to do on top of engaging in the mad scramble for internships. So, here’s the ideas so far:

1) Some sort of Creatively used AdWords Campaign – I get one Euro a day for free as an Ex-Googler to spend on ANYTHING I want on AdWords. Ooh. The POSSIBILITIES.

2) A Video Project – I’d quite like to make some kind of awesome video, maybe a music thing.

The problem with both of these ideas is that they are absolute shite and a simple result of my apparently unmanagable creative block that has been plaguing me since we got the assignment. A mixture of feeling uninspired, unmotivated and just generally dispirited has plagued me somewhat lately, I think it’s partially due to the pressure from the Internship and partially cause Hyper is ending, and not with a bang but with a bit of a whimper. As such, I reckon I need to start fixating on some idea development and to get enthusiastic about it soon or else I risk producing some pretty mediocre work. And we can’t have that.