Welcome to the positive feedback loop

Here we go!

remix-fund-chart

That chart shows the top ten vote-​​getting remix project ideas, with the four that are actu­ally get­ting funded high­lighted at the top. The x-​​axis is votes—so you can see that sup­port was actu­ally really well-​​distributed! But at the same time, the win­ners were pretty decisive.

You will dis­cern, per­haps, that the total bud­get is $2000, not $1000. Yes: the projects were just too good. They were just too cre­ative. So I decided to dou­ble the bud­get, thereby dou­bling the num­ber of projects funded.

And the win­ners are!

The coun­ter­fac­tual walk­ing tour.

Andrew Hunger­ford, a light­ing designer, sound designer, and play­wright, is going to cre­ate an audio walk­ing tour that will take you through the streets of both the real San Fran­cisco and Scheme’s San Fran­cisco simul­ta­ne­ously. It’s a for­mat based on Janet Cardiff’s work:

Here’s how they go: you pick up a CD player from, say, a gallery in Lon­don. You go to the start­ing loca­tion (e.g., stand­ing in front of a par­tic­u­lar book at the library next door). You push play. A voice starts speak­ing to you. And after a few min­utes, says “Walk with me…” And then you go on a walk­ing tour of the neigh­bor­hood, lis­ten­ing to a nar­ra­tion that doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily agree with what your eyes are show­ing you, the sounds of the street merg­ing with those in the record­ing cre­at­ing an aug­mented, coun­ter­fac­tual reality.

So I envi­sion an exten­sion of the Annabel Scheme story pre­sented as an audio tour of San Fran­cisco. The lis­tener down­loads the pod­cast, and can, in a way, walk through Fog City as nar­rated by Hu. The lis­tener gets to have Scheme’s POV, with Hu observ­ing the details, whis­per­ing in his/​her ear, describ­ing things that some­times directly con­tra­dict objec­tive reality.

How cool is that? We’re shoot­ing to have this ready—for real walks and Google Street View-​​powered vir­tual walks alike—in mid-​​March.

The Anno­tated Annabel Scheme.

Tim Car­mody, edi­tor of Book­fu­tur­ism and my co-​​blogger at Snark­mar­ket, pitched it like this:

Annabel Scheme doesn’t read like a heav­ily ref­er­en­tial work, but that’s because for most of its read­ers, its ref­er­ences, even at their most sly, feel nat­ural and famil­iar. But in twenty years, how nat­ural will those ref­er­ences feel? When you read even a rel­a­tively con­tem­po­rary work like William Gibson’s Neu­ro­mancer, the world and allu­sions are almost totally strange, which is partly a func­tion of effect, and partly a func­tion of the dis­tance between its lan­guage & tech­nol­ogy and ours. And the older most books get, the harder it is to spot the ref­er­ences that were the most nat­ural and assumed to its ini­tial group of readers.

My idea is to cre­ate an ini­tial draft of the major ref­er­ences found in the book, and then open the anno­ta­tions up for con­tri­bu­tions from fans & read­ers through a freely editable web site (prob­a­bly a wiki, on the model of Lost­pe­dia). When the anno­ta­tions reach a cer­tain level of sta­bil­ity, I’ll assem­ble an edi­tion of the book includ­ing anno­ta­tions, avail­able for down­load or purchase.

And there’s even the pos­si­bil­ity that it might some­day result in a new printed edi­tion, with text and anno­ta­tions pre­sented together! Cool.

Ren­der­ings of the SF skyline.

The amaz­ing Emily Cooper is going to ren­der not just one San Fran­cisco… but sev­eral. Saheli Datta pitched it like this:

There would be five land­scape ren­der­ings of the sky­line of San Fran­cisco, one famil­iar from our expe­ri­ence, one includ­ing the Shard, and three more of Annabel’s pos­si­ble loca­tions. They would be ren­dered in 3D, with 5 images taken from the same van­tage point, prob­a­bly the Bay or Alca­traz or Trea­sure Island or some sim­i­larly iconic van­tage point.

And what I love is that these images might, in turn, be fod­der for re-​​use and remix­ing… so the feed­back loop con­tin­ues. We should have these by the end of the February.

A track from Pam-​​n-​​Ryan.

For those who haven’t read the book, Pam-​​n-​​Ryan are a fic­tional duo whose music fea­tures promi­nently in the first part of the story. Now Matt Ryd is going to bring their music to life. It was Rebecca Gins­burg’s idea:

So I love the idea of a boyfriend/​girlfriend duo singing songs about love and quan­tum physics, with Ryan whistling har­monies while Pam croons on. As I love both books and music, the com­bin­ing of the two is cer­tainly a recipe for win. Also, who DOESN’T love the com­bi­na­tion of quan­tum physics and love?

Rebecca found and pitched Matt as the musi­cian, and now he’s read the book and ready to go. Here’s one of my favorite videos from him. It’s Ryan! I think Matt Ryd might be Ryan!

So just to be clear: all of this work will carry the same Cre­ative Com­mons license as Annabel Scheme itself, so that means even more poten­tial re-​​use and remixing.

Alas: You’ll notice, of course, that Wil­son Miner’s pitch for a one-​​page Annabel Scheme comic by Aaron Diaz, a.k.a. Dres­den Codak, came in a strong sec­ond. Unfor­tu­nately, Aaron couldn’t take on a new project. But hon­estly, his epic story Hob is already pretty much Annabel Scheme—so you should def­i­nitely check it out if you’re not already a fan.

Okay, that’s it! Let me know if you have any ques­tions, or if anything’s unclear. Or you can just share gen­eral bleats of enthu­si­asm. Here’s mine: WOO!

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