I want­ed to start by estab­lish­ing where we are right now, right here, today. And I’m going to sug­gest that we are in the Black Maria. Black walls, black ceil­ing. Not too much light out there. Who’s this guy?

We are in the Black Maria. And to accom­plish the things that we want to accom­plish here, we’re going to need both art and sci­ence. Who is this guy? We are in the Black Maria. And if you don’t see it yet, you will. Trust me.

So I wrote this book, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. It’s about an out-of-work web design­er who gets a job work­ing the night shift at a very strange book­store in San Francisco. It came out in the US in October. It’s com­ing in the UK next year, going to be pub­lished by Atlantic Books. And that’s real­ly all I’m going to say about it in this talk. The only rea­son I’m bring­ing it up is because along with the pub­li­ca­tion in the US, there’s been a spate of inter­views and lit­tle pro­files and blog posts and things. And as part of that, reporters always Google me and they find my web­site, and there they see this

This lit­tle tag line on the top of every page. I’m a writer and a media inven­tor. I basi­cal­ly made that up a cou­ple years ago. I was cast­ing about for some label to describe the mix of things that I do. You know, it’s not just fic­tion, it’s also things like apps and lit­tle exper­i­ments that play out on the Web. Things that I write in Javascript. And I need­ed a way to describe it, the total­i­ty of it. 

So it turns out nobody can repeat the sec­ond part with­out quo­ta­tion marks, right. A ​“self-described media inven­tor” I think you heard them in the air when Andy said it. ​“He’s a…‘media inven­tor.’ ” Robin Sloan, if that is your real name…

But actu­al­ly, that’s not uncom­mon. Quotation marks often serve as a kind of ear­ly warn­ing sig­nal. The strug­gle with lan­guage, the strug­gle to find words, in the sense that they don’t quite fit for a long time, is actu­al­ly total­ly com­mon. Anytime on you find peo­ple work­ing with strange tools or com­bin­ing famil­iar tools in strange ways, you will often find quo­ta­tion marks. You will often find them I’m strug­gling to come up with the right words to describe what­ev­er it is they’re doing. And then of course ques­tion­ing the words they’ve chosen. 

My favorite exam­ples of that in his­to­ry is movies around the turn of the last cen­tu­ry. Of course, cir­ca 1900, they were actu­al­ly still ​“movies.” If you look in the Oxford English Dictionary at their great sort of time­line of usage, you’ll see it. You’ll see the mat­u­ra­tion of this medi­um, and the mat­u­ra­tion of this word. The first ref­er­ence to movies comes in 1909, and it’s not until some­time between 1914 and 1938 that the apos­tro­phe final­ly drops. It’s like, ​“Okay. Maybe this thing will actu­al­ly stick around. Maybe these ​‘movies’ are actu­al­ly good for something.”

Before that, clos­er to 1900, nobody knew what to call any­thing in the movie indus­try. Every word was made up, every word was in quo­ta­tion marks. From the van­tage point of today, it looks sort of ridicu­lous. But these words, they rep­re­sent a real strug­gle. These peo­ple were doing some­thing new. They were in unchart­ed unchart­ed ter­ri­to­ry, both mechan­i­cal­ly and cre­ative­ly. I mean, what’s a cronopho­to­graph­ic gun? Can any­one guess? It’s actu­al­ly the most cir­cuitous way imag­in­able to describe a movie cam­era. But of course in 1900 they did­n’t have the word ​“movie.” And they also did­n’t have the word cam­era, at least not applied to mov­ing images. So you’re like, ​“Well, it’s this thing, you shoot it, you point it, it takes the­ses pic­tures…” Suddenly, cronopho­to­graph­ic gun does­n’t sound so bad.

They were still so far away from the sta­bil­i­ty of a word like ​“movie.” Now, today of course the quo­ta­tion marks are long gone. Movies have set­tled in. They’re not fixed. The con­tent of movies is still chang­ing, things like the 3D are emerg­ing. But they’re def­i­nite­ly mature. Especially if we work on dig­i­tal prod­ucts, we build and design around movies I’d argue that we take the movie as sort of a black box.

What’s in the box? We all know this. It’s a sequence of video, between 90 and 140 min­utes. The video is 1,920 pix­els wide. Video uses tech­niques like cuts and close ups. We know this. We know these spec­i­fi­ca­tions. And we know these words.

The movie, the black box, is always rep­re­sent­ed on the screen by a rec­tan­gle, rough­ly the shape of a movie poster, always. It’d be ridicu­lous if you made a web site or appli­ca­tion that showed movies as cir­cles or ovals or squares. It’s fun­ny actu­al­ly. As a side­note, isn’t it fun­ny that these might be books, they might be movies. But these are def­i­nite­ly albums, right? Always and everywhere.

In iTunes, on Rdio, and every­where else. Echoes of the past. You can kind of see the ghost­ly CD, the ghost­ly LP, lurk­ing inside that per­fect square. I love those lit­tle conventions. 

So any­way, it’s pos­si­ble to do great, use­ful, inter­est­ing, reward­ing work around a sta­ble, mature for­mat. Of course it is. But. Don’t you think it’s a shame to leave these box­es black? To cede that cre­ative space to oth­er peo­ple, most of them long-dead? I want to con­vince you that it is a shame. The prac­tice of crack­ing open the black box and build­ing new box­es alto­geth­er is real, and it has a name.

So, back before ​“movies” dropped its quo­ta­tion marks, back in the era of the cronopho­to­graph­ic gun, there was one for­mat that broke out ahead of the pack, one of these words that actu­al­ly got some trac­tion, right around 1900. It was Thomas Edison’s kine­to­scope, which was most­ly the work of his employ­ee William Dixon. And you can think about it this way. Edison and Dixon had built a kind of prim­i­tive movie cam­era. They devel­oped a way of play­ing back what they record­ed. So they had all the pieces of the puz­zle. They had, in fact, built this brand new box.

And it real­ly was a box. This is how it looked. This how it worked. You would go into a ​“kine­to­scope par­lor” and see what was play­ing. But they did­n’t know what to put inside the box. Not yet. So they just tried everything. 

They tried ath­let­ic demos. They tried behead­ings. They tried box­ing cats. This is one of the first videos ever made in his­to­ry. I still think that guy in the back is one of the creepi­est things ever com­mit­ted to film.

You can feel it, right? You can feel that Edison and Dixon know they’re on to some­thing. They know this tech­nol­o­gy is real­ly excit­ing, but they have no idea what to do with it. So what we’re look­ing at here is cre­ative R&D. These are cre­ative pro­to­types. This feels like such fun to me. I think it must’ve been fun. And that means it’s fun right now, too. Because we too are in the Black Maria. 

Who is this? Today in 2012, right now, sit­ting in this space, all of us. We are in the Black Maria. Do you see it? You will.

Let me make this more con­crete. I’m going to move from 1900 to 2012. I’m going to share my own per­son­al tale of media inven­tion. I should start by say­ing, or estab­lish­ing, that these are pret­ty pop­u­lar, obvi­ous­ly. Perhaps espe­cial­ly among the peo­ple in this room. I am specif­i­cal­ly inter­est­ed, almost obsessed, with the cre­ative pos­si­bil­i­ties of screens like this. I think there are ways to tell sto­ries, to make argu­ments, on this kind of screen, with its beau­ty, inti­ma­cy, its sort of tac­til­i­ty, that are tru­ly new. Like, tru­ly world-historically new. And I think sto­ries told on the screen could com­pete with all those oth­er black box­es. You know, with movies, books, and albums, all of it. They could com­pete for our atten­tion. They could com­pete in the are­na of culture.

That’s what I believe. So I decid­ed to give it a try. At the begin­ning of this year, I sketched out a retelling of the myth of Orpheus. Remember, this is the one where Orpheus’ lover Eurydice, she dies. Orpheus is heart­bro­ken, and he won’t accept it. So he goes down into the under­world (as one does) and he plays a tune for Hades. He’s the best musi­cian of all time so Hades decides to give him a break, and he agrees to release Eurydice. On one con­di­tion. Orpheus has to lead her back up to the land of the liv­ing with­out look­ing back. So, ner­vous­ly he starts the climb. If you don’t know the sto­ry I won’t spoil it for you. It’s very dramatic. 

This is what I made, Don’t Scroll Back Orpheus. That was the title. And this is per­fect, right? Form meets con­tent on this kind of device. You scroll down for the first half of the sto­ry, fol­low­ing Orpheus down into the under­world for his con­fronta­tion with Hades. Then the scroll direc­tion actu­al­ly changed, and you went back up. And it real­ly did feel like claim­ing. It was hard­er to make your way back up through the sto­ry. Form meets con­tent. I was so excit­ed about this.

I found this page from my notes where you can see I’m decid­ing what to call this amaz­ing new for­mat. The scrol­lotrope, the sto­ry­board, the scroll­board. Clearly this is going to be so pop­u­lar that it needs a name imme­di­ate­ly. I bet­ter fig­ure it out fast. 

As it turns out it did not need a name. Because it did­n’t work. It was like those videos, you know. As a view­er, you kind of look at it and you go, ​“I get what you’re try­ing to do there, but this mayyy not be the future of enter­tain­ment.” I put this thing togeth­er. I showed it to a few peo­ple. And every­body went, ​“I see what you’re try­ing to do here but…it’s not that good. Not yet.”

So then I went back to the draw­ing board. And I can’t say I did so armed with any great insight or rev­e­la­tion. I just knew one thing that did­n’t work. I still did­n’t know what would work. So I just tried again. I start­ed a new sto­ry. Actually, this time it was more of an essay. It was about the lim­its of atten­tion on the Internet today. 

Here’s the project in Xcode. I wrote the text and I built app togeth­er at the same time, just as I had done with with Orpheus. I’d be writ­ing, I’d think of some­thing I want­ed to do cre­ative­ly, and then I’d imple­ment in Objective C. I’d run the app again to see if it had worked. Often, it did­n’t. So I’d take it back, I’d try some­thing else. I’d do this again and again and again. Compile and recom­pile and recom­pile. Read and reread and reread.

The result of this process was an app called Fish that some of you might have used, you might’ve read. You can down­load it for free in the App Store if not. It starts like this. It kind of announces itself first thing. I opt­ed against quote marks but you know, I prob­a­bly should’ve includ­ed them. ​“This is a tap essay. Just tap any­where. Go for it. I want to talk about the dif­fer­ence between lik­ing some­thing on the inter­net and lov­ing some­thing on the internet.”

The main thing that dis­tin­guish­es this form, I think, is the way the sen­tences are bro­ken up like that, some­times down into phras­es, some­times down into indi­vid­ual words. It sort of lends the read­ing expe­ri­ence the rhythm of speech. So this time, I showed it to some peo­ple, and it worked. They liked it. It was actu­al­ly real­ly cool. And I had no idea what to call it at first. Definitely not ​“scrol­lotrope.” It’s actu­al­ly where I came up with ​“tap essay” and kind of put it in after the fact.

It was a great suc­cess. Many peo­ple down­loaded it and talked about it, both its form and its con­tent, which is kind of exact­ly what I was after. And even today, months and months after it was orig­i­nal­ly released, peo­ple are still tweet­ing from inside the app, shar­ing and reshar­ing these pithy lit­tle lines they’re dis­cov­er­ing there.

So, after I released this first ​“tap essay,” of course, I thought, ​“I’ve got­ta make anoth­er one.” Or bet­ter yet, ​“I got­ta make a tool to help oth­er peo­ple make these.” This could be a brand new box. This could be a new for­mat. The tap essay. One day the quo­ta­tion marks might even fall off.

But I could­n’t do it, you know. The app­s’s code was bound real­ly tight­ly to its con­tent. And I’m not actu­al­ly a very good pro­gram­mer, and I had a nov­el to fin­ish. And then I got lucky. A guy named John Borthwick at Betaworks in New York was a fan of Fish, and he believed that it was a new for­mat, or some­thing on the road to a new for­mat. So he built a lit­tle team which includ­ed a super-talented design­er and devel­op­er named Patrick Moberg.

And in a mat­ter of months Patrick cranked out this. It’s called Tapestry. This is live on the web today. It just launched a cou­ple weeks ago. It’s at tapes​try​.is And it’s a plat­form for tap essays. Or ​“tap sto­ries,” actu­al­ly, as Betaworks is call­ing them now. Quotation marks still very much in effect. And, you know, it’s awe­some. You can make new tap sto­ries, you can edit them, you can see them all laid out. You can sort of see the shape and the struc­ture of these things that used to be total­ly obscured in code and nest­ed HTML tags. And this is excit­ing because it means now the work can real­ly begin. We can start to under­stand, is this real­ly a new for­mat? If so, what are its prop­er­ties? What are its physics?

I have some guess­es. I have some opin­ions of my own. For instance, I think rhythm is cru­cial to a tap sto­ry. The rhythm of the words and how that rhythm is expressed in the reveals. I think a good tap sto­ry is actu­al­ly more like a speech than it is like a blog post. But who knows? I mean, I don’t actu­al­ly know any more about this for­mat than any­body else. It’s brand new. It’s fair game.

So that’s a tiny bit of mod­ern media inven­tion. This is a far cry from the kine­to­scope, but it is at least a com­plete arc from notion to fail­ure to pro­to­type to for­mat. Repeatable and explorable. There is now this new lit­tle box, some­thing called a ​“tap sto­ry,” that oth­er peo­ple can fill up with words, pic­tures, ideas. With stories.

So why do this? Why both­er with any­thing like that? Well, I think that’s pret­ty clear, actu­al­ly. You know, in 1900, Edison and com­pa­ny saw this mag­i­cal new thing, the record­ing and the recre­ation of mov­ing images. They saw that it was pos­si­ble for the first time. Now, they did not fore­see what it would become. They did not fore­see Citizen Kane. They did not fore­see the BBC’s Planet Earth doc­u­men­taries. They did not fore­see Back to the Future. But they knew there was some­thing there. They knew there was some­thing pos­si­ble. So they worked hard. They rus­tled up some box­ing cats. And now we owe them a debt of grat­i­tude for all that has fol­lowed, all that they could not have foreseen. 

Well, I think today we, too, find our­selves with some­thing mag­i­cal. We have these beau­ti­ful, inti­mate, tac­tile screens that’re all con­nect­ed to the inter­net. There’s some­thing here. And there­fore, I think, by pow­er of syl­lo­gism, there must be cre­ations just as won­der­ful and unfore­see­able as Kane or Back to the Future wait­ing in our future that we can­not see, that we can­not imag­ine, but that we can begin. We can be their prog­en­i­tors, if we choose. 

So who is this guy? This is Fred Ott. He worked on Edison’s team back in 1900. And he is the star of the great­est of these weird lit­tle videos. It is a kine­to­graph­ic record­ing of a sneeze. And this is actu­al­ly the first copy­right­ed movie in his­to­ry. Edison and his team record­ed this on their kine­to­graph. They print­ed out the frames, and they sub­mit­ted them to the Library Congress, and it had the title ​“Record of a Sneeze.” They had no idea what they were doing.

Fred Ott sneezed here. This is the Black Maria, at last. This was Edison’s movie stu­dio. In fact, it was the first movie stu­dio. They called it that, the Black Maria because it was big and black and sort of shaped like a police wag­on, maybe. Those were called Black Marias at the time. I think it prob­a­bly tells you, more than any­thing, else about Edison’s rela­tion­ship to his employ­ees. They felt trapped, per­haps. They built this place in New Jersey. It cost about six­teen thou­sand dol­lars, in mod­ern 2012 dol­lars, to build. And was total­ly a pile of junk. I think you can you kin­da tell by look­ing at it. Basically a big shed. The walls were all just cov­ered in tar paper. This is where they filmed all those ear­ly videos. You know, they brought them all here, the ath­letes, and the actors, and yes the box­ing cats. And they went to work even though they obvi­ous­ly had no idea what they were doing. They just tried things, again and again, for just about ten years exact­ly. They did it all here, in this cramped lit­tle laboratory.

Can you see that faint line, that sort of track in the dirt? The Black Maria was built on a rotat­ing plat­form. The kine­to­graph need­ed a ton of light to oper­ate at all, so they would open that big pan­el on top and then they would just turn the whole build­ing to face the sun. Which is so janky. And won­der­ful. I’m sure that some peo­ple in this room have made tech­ni­cal deci­sions basi­cal­ly equiv­a­lent to putting the whole build­ing on a rotat­ing plat­form so it can face the sun. And that’s okay.

What were these guys doing there? They were inven­tors in the clas­sic sense, sure. They were build­ing crazy machines. But they were mak­ing the con­tent at the same time, and I think that’s impor­tant. Inside the stu­dio, there was a pile of gears and lens­es. But out­side the stu­dio, there was a long line of actors and dancers, maybe a few stray cats. And all of that worked togeth­er. They were not just inven­tors. They were media inven­tors. No quo­ta­tion marks. This is real, and I think it needs a name. If a guy in 1887 could call some­thing the elec­tro­tachyscope and get away with it, I think I can get away with call­ing these guys media inventors.

And this is what I want to be. I don’t actu­al­ly think I am one yet. I don’t think I’ve done any­thing wor­thy of the name. But this is my ambi­tion, you know. This is my lodestar. And if any of this sounds inter­est­ing to you, I invite you to use the term, too. 

The truth is you might already be a media inven­tor with­out real­iz­ing it. For instance, you might be a media inven­tor if: You don’t quite have the words to describe what it is you do. If you strug­gle with lan­guage to describe your pre­oc­cu­pa­tions. If you rou­tine­ly feel dumb, sort of stam­mer­ing, about a pos­si­bil­i­ty that you can see so clearly. 

You might be media inven­tor if you tend to tog­gle back and forth between tech­nol­o­gy and con­tent. If you work on ideas and code togeth­er. Especially if you love both. If you appre­ci­ate the par­tic­u­lar plea­sures of each. If you find your­self drawn to both, even if it’s clear that you’re way bet­ter at one than the oth­er. If your tal­ents are lop­sided… Maybe you’re great pro­gram­mer but a bad writer. Maybe you’re a great writer but a ter­ri­ble design­er. It does­n’t mat­ter. Talent has very lit­tle to do with this.

You might be a media inven­tor if you’re work­ing inside the black box. If you feel per­haps not quite cre­ative­ly sat­is­fied, shuf­fling and reshuf­fling a deck that was cre­at­ed decades before you were born. If you think you might be inter­est­ed in mak­ing a new format.

We are in the Black Maria. Can you see it now? Can you feel it? The future, just out of sight, still in quo­ta­tion marks, for­ev­er trapped in quo­ta­tion marks, but nev­er­the­less being fash­ioned right here, in the dark. 

We are in the Black Maria. Edison and his crew spent ten years in that shed before they final­ly upgrad­ed. They moved to New York City and they had a beau­ti­ful glass stu­dio built there. When they upgrad­ed, the word movies still did­n’t exist. We’ve had these [holds up cell phone] for about five years? So we’re right in the mid­dle of our time in the shed. And when that time is up, we will not have come to the end. No way. We will in fact final­ly be at the begin­ning. We’ll final­ly be ready to find our own ​“movies.”

Here we are. It’s hot. It’s cramped. It’s stuffy. The wheels keep get­ting stuck when we try to turn the whole build­ing around. We’ve been up all night. There’s a guy out front with a fer­ret who he’s taught to play a tiny trom­bone, and he wants us to put it in front of the kine­to­graph. And you know what? We prob­a­bly will.

Right now in 2012, work­ing with screens, telling sto­ries on these new devices, I’m con­vinced we are in our own Black Maria. And I think it’s a won­der­ful place to be. 

Thank you.