A summertime question for Kevin Kelly.

At first glance, True Films would seem to be nothing out of the ordinary. It's a film blog. It's got an angle: docs, or any other film that might be defined as non-fiction. But it's also a book, and here's where things start to deviate from the norm. The book is available in a variety of formats, explained here: "You have about 5 different ways to get this book."

By this point, you'll have noticed the name of the author: Kevin Kelly, editor of the Whole Earth Review in the late 80s, a co-founding editor of Wired and author of Asia Grace, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (required reading for the cast of The Matrix) and New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World.

That last one appeared about ten years ago, when I was editing a site called Rewired, a zine as we called them back in the day and one that was highly critical of Wired when the magazine was the talk of the town - that town being either San Francisco or what was then a cyberspace far, far less populated than it is now (and of course, in the mid-90s, there was a lot of overlap between the two). Wired has since drifted away from its cyberlibertarian roots and Rewired has simply drifted away. At any rate, the record of a series we ran on Kevin Kelly's New Rules can be seen here (scroll down for a sort of impromptu index).

Kevin Kelly, it seemed to me, was always extraordinarily good-natured about critiques of his and/or Wired's theses and hypotheses; his is an acutely inquisitive mind, after all, and currently, he's working on a new book, The Technium, about which he writes:

It's a word I've reluctantly coined to designate the greater sphere of technology - one that goes beyond hardware to include culture, law, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types. In short, the Technium is anything that springs from the human mind. It includes hard technology, but much else of human creation as well. I see this extended face of technology as a whole system with its own dynamics.

Now, if you're going to watch over 150 documentaries with someone or simply turn to them for good tips on a few, this is the sort of fellow you'll want to consult. Which you can do at True Films.

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Kevin, I wonder if you could imagine one of your books adapted as a non-fiction film, and if so, any ideas as to who you'd like to see make it? Second, are there any other books, ideas, events, subjects that you think just cry out for a good documentary treatment?

Over the years I have had a few nibbles from filmmakers interested in translating both my first book (a heavy-weight tome on how bee hives, robots, the internet, and organizations all operate by similar laws) and my second one (on the new economy built upon ideas) into educational documentaries but the treatments seem far-fetched to me. There were so many abstractions to explain. Later when Brian Greene's remarkable and high-budget NOVA series on quantum string theory came out, I decided that maybe if you can make string theory pop cinematically then it could be possible to make complexity theory visual. But I've changed my mind again in the last 5 years as I've watched many hundreds of documentaries. I find that I really crave narrative structure in documentaries, and my first two books did not lend themselves to that arc. It remains to be seen whether my third in-progress book will.

Without contradicting myself too much, I think that almost any subject can be viewed through the lens of a documentary. The more of them I watch, the more excited I become when I find one that takes the least interesting subject possible - say vanity music recordings, or old girlfriends, or chickens - and transform it into something extraordinary. That selective gaze has always been the boon of photography, and it works wonders in film. Now that film is no longer film, but cheap bits captured by cheap cameras, filmmakers can "waste" footage making films about all kinds of small-time things. Which is paradise for us viewers. I think there is a whole unexplored genre of films about what people do as they work, how they do it. The runaway success of series like Project Runway, or Dirty Jobs, are examples of how making things can be inherently fascinating. Take me behind the scenes anywhere and I'll watch.

Posted by dwhudson at July 25, 2007 10:37 AM