dangoldmandotnet

This past weekend I was a speaker at SXSW Interactive, giving a presentation on SHOOTING WAR and other comics in my immediate future as part of the multimedia “Book Readings” series. Any trip to Austin gives me a chance to see friends and family there and eat heaps of barbecue, but my experience at SXSWi was unlike any convention I’ve attended before: full of enthusiastic, intelligent and forward-thinking brains all gathered together to tear down old ways and build up new ones. Everyone had a dream, a project, a company and wanted to figure out a way to pool resources to benefit each other.

Traveling to SXSWi as a future-comic creator seemed like a wonderland of ideas and information, letting me chat and mix with filmmakers, programmers and developers alike and funneling new ideas into my digital arts + online distribution framework I’ve been playing with the last few years and letting me learn from other peoples’ mistakes, instead benefiting from sage wisdom that faced me at every turn.

My first morning there I attended the Knowing the Audience: Improving Communication Between Artists and Fans panel discussion on ways of interacting with the audience, both to spread work and build community and even finance the work itself. The Digital Cinema for Indies also dealt with the community-building aspect of circumventing traditional distro outlets like theaters and video-stores and connecting directly with the audience… That seemed to be the most common point across mediums that were discussed at SXSWi.

From there I headed over to the offices of B-Side to participate in a really interesting round table discussion about online distribution of films/media; the discussion featured about thirty people around the boardroom table from various angles of indie/digital films, figuring out what was right and wrong about systems already in place for discovery and distribution. Again, another facet of the same discussion on everyone’s lips.

Afterwards, our all-star posse split and I hit a screen of Explicit Ills at the Alamo Drafthouse; the filmmaker and much of the cast were in attendance, including Rosario Dawson. We sat in the front row and got hamburgers and neck-cricks but the film itself was lusciously shot. The posse reformed post-screening and piled into a van to an afterparty at Enchanted Forest, a kind of Burning Man-in-Texas location where freak-art installations with multiple band stages were built deep into the woods in South Austin… this was one of those things that doesn’t happen in New York and makes you pine for space and nature. I happily lingered until 4ish, chatting with Brian Chirls in front of a fire pit about all manner of things.

My old friend and SXSWi chaperone Noah picked me up bright and early, a few hours after I’d closed my eyes an next thing I knew I was back at the show. An early morning panel entitled “How Manga Explains the World” caught my eye. I’d thought I was the only comicker in the show, but I imagine my surprise that this presentation was by one of my favorite Wired contributors (and author of the *excellent* FREE AGENT NATION) Daniel Pink… and he was profiling his upcoming nonfiction-career-guide-in-manga-form THE ADVENTURES OF JOHNNY BUNKO (published soon by Penguin Books). His presentation was based in grant-funded research into the world of manga and doujinshi and framed as an approach to copyright reform in the west (really heady stuff). We were all gifted with copies of not-yet-released BUNKO at the panel’s end, which I ate up on the plane ride home and recommend highly as one of the first OEL non-fiction manga.

I also attended the “Make It So: Learning From SciFi Interfaces”, a really interesting sky’s-the-limit discussion tracing back-and-forth influences between human-computer UI and where imagination can lead us. I’m a nut for this sort of thing and hung on Nathan Shedroff and Chris Noessel’s every word; their presentation will be explanded and published as a book this fall. Shortly after the panel I needed some air and food; I don’t do overpriced convention floor junk-food so I popped outside for a slice… and ran into Nathan at the pizza joint. I got to relay some of my own website-for-comics UI experiences via ACT-I-VATE/etc and hit him with a few interface ideas from films missing from his discussion (Children of Men’s retinally-projected keyboard-free typing? Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within’s holographic multi-touch?). After that it was back to the show to check the eminently-interesting to me (especially for my current 08 project) “Mobileactive: How Mobile Technology Impacts Politics and Vice Versa”, which charts the massive distance that politics has traveled via social networking and mobile devices. Putting the last two presidential campaigns in context (and watching how tight and effective Obama’s machine has used new channels), the panel was a hum-dinger.

The next morning I took it slower, spending some time online at my brother’s house, securing an interview for a political blog and an illustration gig for Blender magazine for when I got back to New York. It was raining and chilly in Austin and Steve and I walked up to a taco joint for some breakfast and then parted ways: him to an internship interview and me onto the free Dillo shuttle to the convention center to prepare for my multimedia Book Reading talk.

My talk went smoothly and quickly, about 15 minutes of gab-and-click; given that that my presentation was not only the sole comic in the series, but the sole work of fiction, it was a welcome change for the show. Another simple example of how well-thought-out the entire show it was, SXSW smartly put the Book Readings on the Day Stage where the food is located, guaranteeing a captive and slurping audience. After my talk, I was greeted by fans from around the US and UK, which was a happy thing… and then I parked myself at the Barnes & Noble table on the con floor to sign their pile of copies of SHOOTING WAR and chat with SXSWers who were either new to my presentation or came specifically to meet me (the pure love part of the show for me).

By that point I’d reached con-saturation and left the show, having been invited to sit in on a studio session with VAST at a secret studio in downtown Austin. I got chills sitting in a folding chair listening to them working through tunes for their next release.

There were parties afterwards, but I was more interested in quiet time with the fam; I pinged my brother who was out at Chinese food with Paul Maybury and their respective womens and we all went back to Steve’s to chill over cocktails of questionable recipe and crack each other up. In the morning, Steve and I went for pancakes and a ride through the Texas hill country and then I was dropped off at the airport.

A few days’ hence, at home in Brooklyn, the many lessons and conversations and new friends I’ve picked up are still slowly percolating in the “futurecomics” part of my brain… but I know I’ll definitely be attending next year.