Words You Can Use: The BAVC BLOG

by Carol Varney, BAVC Director of Development

Today’s blog post is brought to you by the serendipity that is the airport shuttle van. It was on such a van leaving the Sundance Film Festival for the Salt Lake City airport that I, by chance, met Lyle Hysen, founder of Bank Robber Music - an indie music licensing company. Lyle was at Sundance because he was one of the music supervisors for the film Choke, which screened at Sundance and was subsequently bought by Fox Searchlight (one of those “rare” success stories from Sundance this year. Or so they say).

On a recent trip to New York, I had the opportunity to sit down with Lyle at his office on Wall Street (according to the security guard at the front desk, the piece of art on the wall in the lobby cost $3 million, and she didn’t think it was worth it) to ask him about Bank Robber Music, how it started, and his thoughts on indie music in big and small budget features, television shows, and documentaries.

Before we started talking, Lyle warned me that our conversation would be full of swear words and that the conversation might sound a little disjointed, but I thought it all turned out ok. You can decide for yourself . . .

How did you decide to start Bank Robber Music?

Lyle: I was at Matador Records for 10 years running their publishing company and doing their licensing work, and when my wife and I had our first child, Charlotte, I realized that I wanted more flexible hours and to have screaming children as assistants. So I eventually left Matador to start my own company. I consider founding the company to be a post-birth hormonal decision. My very supportive wife encouraged the idea, and now I get to work with all kinds of bands and labels that I like.

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by A. Schmidt, BAVC Marketing Strategist

Ok, I’ll admit it. When I first heard about Twitter early in 2007 from Mindy Aronoff (BAVC’s Director of Training and Resources), I thought, SO WHAT. Sigh. Here is another ridiculous waste of time created by techies looking to create a new nugget of nothing special in hopes of getting snapped up by Yahoo, Rupert Murdock or Amazon.

Mindy and Andy (her partner in crime) twittered for about two days, and then the novelty wore off. At that time, I assumed that was going to be the way of Twitter – a passing fancy that would end when everyone got tired of drunk twittering. Then came an award at 2007 SXSW, and then the stories of how the news media and even the LA Fire Department were using Twitter during the California wildfires last year to send and receive immediate emergency updates from residents and firefighters. Fine. I admit it. I didn’t get it. I was naive, thinking inside the box, refusing to jump on the bandwagon for fear of the bandwagon.

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by Angelo Sacerdote, TIMA Manager and Senior Preservation Specialist

This past March 13th, I was fortunate enough to go to the opening of California Video at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles with BAVC’s Development Director, Carol Varney.

We arrived early and were given a tour of the Getty Research Institute’s video vaults and preservation set-up by Jonathan Furmanski, who does all of the video preservation work for the Institute. About half of the exhibit came from the Getty Research Institute’s acquisition of the Long Beach Museum of Art Video Archive in 2006. Jonathan came up to BAVC around then and was given an intensive training by our former preservation specialist, Jon Selsley. Jonathan said he modeled their preservation lab after ours and used their preservation lab to work on many of the pieces in the show.

We met all kinds of people including our host, Glenn Phillip—the exhibition’s curator and senior projects specialist and consulting curator in the Department of Contemporary Programs and Research at the Institute. We also met Bill Viola and Kira Perov (whose work BAVC preserves), Skip Manning, Chip Lord and Doug Hall of Ant Farm. There was a re-creation of Ant Farm’s original video installation “Eternal Frame” which included Heather Weaver’s restoration of the video (which was featured in our preservation DVD, PLAYBACK: Preserving Analog Video). (more…)

by Dannie Delvos, BAVC Education Recruiter

If you have visited BAVC’s facility lately, you might have noticed some changes in the hallways: new lighting, new paint, and, most importantly, new photographs. BAVC’s new gallery ROHSTOFF [raw material] has opened its doors and was kicked off with a big bang — a shoot-out between the leading photo-editing applications Lightroom and Aperture. However, the tools had to take a back seat when it came to the stars of the night: the artists Brent Bowers, Liz Hickok, Michael Mages, and Michele Sieglitz.

So, what is ROHSTOFF [raw material] and why does BAVC have a gallery, you might ask?

Rohstoff is German for “raw material” – the stuff big things are made of. BAVC’s exhibition series features emerging and established artists, whose work is mostly experimental, often innovative, sometimes controversial, and always thought-provoking. (more…)

by Connie Hwong, BAVC Grants Manager

I firmly believe that the Nintendo Wii is primarily designed to make game players look like flailing idiots. This suspicion was confirmed at the annual Game Developer’s Conference, which filled the Moscone Center this past February 18 -21 with summits, panels, tutorials, and lectures, as well as a career pavilion and an expo that allowed gaming companies to show off the latest and greatest in technophile gadgetry. There was, of course, heavy representation from large and small game companies and dot-coms from Silicon Valley and SF, as well as a surprisingly strong Canadian presence; Manitoba is heavily marketing itself as the next new Northern hub for game development studios, following in the footsteps of Quebec and British Columbia. Flashy video footage glorifying Winnipeg’s charming riverfront district, packed with grinning rollerbladers and hip café-goers (and surely shot during the only 2 weeks of the year when it’s not freezing cold) were projected everywhere. Nice try, Manitoba, but you’re not fooling me – I know my Canadian geography, and your province is the North Dakota of your country. But maybe the US’s game developers don’t know that . . .

My reasons for attending the GDC were mostly job-related: I attended part of the Serious Games Summit, a two-day mini conference that featured speakers from various universities, think tanks, government agencies, and private game development companies discussing games created around a social cause or an academic/learning environments. There was also a heated debate between academia (researchers USC and U Wisconsin-Madison) and the industry (Stormfront Studios and area/code) over whether there is an actual way to measure or evaluate what or how much people can learn from games. I saw many things and took pages and pages of notes, but for the sake of you, dear reader, I’ll spare you the full regurgitation and instead focus on a few key moments that arose during the week. (more…)

by Carol Varney, BAVC Director of Development

On a recent trip to New York City, and thanks to my friend Rachel who works in media relations at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), I had the pleasure of meeting with Constance DeCherney, Media Relations Liaison at the ACLU, and the person who is behind the ACLU’s presence in Second Life.

Anticipating the 6th anniversary of prisoners arriving at Guantanamo Bay Detention Center in Cuba, the ACLU hooked up with the Producers Institute-developers Nonny de la Peña and Peggy Weil, creators of Gone Gitmo. Gone Gitmo is a Second Life experience of rendition and Camp X-Ray, the now-defunct arrival center at Gitmo, developed as a virtual world companion piece to the documentary Unconstitutional. Gone Gitmo allows SL avatars to experience being hooded, handcuffed, verbally abused and detained. (more…)

By Carl Weichert, Training and Resources Strategist

My SXSW report in chunks . . .

Chunk 1

Most of the panels I attended were focused on some type of gaming. The first two I want to talk about were:

• The Future of Virtual World & Game Development: Rise of the Indies

• Cross-Media Cross-Pollination: Mashing Up Video Games and ARGs

Rise of the Indies was presented by Corey Bridges, Co-Founder of multiverse.net. Bridges reviewed the shift that’s occurred in the broadcast, music and newspaper industries as a result of people distributing their own content via sites such as YouTube (neatly summed up by Bridges: “Sucks to be you, Media Oligopolists”). He went on to assert that the video game industry was the next on the chopping block, citing issues in the current model, issues similar to those in broadcast and so on.

Trends mentioned by Bridges that are opening the industry to indies: faster connectivity, middleware (software that allows other softwares to talk with each other), and the move towards a universal client for virtual worlds (meaning a player in one virtual world, such as Second Life, could visit another world, such as There, with the same avatar).

He also discussed the rise gaming in social network sites, such as Facebook, that now allows users to add games, such as Scrabulous. to their pages, and software such as Flash that allows for easier development of simple games (if you want to check some out, try Kongregate.com). (more…)

Generally speaking, we think we’re pretty smart, but we are also big believers in the idea of collective intelligence (i.e. how communities can often interact and be more effective problem solvers than individuals) . . . So, we’ve got a problem, and we need your help to solve it in a way that works for everyone. Here’s the thing . . .

For each of the more than 650 classes we run each year, we have a handout that accompanies the class instruction. Last year, in an attempt to work more efficiently AND make good on our commitment to become a green business, we started sending these packets as PDF’s (rather than large photocopied paper packets). (more…)

By Mindy Aronoff, Director of Training & Resources

During the first tech boom, Hugh Forrest, the dude that puts together the SXSW Interactive Fest, was talking about how that conference differs from the music and film one . . . “There’s less of a distinction between the speakers and the attendees. There’s kind of a feeling that everyone is in the same boat and we’re all kind of going the same direction. The people leading the panel might have a little better idea of where the boat is going to end up than the people listening to them—or maybe not.” (Italics are mine.)

Even though the boat has gotten so much bigger, Forrest’s observation still holds true. Did I learn a lot from the panels last week? Not really. Not in a traditional sense. But I picked up so much from just being in the same space as Valleywag, Gawker, Mahalo, PostSecret, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Adobe, Citizen Agency, Pownce, MySpace, Laughing Squid, Meebo, Maker, Upcoming, Flickr, Zappos, Twitter, Udderz, Black Web 2.0, Fast Company, LinkedIn, Opera, Microsoft, TMZ, Robert Scoble, Six Apart, BoingBoing, RazorFish….oh, you get the idea. ‘Bout 8000 people, people. Jeez.

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by Alicia Schmidt, Marketing Strategist

Apparently attendance at SXSW Interactive nearly double this year as evidenced by the fact that there have been long, long lines to get into most of the parties. Last night, I wanted to go to The People Powered Party hosted by Moo, Threadless, Etsy and SF locals Timbuk2 (some of my favs), but the line stretched around the block to get into a bar the size of my living room. No thanks. Seems like the party lines have been one of the biggest topics about the conference this year. Off to a late dinner instead where we gossiped about how the SXSW crowd turned on Bay Area journalist Sarah Lacy who interviewed Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (a painfully inept communicator - thus the need for him to create a system to “help people connect and communicate more efficiently”). I’m not taking sides on this one, but you decide for yourself by watching the video on TechCrunch. I’m sure there is an interesting blog to be written about gender and SXSW Interactive, but I don’t have the energy to write it today. (more…)