Make it New
I’m excited to announce I’m joining Matter Studios as a Community and Platform Development Executive. I’ve been Vine’s Editor for the past two years, so I’m leaving one dream job for another.
During my time at Vine, I learned how to construct narratives with looping videos. Incredible looping videos. I built Vine’s most popular playlist to date, curated its first-ever art exhibit, and flew a bunch of brown boys to Coachella to shoot a music video composed of 60 connected Vines. (Warning: the song will stay with you for days).
So. Why Matter Studios?
Matter is water, my friends. Since its launch, Matter has admirably eschewed categorization, and this will allow it to become whatever it needs to be in order to support new kinds of stories. It’s a new kind of company and a new kind of role, but I’ve been experimenting with storytelling and building toward this opportunity for a very long time.
In 2009 I saw a video on YouTube that I shouldn’t have seen, that nobody should have seen. Many of us watched a woman die during the Iranian election protests. It changed me.
I was in Chicago, having moved from New York in order to study with the writer Aleksandar Hemon. Hemon taught me, among many things, to move with my work beyond comfort into the places I feared. The experience of watching that video resulted in Throw Forever to the Fleas and the process revealed that the Internet would be inextricably tied to my writing — and whatever else I wanted to do.
I began to Internet for money as well. During my last three years in Chicago, I served as Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Digital Director. I learned how a city came together. I helped people watch snow plows clear the streets on a Google Map. I sent Jon Stewart deep dish pizzas with anchovies when he knocked Chicago’s pizza in favor of New York’s (even though you were right, Jon). I collaborated with the Chicago Public Library, Tumblr, and amazing writers including Roxane Gay and Patrick Somerville to write a mixed-media story online.
But one of my favorite stories came from interviewing the fake @mayoremanuel two weeks before I became the actual @rahmemanuel. Wired called this fictional Twitter epic “the first, truly great piece of literature to be produced using this micromedium that’s rapidly transforming communication in the digital age.”
@mayoremanuel was new kind of story, pushing the boundaries of genre that didn’t exist a decade earlier. A few years later, I made my own attempt at real-time literature, remixing a Bollywood film through screenshots as part of the second annual Twitter Fiction Festival.
After I’d finished the story, my dad called me to ask when I was planning on getting over “her.” Such an epic burn. But it was true, I’d watched 90 hours of film to tweet a story about my own life. Incidentally, this is how I found work at Vine.
The impulse to tell stories is as old as we are, but we keep inventing new ways to tell them. The walls between creator and audience are being torn down, and it’s not unusual for the art to be drawn from the process as much as the product. I suspect The Life of Pablo will never be officially complete, and the constant tinkering is more than just Kanye being Kanye — it’s an entirely new approach to art and one that spans all mediums.
This is why I’m joining Matter. We want to support creators who are guided by process, narrative, and collaborative feedback, because it is these creators who are telling the kinds of stories we haven’t envisioned yet.
Let’s get started.
