The Theory of Everything: Strings or Cubes?

With the advent of new media, creativity is becoming increasingly derivative. Typically, new media parrots past creations and plays on their themes to create something new and different. Spoken in the parlance of our times, Rip, Mix, and Burn. We have not discussed this topic specifically in class, but the idea fits with the notion of becoming digital. In Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig explains that it is an American tradition to build on past culture to make new media, such as "Steamboat Willie." Today, however, we have new technologies enabling all kinds of new, peer-to-peer and derivative creativity that doesn't require a record label or publisher. Our project is to explore this new space by creating a PBS-style documentary about the Time Cube, a totally bogus “theory of everything.” Borrowing presentation elements from historical documentaries and the like, we will present this new material in a totally incongruous light and create something hilarious. The interviewer will maintain an air of absolute seriousness while his guest rambles on about completely and totally absurd gibberish. We also plan to try and make as many pop/nerd-culture references as possible to further demonstrate how old material can be mixed into new material.

The second part of our project is to post our mockumentary to the Internet five days or a week before the final project deadline and see if we can generate hype for it by posting to various link aggregation sites and blogs. After a few days, we will see if we have garnered any popularity and reflect on how the Internet works as a peer-to-peer knowledge community. Early in the history of the web, it would have been near impossible to publish and distribute media of this kind. With the rise of YouTube and the like, however, we want to try and measure how easy it is publish and market new media over the Internet. This project is basically a test of Benkler's graph theory discussion about how new nodes on the Internet quickly become linked in to the established core of the Web, reminiscent of the rapid and short-lived popularity of the MIT spam war video.

About Time Cubism

Time Cubism is a theory of everything similar to string theory developed by the self-proclaimed Dr. Gene Ray.

"Educators are lying bastards. -1 x -1= +1 is WRONG, it is academic stupidity and is evil. The educated stupid should acknowledge the natural antipodes of+1 x +1 = +1 and -1 x -1 = -1 exist as plus and minus values of opposite creation - depicted by opposite sexes and opposite hemispheres. Entity is death worship - for it cancels opposites."

(http://www.timecube.com/)

Project Outline

• 10 minute video documenting Time Cubism
• Website advertising the documentary with links to YouTube
• Submission to Slashdot, Digg, etc.