Who is Who – Scott Kirsner

Scott Kirsner has always been  interested in understanding how art blended with technology. While he was studying jazz and saxophone in New World School of the Arts he started to write.  He wrote mainly about theatre, cinema and technology. In the next years, Scott built a name for himself collaborating with “Variety”, “Hollywood Reporter”, “Business Week”, “New York Times”, “Wired”, etc.

In 2008 he gathered an interesting study on how cinema dealt with technological innovations, like film stock, sound, color, etc. The book, “Inventing the Movies”, points a fundamental historical clash over the years between the cinematic status quo that resisted each innovation and the technological inventors. Here you can see him explaining some of his ideas on the matter. As his curiosity moved closer, Scott analyzed the new paradigm of web video ecosystem in comparison with the standard TV/cable/cinema media systems. That became the book “The Future of Web Video.

Recently, he became interested in how artists would deal with the democratizing of media and artistic tools. Just as with other technological innovations, he sees that nowadays too, the status quo is being challenged by the web 2.0. era and now too the status quo is trying to resist. His next book “Fans, Friends & Followers, definitely got Scott under the attention of the independent filmmaking community. The book compiles 30 interviews of different artists that have only one thing in common. All of them managed to build an online audience and are now making a living out of managing their own careers.  And with no gatekeepers. Here you can see a two part presentation on his findings. Chris Anderson (remember him?) describes the book as an incredibly useful “playbook for the social media age”.

In all these investigations Scott sees himself more as a film anthropologist than an expert on digital cinema. However, his blog CinemaTech is the right place to get a hold on how technology is changing cinema every day. Last month at the Columbia University in New York there was another edition of “The Conversation”, a forum about social media, digital distribution and the future of film, which he was one of the founders together with Lance Weiler.

Due to all his research work, Scott Kirsner is definitely another name to follow.

Well, I guess that’s it for now. Next post will be on the father of New Distribution models, Peter Broderick. And after that we’ll take a little break from the theorists on DIY Distribution and we’ll be taking a look at some of the filmmakers who actually did it.