Visual Thinkery Story Telling with Bryan Mathers

And good morning, good morning, good morning.

It's me again, Jim Groom.

And for this hour of DS106 Radio Camp, Summer Camp,

I'm here with the inimitable Brian Mathers,

who I've been a long-time fan of his visual thinkery work.

And he's with us this morning to talk a little bit about some

of his ideas and kind of his journey

through talking through pictures, if you will,

or thinking through pictures.

So Brian, welcome.

Thanks, Jim.

Big fan also of your good self.

And in fact, I think you've got some skin in this game in terms

of maybe what we'll talk about today.

If skin in the game means using you to the nth degree,

then yes, I have skin in the game.

Well, listen, I am a curious creative,

as I'm sure many of our listeners,

our millions of listeners are.

You know, a little thought presents itself,

and I'm thinking, well, where can I take that?

And a lot of those thoughts have been--

a lot of those early thoughts around visual thinkery

were reclaim-oriented thoughts, I guess.

But in particular, this idea of aesthetic

is something that I didn't really

understand until I started doing work for you.

So you would use words like "iconic."

It's very iconic.

That's my best Jim Goom impression there.

And you talk about art.

Yeah, thank you.

You talk about art.

You know, I know nothing about art.

I know nothing about what makes something iconic.

And yet, you would give me a fairly loose frame

to create stuff in, and I would create within that frame.

And it's almost like you were able to keep

that conversation going, to sort of--

maybe some of the weaker things sort of got left on the shelf,

and some of the stronger ideas that came through redeveloped.

But this idea of how does it make you feel--

whenever you create something visual,

and you put it in front of someone's eyeballs,

they digest it without even thinking about it.

They can then think about it, but it goes in first.

So that idea of what does it feel

like before you get a chance to think about it

is something that I have often came back to.

And yeah, I suppose I'd like to spend some time today sort

of maybe fumbling around in some different directions,

just to explore the idea of sort of aesthetic and visual

language.

It's interesting, too, because being

an early kind of partaker of your visual magic,

one of the things that hit me in Barcelona

when you drew the kind of sketch that

would become the iconic vision of Reclaim Hosting

is the album, and the album which then gave birth

to the fact that we're like an independent record store,

or even an independent record label.

And then we kind of have played with just that single vision

and that single--

I don't know if it's an allegory, analogy, however,

we're a metaphor.

But the thing that was so powerful to me

about the record was that it very simply and very kind

of concisely captured the principles

that Reclaim Hosting wanted to represent.

Like we believed in it, it undergirded this idea

of an independent record label, this idea

of an independent hosting company that was actually--

had different principles than say Bluehost, or GoDaddy,

or some of the bigger ones.

And those were more aligned with the artist,

more aligned with the creator, more aligned with building out

a sense of who you are, and us providing

a kind of infrastructure that's affordable, accessible, DIY,

et cetera.

And so I saw that record, and immediately I

was like, that's the Reclaim aesthetic.

Like that is not just the visual beauty,

that is a set of principles that we can build upon visually

and have for now going on 10 years with you.

And so it's amazing to me how you so quickly picked up

on so many of the principles undergirding Reclaim

and then found that iconic image that we could then

build everything else around.

I just thought that was magic.

Well, again, this is very interesting

because there's two sides to this, isn't it?

Because I didn't recognize what it was.

You were able to see what it was, and the fact

that here is an aesthetic.

You know what I mean?

All I had done was to absorb the conversation that

was playing out in front of me and sort of played back

something that sort of came from my own brain, I guess.

And that's what I've tried to bottle in visual thinker,

where everything I do starts in that conversation

because I'm a very thin-skinned person anyway.

I'm very empathetic.

But I'm always just trying to step into whoever

I'm working with, their shoes, and to try

to absorb what it is they're trying to communicate

or trying to say or trying to be.

But it took you to recognize what it was,

and then immediately you played it back to me.

So it's a bit like a game of tennis, I guess.

You played it back to me, and you said, well,

can you go in different directions?

And I remember being on a plane and just sort of going,

well, OK, this is like solving puzzles.

As soon as you have an element of the visual language--

so if the aesthetic is how you feel,

and as you talked about values, you

talked about something being independent

and those sort of things.

But a record is a thing.

It's a noun.

It's an element of that visual language.

And then the question is, well, what can I do with that?

What can I do with that element of language?

Because it doesn't take much to think about, well,

a record in a record store and a greatest hits album.

You know what I mean?

And you can just start sort of stepping--

well, if something's not useful to the aesthetic,

you bypass it.

But if something then becomes useful,

say, well, what would that be?

I remember us thinking about mono and stereo,

and stereo, that idea that everything's backed up.

And it's just like, well, lovely.

There's a little way to communicate that.

You want stuff in stereo, don't you?

You want--

Yeah.

There's limitations to even that little bit of visual language.

But it's a lovely little play that as soon as you

have something, you can use.

And if you think about some of the other visual languages

I've explored with other clients,

things like Penguins, I'm sure some of our listeners

will recognize.

The Penguins are created for the GoGM network.

And again, they are a really great, really flexible

visual language.

And of course, it's a really good--

the idea of the concept was there before I came along.

As in, they used to--

different members of GoGM used to send this squidgy stress

toy penguin to each other.

And then so it would pop up in Rio de Janeiro.

And here's a photograph of our penguin on Rio's beach

with one of our members.

You know what I mean?

And then it would be in Australia or whatever.

But this idea of a penguin, it was already there

for a reason.

And spotting it is half the game.

And sort of going, actually, penguins are really good--

who doesn't love penguins?

You can sort of get behind it.

You don't have a gender problem with penguins.

You know what I mean?

They're sort of gender friendly.

And so from an illustration point of view

and a sort of capturing point of view,

and from where they're always up to sort of antics

and doing sort of silly stuff, but they're really

pretty clever, to be honest, in terms of survival.

That idea of survival as sort of researchers

spread amongst the globe.

It's just, again, once you've got it,

you can-- it'll run and run.

And it's still running.

And that amazes me, because it started off

as one little thing that then struck a chord.

And again, that team were able to recognize the power of it

and what it could do.

And it's done different heavy lifting.

Yeah, once you've got a visual language,

it can do the heavy lifting for you,

whether that's communicate stuff or--

in Gojian's realm, it's more about making

stuff feel friendly, I think.

They've done some pretty serious sort of research and documents

around research, or outputs from that research,

that I, as a researcher, I'm not.

But I would find that pretty intimidating.

But yet, sprinkled with penguin dust, suddenly,

it's more accessible.

So it's doing a different thing there,

I think, than maybe the reclaim.

Yeah.

It's two things that I think you really do well

with some of the work you're doing.

And I'll come back to the second one.

But the first one is, you have the--

let's say the driving metaphor, or that kind of principle

that gives birth to a broader aesthetic,

whether it's a penguin or record.

And soon enough, you will find yourself, I find--

and I mean specifically you, not the royal you--

kind of playing with the jokes in there.

You immediately start playing on words.

You start punning around.

And the whole thing not only has a kind of principles behind it,

but then it's fun.

And I think those are two amazing things.

A, how many hosting companies, how many research groups,

how many learning management systems have, A,

anything akin to an aesthetic, visual sense of beauty

or driving principles.

And then B, are even remotely fun and playful and humorous.

And I think the marriage of those two things

really takes the work that you've

done for a pretty large swath of the community

now to a new level.

And I really love the fact that you're able to--

and they're sometimes small things.

Like with Martin Weller's book on metaphors,

the name of the boat is meta and then the number four.

And it's simple enough.

It's not crazy.

But it's great.

It's beautiful.

It's so playful.

It's so right on.

And I really like that.

And I think that also playfulness

underscores, like you were saying with the research,

the idea that this is accessible.

This is open.

Please come join us.

We're not here to scare you with security, servers,

climate control.

This is like, come in and do this and play with us

and have fun and learn something.

I love the way you were able to kind of walk

that line for "Replayment."

It sounds very much like that for "GoJian."

And I'm wondering, how does that play

into your idea of the visual style or the aesthetic?

Yeah, look, thank you for picking up on that.

That's very helpful because I think

I realized reasonably early on in the visual thinkery journey

that humor was my most powerful weapon.

Humor disarms.

I think I learned it most not necessarily working

for my ed tech clients.

Because essentially, I've got two banks of clients.

Clients in the education ed tech world.

And then I've got a completely separate bank of clients

that are around environmental policy and plastic pollution

and preventing plastic pollution.

So people like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth.

There's loads of little NGOs based in Brussels

that I've done a whole bunch of work with.

And the idea of using dark humor--

so whenever you're talking about an existential crisis

as we face in the world today, how do you reach people?

As in, are you going to--

do you have to use shock tactics?

Do you have to-- so for example, plastic pollution,

do you have to-- is it another picture of a turtle

with a plastic around its neck?

You know what I mean?

Which is hard to look at, but it's

trying to communicate this sort of problem.

I think I realized that the power of cartoons

and that humor element that can be not slapstick humor,

but dark humor.

I'm sort of just going, really?

Can you believe this?

And leaning into that side has been really effective.

Because it has the-- in fact, I'd probably

say dark humor has a stronger power to it

in terms of disarming or grabbing

the attention of someone who's looking at it.

It's certainly not forcing them to close their arms.

It's the opposite of that.

So I've been amazed at how that can be used.

But again, a lot of the humor that I tend to pick up on--

OK, a lot of it is coming from me

or things that I find humorous.

You know what I mean?

But most of it's rooted back in that conversation

I'm having with the client.

It's their world that I'm spotting.

Because I'm an outsider, I'm able to sort of spot

something that's absurd or a situation or a part of a story

that's absurd.

And yeah, whenever I play the ideas in front of the client,

they are gravitated generally towards those more absurd--

those little bits of playfulness.

There's another element to it as well, which is--

part of it is just I've drawn--

we've used a Jaws metaphor.

There's a boat on top.

I've sort of looked at various different images

to do with the movie.

And I've drawn a boat.

And I'm going, well, what would this be called?

And the boat tells you what it should be called.

The boat answers right back.

Or I've got a person in danger of the shark.

They're on a lilo.

Well, of course, they're on a laptop.

So it starts telling you.

Because you have this visual language

or the scene's already set, it starts

telling you the bits that need to be there.

So yeah, it's funny how it evolves.

So it's interesting, too, because you, Brian,

have in many ways developed an aesthetic.

I can look at art and say, oh, this is Brian Mathers' art,

although I have to be honest with you--

and this might be a good frame--

I didn't realize you did the art for OER 20--

was it 4?

For the most recent--

and that was a really great piece.

But I was like, oh, wait, this is Brian Mathers' art?

I didn't recognize it.

And was that, for you, a conscious departure

from your aesthetic?

Or is it part of your experimentation?

Or did it just-- it called for something totally different?

There was no sense of cartoon in that.

So I'm just wondering what your take on that is.

So if you look carefully, there's

definitely cartoon in there.

There's definitely cartoon in there.

But I loved how that came out, actually.

Sometimes you've got to do a bit more digging.

Maybe we should describe it for the listeners,

because I didn't do a good job of describing it.

So what is the piece we're talking about for OER 24

before we go too deep into it?

Well, so there's the lettering themselves.

So it's more of a brand aesthetic, isn't it?

Because-- and I've done this at successive OERs, where I've

met--

again, had a conversation with those people that are chairing

and responsible for the themes.

Usually, Maren Deepwell is involved,

has been involved in there, too.

And so she's guiding the process,

because guiding academics is a tricky business

at the best of times.

And I'm hunting for clues.

I'm playing a game that my participants don't necessarily

see as a game.

You know what I mean?

Sometimes if they're new to it or new to how

I work on my process, they go, well, what's this about?

What's this conversation about?

What are we doing here?

But what I'm doing is I'm poking,

and I'm trying to find an angle.

I'm trying to find a clue that I can work with.

I'm trying to find--

and so for OER 24, which is based in Cork City,

one of the things that evolved was the Book of Kells,

the Ireland being an ancient place of learning, I guess.

And that's the time taken to create something beautiful

that held the knowledge.

And so what I tried to do--

and I didn't know whether it was going to work.

And I actually came up with two or three different ideas--

but was to try to think, well, what

would a modern version of that be, as in an O'Brien version?

Because I do things in my style, because I've only

got one style.

It's just me.

So I was trying to just absorb the beauty of some

of those ancient texts.

But yet, live in a digital world, I guess.

And so I spotted some of these little small dots, almost.

And you find them in different ancient civilizations.

You find them, obviously, in First Nation Australian

culture.

You'll find it in Tinga Tinga art in East Africa as well.

But these are almost like stipple, sort of dot effect.

And so I created OER24 with that.

And I don't know.

It just really resonated with people.

And it really worked.

Better than that, I went to OER--

I really enjoyed OER24.

But they had big screens everywhere with it on.

It's one thing creating it.

It's another thing displaying it.

And they had it on everything, which

was beautiful because RGB-wise, you

can use punchy colors when you're drawing on an iPad.

And it really popped.

I was really pleased with how it evolved.

But again, it's rooted in a conversation.

But the question is, Jim, is it art?

Is it art?

But is it art, Brian?

But I think it actually--

one of the things I'm realizing just asking that question is,

I didn't see it, only saw it on the laptop

because I was in that OER24 in person.

So I didn't get to see that.

And I didn't get the subtlety of it

until I was like, oh, that's Brian's art.

And then I gave it a second look.

And I'm like, oh, I can see some of that.

But for me, the subtlety of it and the fact

that I almost felt like you were trying on a completely

different style or going where you needed to go culturally,

with the idea of illumination and the Book of Kells

and all of that.

But it raises a bigger question, I think.

And this is maybe for you more individually as an artist,

is part of your aesthetic, obviously, is rooted in cartoons

and is rooted in humor.

And then you've married those two for your own project

with the work you're doing around a history, if you will,

through zines of Ireland.

And I think, how does the kind of aesthetic

now start to marry to the politic of what's going on

and where we do?

Because I don't think as much-- and this is a big philosophical,

this is an artistic question--

can you divorce an aesthetic from a politic?

Reclaim has a politic.

We don't want to be like the big corporate sellouts.

We don't want to play big ed tech.

We don't want it.

We want people to feel like they have a voice.

We want people to feel like there is a person behind it.

That's a politic.

And that's a politic we're trading on.

And I wonder, have you, through your own work

as a visual artist, sometimes a gun for hire,

found your own aesthetic and your own politic

through your work?

Yeah, thank you for asking that.

Yeah, I think there's a commonality here.

And I will tell you the cartoonist's greatest trick,

Jim.

I will tell you.

The cartoonist's greatest trick is that a wobbly line,

if you draw something with a wobbly line,

it is more human than a very straight computer-created line.

And so when you draw a cartoon and have people in the cartoon,

it feels human.

If it feels human, it feels genuine.

And it feels honest.

And I think that represents me.

I'm trying to create things that are genuine.

I don't really do any corporate work.

I'm not really working for the man.

I'm trying to take conversation with real people

and turn it into things that reflect,

turn it into art that reflects those people

and what they're trying to say.

So that element of being genuine and that element of honesty,

I think, is so powerful, especially in an AI world

or in a computer-y world.

But the humor is also human.

So building humor into art just makes things, again,

feel more human.

So I think that's the sort of essential strand.

So then trying to deconstruct my Irish past or my Ulster past,

again, I found trying to use cartoons and humor to do that.

And for me to be honest with myself

and allow others to see some of my thinking,

I found it incredibly powerful.

Funny enough, though, it seems to get harder.

Every scene I do gets harder.

I don't know if I'm trying to set the bar higher

or whether I'm getting slower or whatever.

I'm not quite sure.

But I definitely get a chance to be me

and to try to say stuff in a way that some of--

I would just love to have an impact in Ireland

as someone who was born in the Troubles

and thinks very differently now than maybe they

would have done when I was growing up.

And so being able to sort of deconstruct that

and be able to jump back--

cartoons allow you to do that.

I can represent myself as a boy or whatever else,

thinking a thought, finding something funny

or finding something absurd very easily in a cartoon.

I don't know a better way of doing that.

And yet I'm able to keep it completely personal

so that someone else can look at it

and go and identify or choose not to.

They can see meaning or choose not to.

But there's no threat there.

I'm not telling them what to think.

I'm just talking about stuff that is meaningful to me.

So yeah, that has been another whole journey, really,

that has amazed me.

Well, honesty and humor could almost be like a life

philosophy, right?

Be honest but funny, right?

That would be a wonderful life philosophy

if you one could adopt it as much as possible.

But yeah, I think--

Sounds like a great gentleman's barber's, doesn't it?

Honesty and humor, gentleman's barber's.

I maybe need to set that up, having a background

in hairstyles as I do.

But I also like the point you made,

and one that I really didn't make and should have,

is you do keep it as a-- because it is such a gigantic topic,

and it comes from so many different points of view,

so many-- and it is potentially a point of contention,

that you're acknowledging and approaching it

from your own journey through it,

as you do seemingly most of your art.

And I think that's interesting, because part of--

and I don't know, because having been

a student of literature, and maybe not to the same degree

as visual art, the term of aesthetic

was almost like the term of art.

Is it art?

What exactly is an aesthetic again?

It's one of those terms that it took me most of my life

to come to terms with.

But I understand, OK, it's visual beauty,

but it's not just that.

It's also some sort of principled idea

that an artist represents, so it can offset the beauty.

And I love it, because it's one of those multifaceted concepts

that undergirds a whole creative way of thinking, that is,

as a word, you could almost unpack it over a lifetime.

And I think that's why the fact that your story in itself is--

I continue to be a gigantic fan and just truly--

how would I say--

just not mesmerized-- that's the wrong word--

but fascinated is the wrong word.

It's too general.

But astonished might be right.

I don't know what the right word exactly is.

I got to figure that out.

But the fact that at a certain point,

being a programmer, saying, you know what?

Done with that.

I'm going to try my hand at this whole creative cartoon thing.

And the success you've had, I just

find that really admirable.

I think maybe that's the term I'm looking for,

the admiration I have at your ability to do that.

Well, look, it's admirable if that's

the way you tell the story.

But that's not how it was.

I've only ever done a succession of small experiments.

And I'm switching careers.

I keep pinching myself, going, oh, yeah,

I used to run a software company.

I used to do all sorts of stuff in a completely different

world.

And it seems like a completely different brand.

But I never really made the conscious choice

to be a cartoonist.

I started drawing on an iPad in order to do a thing,

in order to say a thing in a corporate world.

And one thing led to another.

And people started asking me to do stuff for them.

And they were terrible.

But it was definitely small steps,

because I'm not brave enough to--

and I don't think I've ever had visions like that.

I remember as a young man, whenever

we were starting our first company,

I went to this entrepreneurship course.

And apparently, it was very important

that we all had 10-year visions.

And I was very certain that I didn't have anything

like a 10-year vision.

As in, it was me and three other guys

had started this little web company back

before the dot-com crash.

Yeah, I just didn't have a vision,

because I just don't think that way.

I just see little, small, curious wonderments.

And I just go from one of those that

then opens another couple of different rabbit holes.

I think people in this audience will

know what I'm talking about there, because I've

seen very similar behavior.

And especially anybody who enjoys a remix, I think,

is oriented in that way, where a creative opportunity presents

itself, and they have to take it.

And so that's the journey, really,

as in how it looks like from 30,000 feet.

Maybe it looks more impressive than it is.

It's worth talking about the remixer,

and I do want to come back to that.

But before we do, you reminded me of one of the things

that this idea of vision, and maybe not having

a 10-year vision, or not having a grand historical narrative

that's driving your work.

I've been reading a Belarus author

who won the Nobel Prize--

I don't know if it was 2015 or '17.

Her name is Svetlana Aliaksevich.

I think I'm pronouncing that right, but forgive me if I'm

not.

Anyway, I'm reading a story by her,

or actually a narrative by her.

It's kind of documentarian, where

she has a whole bunch of people tell

their stories of what it was like in the Afghanistan War,

so when the Russians went to Afghanistan.

And so that's all to tell you what she wrote.

But what was interesting to me is, for the first time--

I've read a bunch of her books-- for the first time

in her books, she spent a little time explaining her vision.

And it was super interesting to me,

because I've read many of her books,

and she never says anything about why she's doing this

or how she's doing this.

A lot of other pundits do, but she doesn't.

But in this book, she says, my idea

is to try and resist the grand historical narratives

and capture the people telling the story in the moment that

will be forgotten, and tell the details about what

was in their kitchen, or what they were eating,

or what they smelled, or all of these other details that

will get lost in the grand historical narratives.

And she talks about it as small histories,

as individual histories, which kind of is an interesting way

to maybe think about the Ulster Project,

but also maybe to think about some of the broader ways

that communities now can and should

start to tell their stories and start to think about,

there are the grand narrative historical visions that

will be told, whether we like it or not,

but our small place in it and how we saw it

and how we experienced it and what it meant to us

may weave together a whole bunch of smaller histories

that tell a different, grander history.

And I'm fascinated by her attempt at that.

And it reminds me a lot of what you're talking about.

Reminds me a little bit of moving away from that.

Well, look, yeah, that makes complete sense to me.

And again, back to the root of the things that I do

is conversation, because conversation

is almost like the smallest common denominator.

You know what I mean?

In history, I guess.

Or there's maybe one way to look at it.

But finding-- the nuggets are hidden in the grubby detail.

Yeah.

And that has been clear to me for many years.

Certainly in my process, that's clear.

As in, it's just the form of words

that someone chooses to use without thinking,

as in a little metaphor that just sort of pops into it.

Like, aha, that's the angle.

That's the angle I'm looking for here.

It's because it's telling a story.

It's telling a story that comes from the source.

So yeah, those-- because who can possibly--

I've also-- how do you stand on a plinth

and proclaim yourself the authority to sort of say,

here is how it is?

You know what I mean?

I don't know how to do that.

I didn't go to the right school that allows me to do that.

You know, I can only tell you what it looks

like from where I'm standing.

You know, and also I've found that where other people are

standing, they see all sorts of other things

that are so interesting.

So it really bothers me in things like just meetings.

You know, whenever you don't get the viewpoint from a person

who feels like, for whatever reason, they can't contribute

or isn't allowed to contribute, or you know what I mean,

or it's not a level playing field or whatever,

that just feels so unfair to me because everybody

sees different stuff.

Everybody thinks different stuff.

And it's those little grubby--

you know, in the grubby dust, that's where the gems are.

Yeah, and it's funny because that's

how this Belarus author does it.

It's all through conversations and the way

she weaves them together as a broader idea.

And so to the point of your kind of style,

and you're hearing all these different things

and being able to bring them out and then kind of weave

in those points that people didn't make,

you've also gone beyond that and made a machine

where other people can jump in and actually add their two bits

and not have to worry about being--

not being able to talk about it or being silenced in a meeting

or not having that place.

Like, you've created this really cool tool

called the Remixer, right?

And can you talk a little bit about the creation

of the Remixer and why you did it?

And I know you're excited about it now.

So I'd love to hear why you're excited about it.

Well, I've been working on the Remixer for a number of years.

And it's the same sort of thing where one day I

discover what SVGs are, a document describing vectors.

And then my web--

sort of year 2000 knowledge of the web sort of goes,

well, hold on a minute.

If you twiddle parts of that document, the SVG changes.

Oh, that's interesting.

You know what I mean?

And again, a series of very small steps.

And also then, you always need a reason to create stuff,

or at least I do.

So yeah, I remember being--

what was I?

I was at some sort of a retreat with people

like Greenpeace and environmental organizations

that were sort of thinking about policy,

but also they had some artists along.

And I found myself there.

And it was brilliant.

But I was like, well, hey, there's a campaign.

And we could use this.

We could remix business cards.

And there would be a thing.

So suddenly, I've got a reason to turn some lines of code

that I'd mucked around with into a--

well, if that person was able to remix their own business card

and print it, oh, that would be really interesting.

And I found myself sort of in a space

where people were like, this seems

different from conversations we've

had when it comes to thinking about campaigns.

And so again, one thing led to another.

And every enhancement I made to this machine,

I guess, more people started dabbling with it.

But its root is in that same curiosity,

or that same realization that the way I see the world is not

how anybody else sees the world.

Whenever I see the opportunity to remix something,

everybody else sees different opportunities

to remix something.

So one of the remixers that I'll share,

or that we can put in the notes of this radio broadcast,

is a little cartoon that people can remix the speech bubble.

And it's funny.

I just sort of thought--

one, you assume that people are like yourself.

So I assume everybody wants to remix.

And that's not true.

I think, in fact, probably the majority of people,

when presented with an opportunity

to remix something, actually sort of won't,

for whatever reason.

I don't really know why.

Whether they don't think that that's fun,

or whether that's putting them on the spot,

or whether they don't get enjoyment from that, I don't

know.

But there's certainly a slice of people who will see something

and jump right in.

And so some of the remixers that have worked best,

things that have been used for conferences,

so things like a remixable postcard,

have been simple enough to allow people to just upload a photo,

type a few sentences, even, and publish.

And of course, everybody being able to see what everyone else

is remixing is the real gold of it,

where a gallery just starts to emerge

of different people's inputs.

And I don't know why that gives me so much joy.

But it really does, because there's

something very human about that, and realizing that everybody's

got a different angle.

And therefore, everybody's remix is different.

So I guess that's the background to the remixing machine.

But it just keeps going.

That's the thing.

It's funny to me, the way that your remixer

captures that sense, like you said, of make it human

or honest, and make it fun.

And I think one of the things I know,

I remember about our conference together, OER by Domains 21,

is the remixer was employed to allow people to--

because it was a fully online conference.

We were deep into COVID.

And the remixer allowed people to create their own,

essentially, conference name tags.

You didn't really need a conference name tag,

because it was an online conference.

But almost everyone created it, because it

was a fun, unique way for them to introduce themselves

to the rest of the people in the conference.

And it worked.

And it was a really--

I started to associate the people who would come to that

and who would introduce themselves with their name tag

kind of like you would at a conference that was physical.

And it was a really beautiful trick

to kind of take some of what we've expected

in physical conferences, but give it

a new twist and a fun twist, and still say,

it's important for you to be there.

It's important for you to introduce yourself

and to kind of give yourself a sense of what it is.

I really love that piece of it.

Yeah.

Yeah, that worked so well, didn't it?

And again, it seemed like a good idea at the time,

so we created it.

But like most projects that involve Jim Groom

and Brian Mathers and Maren Deepwell,

afterwards, we're like, oh, yeah.

Yeah, that had a different angle to it.

So again, I find myself looking at how people present

themselves and thought, oh, there

would be an interesting person to talk to.

There's a person that actually I need to make sure

that I connect with them.

And in a way that if you give me a delegate list,

as conferences tend to do, it's just like, well,

I've got nothing to go on here.

I don't know.

I've just got a name and an institution.

Exactly.

You know?

And so there was a very functional angle there

of essentially allowing people to introduce themselves.

Also, people sort of saying, I am here.

Because also with that conference,

because it was all online, people could check out.

But somehow by creating something,

you were saying, I'm now officially

part of this conference.

And therefore, I guess that people were probably

more engaged as a result by I don't know how many percent.

Maybe it's only 1% of them.

But definitely, I think there's an impact.

So this is what happens with all sort of creative projects

is afterwards, you're like, oh, yeah.

And it had that effect, too.

And that was quite interesting.

Well, the investment there is definitely telling.

Like the idea that people invested a little bit of time

and as a result, it paid off.

So I mean, that's great.

And look, this has been an amazing conversation.

We're coming to the end of our hour, Brian.

So I just wanted to get a sense, is there any points about--

because I know I hijacked the conference again and again

around Belarusian literature and the rest.

So is there any points you wanted to make

that I might have missed?

No, I don't think so.

I think we've done very well.

I think I'll be keen to see if anyone remixes

my little cartoon on the remix machine, anyone who's

listening.

And look, there's millions of listeners, I'm sure.

Nobody's listening.

That's the rule of Diaspora Six Radio.

Nobody's listening.

OK, so the gallery is just going to be

me remixing my own cartoon.

But is it art?

[HUMMING]

If art happens in a vacuum, is it still art?

Is it still art?

Well, that's a topic for another day, isn't it, Jim?

It is.

Well, Brian, thank you so much.

You're so generous with your time and your thoughts.

And I really appreciate it.

It's been a pleasure.

I very much enjoyed the conversation.

Thanks, Jim.

All right.

You too, Brian.

Take care.

Cheers.