Howard Bloom's Big Bang Tango Media Lab

by unknown

Street art has traditionally been the mainstream art of the future. The power of street culture gave us jazz in the 1920s, tap dancing in the 1930s, doo-wop in the 1950s, garage band rock in 1960s and 1970s, and break dancing and rap in the 1980s. There is a new form of street art that's compelling and spontaneous. But the street this burst of creativity is coming from is the Information Highway--the World Wide Web. And the art it's producing is the sort of thing that even Pixar and Lucas films could not achieve 20 years ago.

It's street animation--flash animation done without armies of illustrators and inkers. It's done on a pc at home. And it is done dirt cheap.

The first group to harness this art for a purpose calls itself Howard Bloom's Big Bang Tango Media Lab. Amazingly, it is a group of kids and of older folks who've never met each other, who live thousands of miles apart, who come from wildly different backgrounds, and who dress in ways that might horrify each other, but who meet in cyberspace everyday.

The group spontaneously combusted in two meet-the-author chat room sessions sponsored by two separate groups, sessions that through the magic of IM buddy lists attracted the same participants. On March 6th this self-assembling cyber-tribe announced its intention. On March 29, 2003, it met without pre-planning in a second meet-the-author chat room and set out its first objective.

What is Howard Bloom's Big Bang Tango Media Lab's aim? Ultimately to save and change humanity by changing the way it sees. To change and save humanity by giving it a sense of meaning.

The Big Bang Tango Media Lab's first step is an animation that tells the tale of the cosmos' history from the first instant of the big bang to the emotions in your brain as you read this page...all in a mere nine minutes.

The group's next task is to tackle bit by bit the expression of a Grand Unified Theory of Everything In the Universe Including the Human Soul created by an invalid stuck in a bedroom in Brooklyn. That trapped human with a universal view and with 600-books-worth of new theory and research in his computer is the author whose chat-room appearances triggered the self-generation of the Big Bang Tango Media Lab. His name is Howard Bloom. Gear Magazine says Bloom, "May just be the next Stephen Hawking," and Britain's Channel4 TV has called Bloom, "The Einstein, Freud, Buckminster Fuller, and Isaac Newton of the 21st Century."

But Einstein, Freud, and Newton never made street culture an object of their study and were never able to use it to express themselves. Bloom is an expert in mass behavior. His Voyage of the Beagle was a 20-year-dive into the seas where the Wild Ones of human nature writhe-a dive into popular culture. Bloom worked with Michael Jackson, Prince, John Mellencamp, Bette Midler, Billy Joel, Paul Simon, Billy Idol, Joan Jett, Aerosmith, Kiss, AC/DC, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Run DMC, Luther Vandross, and Bob Marley.

Bloom helped make many a street subculture go mainstream: heavy metal, disco, country crossover, new age music, fusion jazz, Midwestern rock, punk rock, and rap, to name a few.

He also climbed his way to the top of the corporate world, helping Sony establish its first software beachhead in North America and helping Disney publicize the three Bette Midler films that turned its image from an antique to a player in the modern mind.

Unlike the collections of evidence compiled by Darwin and Wallace, the specimens Bloom brought back to science are very much alive. They're still influencing the flavor of our lives.

Now Bloom is using street culture to give science a new kind of message in a new form. He's collaborating with undiscovered cyber talents in a cyber-medium to lunge toward a wraparound media experience that makes you feel and taste the way this cosmos self-constructed and the implications for human passion, love, hate, and mass convulsions like war and genocide.

"You cannot solve a problem until you see it from a radically different point of view," says Bloom. "We're clever piles of quarks, piles of quarks with will and knowledge, but piles of quarks with blind spots that trip us up constantly. Those blind spots disable us day to day, whether we are looking for a mate or agonizing over the use of military might. Our goal," says Bloom, "is to remove those blind spots. Our goal is to help humanity see. So books and journal articles are not good enough. We need IMAX, we need film, we need television, we need theme parks, and we need virtual reality."