Hurtigruten 5 days TV marathon June 2011

SOME FACTS: 8040 minutes of sea and arctic nature - on TV channel nrk2 and the Internet (creative commons).

BACKGROUND. Hurtigruten, the Norwegian Express Line, has for well over 100 years been the backbone of coastal Norway, bringing people and goods up and down the weatherbeaten west coast towards the north of Norway. It has struggled to survive and be prosperous in a mixed economy of private and public support and investments.

COASTAL CULTURE. More than a pure enterprise it is no doubt about a broad interaction and transportation of people and things, in fact, even dead bodies. Hurtigruten thus encompasses both daily and extraordinary transportations, as well as people experiencing nature and how to cope with it in the living coastal cultures. This TV, realworld and social media event uncovers through creative use of multimedia the encounters and experienced beauty of a number of scattered places, regions, inhabitants and families, locals and visitors to Norway's coast.

FLEET. Currently, a fleet of 11 ships service 34 ports from Bergen to Kirkenes, covering a distance comparable to the distance Oslo – Tunisia. Daily, and all year round.

WHY. Why this TV marathon from a coastal sea cruise, although among the most beautiful ones? Why are they - over in nrkbeta - doing this? It has been prepared for some months (*cf. e.g., invitation to an open-source ideation in January 2011, maybe more info to be checked here later). The idea emerged after the minute by minute 7 hours realtime show on TV, nrk2, of the railway experience from Bergen to Oslo, which achieved a lot of media attention and many viewers. But why doing more of this?According to nrkbeta's website, an article by ANDERS HOFSETH, dated 16. June, 2011:

"Primarily because we’re a publicly funded Public Service Broadcaster with a responsibility towards Norwegian culture; a responsibility for covering things important to the inhabitants of a small country, a country that in spite of, or perhaps because of our significant oil wealth has a vulnerable culture. And programmes like this aren’t economically feasible for a commercial channel; to a large amount of the public it probably seems completely useless, but to some of our viewers it can have a very high value, be something they wouldn’t get in any other way, and in twenty or two hundred years, it will be a strange document of life at the edge of civilisation from a different time."

Also, there’s the NRKbeta Doctrine, stating: "The only way to control your content is to be the best provider of it."

EXPERIENCES SO FAR. Indeed, ample evidence suggests that nrkbeta and cocreators have done it again. Provided many with a triggering enduring experience. Because this is not merely about clock-time, it is about enduring time minute by minute. It encompasses both the subjective and intersubjective experiencing of something both locals and spectators may easily relate to, like hurtigruten.

Despite nrkbeta's relatively modest reasoning about it above, #hurtigruten in realtime and on TV, cell phone and twitter etc. has become a huge event and a success already in many ways including gaining hundreds of waving families and engaged or disengaged citizens along the coast and thousands (or sometimes millions) of participating viewers. In many ways, the current journey has become an umbrella and magnet for many kinds of encounters and performances. People are active with their experiencing including often their second screens whether it is a normal mobile, smart phone, iPad or lap top, camera etc. Several twitter reports have pinpointed that even shares in hurtigruten's shipping companies have gone up as well.

Just a wild thought: Maybe some of the key share owners could perhaps consider to give something back, for instance, to the further creative work in some ways?

CONTINUED ACCESS. The live stream is available at nrk.no/hurtigruten from Thursday June 16th 2011 until the ship lands in Kirkenes Wednesday June 22nd. Info on how to download etc. can be found there as well. You can reuse but need to acknowledge the cocreators and rights.
Content licensed under Creative Commons Source: NRKbeta.no http://nrkbeta.no/2011/06/16/hurtigruten-eng/ Norsk versjon av artikkel [...]

http://nrkbeta.no/2011/06/16/hurtigruten/

Reading Eats and Reads...

READING EATS. Inspired by Italian columnist Giacomo Papi, Ingrid D. Rowland in the NYR blog (NYR=NEW YORK REVIEW of Books) reflects on how contemporary society has been revealed once and for all in the way we eat and our reading eats. "The mouth has become the most important organ..." says Giacomo Papi. "...Because eating is the only sensory, and hence aesthetic, experience that is entirely fulfilled in consumption. By destroying the work of art."

hmmm, a due warning before Xmas?
To recall that before Christmas is making rather than purely consumption time I have put in a picture of Norwegian flatbread baking. However, this could be a vanishing craft... (own photo).

BACK to the columnist: As in Italy and elsewhere, reading eats are changing in America, reflects Ingrid Rowland:
- "No one could have imagined that polar bears or the countryside would ever end when my family arrived in Corona del Mar, California, in the mid-1960s. The prevailing fantasy of those years, in that idyllic place, depended in equal measure on Walt Disney and Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki; apartments and bars bore names like Outrigger or Aloha Moku, and no one’s patio was complete without a series of flaming tiki torches to lend evening parties the allure of a luau. Since then, however, the collective imagination has turned Corona del Mar into an outpost of Tuscany; the cut of meat that used to be known as a “T-bone steak” is now a “Tuscan Angus"..."

ON READS. - "What would Machiavelli or Borges make of the fact that books, at least in the US, seem to be going the way of the countryside, butterflies, and polar bears? Asks Ingrid. "For more and more publishers no longer advertise “books”; they advertise, with hammering insistence, “reads”—and reads, abetted by the very brevity of that Anglo-Saxon syllable, are acts of consumption as voracious as the meta-culinary gobble that has turned dinner into an analytical ordeal for Giacomo Papi. A read, of course, can be consummated on a Kindle, on a tablet, or on a computer, as well as between the pages of a book—perhaps that is the point of emphasizing the sale of reads rather than evoking that archaic form in which texts have so long been embodied."

OLD WORLD ACTS. "In one respect, at least, the Italians still live in the Old World," Ingrid remarks. - "An Italian lettura is not a “read” but a “reading,” a word that, apart from its long history of liturgical use among the Peoples of the Book, suggests an experience through time—like its English cognate, lecture. A lettura is a feast on slow food, an act that still retains a hint of ceremony..."

Maybe some of us Norwegians appreciate this as well when making flatbread or special gift readings such as handwritten cards for Christmas. We make it into an annual passage ceremony. Though we tend to save time by putting a few handwritten words on the cards or on preprinted letters that are put into envelopes with pictures and colourful old postcards. Any way, it needs to go quickly by slow post. Mass wired letters won't do the same job since they are less able to become family treasure readings.