Artist Jonathan Harris has just announced the release of an interesting project he’s been working on over the last two tears with Sputnik, Inc., a NYC-based nonprofit dedicated to documenting, archiving and disseminating ideas that are shaping contemporary culture. Named Sputnik Observatory, the project is a fascinating collection of inter-connected video interviews with hundreds of leading thinkers in the arts, sciences and technology.
As one might expect, the conversations are organized into typical categories such as speaker name and subject matter, but what makes this site’s design a bit more revelatory than the standard fare, is extra functionality that enables users to easily navigate between sound bites organized around common themes. It makes the process feel a bit like searching through the shelves of library, while simultaneously fulfilling our need for abbreviated immediacy. In addition, a visual bookmarking feature allows the audience to keep track of their paths and save the results to a “playlist” so as not to get lost or waylaid on the way to an epiphany.
Harris explains:
The central premise of the Sputnik project is that everything is connected to everything else, and that topics and ideas that may seem fringe and even heretical to the mainstream world are in fact being investigated by leading thinkers working in fields as diverse as quantum physics, mathematics, neuroscience, biology, economics, architecture, digital art, video games, computer science and music. Sputnik is dedicated to bringing these crucial ideas from the fringes of thought out into the limelight, so that the world can begin to understand them.
Conducted over more than ten years and previously unavailable to the public, the interviews within the site chronicle some of the most provocative human ideas to have emerged in the last few decades. The site itself aims to highlight the interconnections between seemingly disparate thinkers and ideas, using a simple navigational system with no dead ends, where every thought leads to another thought, akin to swimming the stream of consciousness.
And for those seeking a slightly less taxing form of discovery, the site also offers a number of curated pathways.
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