In this video from PSFK CONFERENCE NYC 2012, new media artists Jonathan Harris talks to the audience about how he walked away from success and notoriety and was inspired to counter current online trends to build Cowbird.com. Opening up the conference, he spoke about how his early work like We Feel Fine, The Whale Hunt and I Want You To Want Me gave him a trendy lifestyle where he found that everyone around him seemed to think the same way and have the same ideas. After traveling he experienced first hand the human emotions of the Occupy movement in Oakland, California and this mixture of joy, love, hate and fear drove him to counter the vapid stream of personal updates and detached news stories to build a community of stories.

A live-write up of the talk can be found on PSFK in the article “How do we improve the values of the web?”

Cowbird