An Afternoon with Jonathan Harris at his Brooklyn studio.
(The content of this interview will be available in video chapters on Project New Media Literacies Learning Library)
"Jonathan Harris has made projects about human desire, modern mythology, science, news, anonymity and language and also documented an Alaskan Eskimo Whale Hunt. He was commissioned by Yahoo! to build the world's largest time capsule, and by MoMA to build an interactive installation about online dating. He studied computer science at Princeton University, and was awarded a 2004 Fabrica fellowship. The winner of three Webby Awards, his work has also been recognized by AIGA, Ars Electronica, Print, ID Magazine, and the State of Vermont, has been featured by CNN, BBC, NPR, Reuters, Metropolis, The New York Times, USA Today, and Wired, and has been exhibited at Le Centre Pompidou (Paris), and MoMA (New York). He has given lectures all over the world, including at Google, Princeton and Stanford Universities, the TED Conference, and on Bhutanese television. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York."
Jonathan Harris's goal has been always to make his projects simple enough so that a fifteen year old or a 85 year old person with little technical knowledge could understand them. Jonathan believes that a creator has a responsibility to tell his/her stories in a really simple and natural manner so that even a non-technical person can understand them.
In his perspective, the world is certainly littered with complex, data visualization projects that are completely opaque even to somebody like him who has a fairly expert view on such things.In his creative process he always strives for three things in the work that he does:
1) to have a really simple universal idea at the basis of it
2) to execute it in a simple manner aesthetically
3) to have some element of playfulness, nostalgia or beauty
Jonathan advices the teenagers to start learning anything. "I certainly believe in learning by doing and that's certainly how I learned," he said. He even suggests that teens start in an analog way."You don't need to start with computers. In fact it's probably better not to start with computers". He believes that you can start by collecting things from your life.
You take your camera and every time you see something purple you take a picture of it. And then you have a set of 300 purple things that you have collected. You may see some patterns that come out of that. Or every morning the moment you wake up, you may write down the first thing that comes to your mind. You do that for three months and at the end of the three months maybe you see some interesting pattern that comes out of that.--Jonathan
So his basic advice for teens is to develop a sense of being a collector. Once they have developed a sensitivity for that, they can start to write computer programs, or do more ambitious things to collect larger sets of data, but they first have to develop a sensitivity for what it feels like to gather content and look for the beauty that is hiding in it. And often beautiful things emerge when people collect enough of something.
Even if there is something incredibly mundane, Jonathan Harris often finds something incredibly beautiful in that.
