The Orcon Great Blend on Saturday 21 Feb was a resounding success, with a wide array of people heading over to Pioneer Women’s Hall in Auckland’s CBD for some enlightened conversation, debate, drinks and music.

The seats began to fill as people came in from 6pm in dribs and drabs, gradually picking up steam around 6.30 as stragglers found parks (not necessarily an easy feat around High Street on a Saturday night!).

Russell Brown (of PublicAddress fame) was the MC, interviewer, and driving force on the evening, and did an outstanding job. The event, the first Orcon Great Blend of the year, was also proudly supported by Eden Coffee, The Quadrant, and Freeview. So big ups to them!

First up (after Russell’s introduction and welcome to the audience) was a short film by NZ on Screen, put together especially for the Orcon Great Blend. My favourite quote was on the special effects for Peter Jackson’s ‘Bad Taste’ – “If you’re going to have a machete go into someone’s head, it’s easier to have a real person’s head and a fake machete”. Not quite sure why that resonates so much, but what the hey.

The first guest was Andrew Dubber, lecturer, author, speaker, broadcaster, music enthusiast, haver-of-ideas, and teacher of Media Industries at Birmingham City University. Russell gave Dubber the added character reference of being a ‘leading voice of the challenges facing the music industry’ (quote, un-quote).

Dubber’s speech, New Media Strategies, revolved in a large way around his story about Anthony the theatre director. This story / parable (or rather, metaphor for the music industry and the Internet), discussed the changes of media that have influenced Anthony’s theatre. Basically, Anthony starting bringing in cameras to record his plays and thus reach a larger audience by playing them on this thing called a television. The story evolved, and eventually, due to the myriad problems Anthony encountered, he reached the conclusion that he must stop making theatre and televising it, and instead start making television. To change his mindset, effectively.

It is worth noting at this point that even if the length of this article suggests otherwise, I am without a doubt cutting a long story short, and thus in the process removing some of the context, and the speakers' own rhythm and structure. One can only hope that my own abridged version of events does the original justice...

Anyways, my quote of the hour on Dubber’s speech was “Musicians are now faced with the idea that they’ve got to go past making music and putting it online, and start making Internet”. Worth taking a moment to think about – or more than a moment, perhaps. Relate this to good ole’ Section 92A, and maybe it’ll make things clearer. A nice summary of the new mindset required to think about online music distribution and copyright - “You just can't use the old laws [with the Internet], you have to throw them out and find new ones.”

Dubber went on to describe the Internet as an essentially organic form, evolving and changing, a form that we as people originally designed, and that we as humans must now adapt to. We must focus on innovation, and on gaining competitive advantage through proper understanding of the medium. In order to remain on top in this evolutionary struggle, we must set up the infrastructure in such a way as to have some input into what is done with the technology, and thus have some control over what the technology does to us... (Again, that was merely a butchered summary of the original, Dubber was much more illustrative.)

That brings to a close the Dubber section of this ‘review’, and brings forth the next act, Jasmina Tesanovic, and Bruce Sterling. This wonderfully intelligent husband and wife team really lit up the room, but the interview, whilst fascinating and thought provoking, was also a tad depressing in nature. Perhaps it is just that I’ve lived too sheltered an existence that talk of murder, oppression and economic and moral destruction had such an impact. In any case, Jasmina certainly seemed a being possessed with eternal optimism, and Bruce could seemingly look at any situation, crack a wry grin and divulge his own profound observations.

To better paint the picture, I suppose I should start from the beginning. Russell began this segment of the Orcon Great Blend with a short, rather shocking video clip. This clip, that some of you may have seen before (I recall seeing it on the news as a child), was a snippet of young Muslim men and boys, hands tied behind their backs, being executed by a Bosnian Serb vigilante, pseudo mafia-military style group known as ‘The Scorpions’. This cassette was filmed by the Scorpions themselves, conceivably as a form of war-porn, who knows. The reason we were watching the video? Jasmina wrote a book about the trial of this group for war crimes, ‘The Trial of Scorpions’, and this clip is the book trailer - a quick warning about the clip, it is not suitable for children or squeamish people, and it is real.

What  was extraordinary (and I’m paraphrasing Jasmina here) - and perhaps all the more disturbing for it - was that these Scorpions were more-or-less ordinary people. Ordinary people, who for whatever reason went about murdering their neighbours. Some were drafted, some were doing it for money, others out of a sense of patriotism, but all the same, the fact remains that these were largely normal people. Normal people doing horrible things. See why I felt this at both times depressing and eye-opening?

Jasmina Tesanovic, “writer, journalist, filmmaker and political activist” is also known for, amongst other things, being a member the ‘Women in Black’, and her wartime blog ‘Diary of a Political Idiot’. Within this blog she chronicled her time in Serbia during the war, and her stance against her own government of the time, who she saw as the aggressor in the situation. Needless to say, her position did not lend itself to fond thoughts from the powers that be, and she and the other ‘Women in Black’ ended up infamous, labelled as enemies of the state.

As well as the destruction and oppression in wartime Serbia, the interview also discussed globalisation, the evolution of language, the impact of technology on unemployment, the depression the world is going through, the use of sanctions, the climate crisis, the demographic crisis, and of course the Internet. Rather a long sentence that one, sorry about that. Lots of commas.

Bruce, a science fiction author, journalist and futurist, whilst never professing to be able to predict the future, nevertheless provided a great deal of insight and thought provoking ideas on how he believed events would unfold. Even his stance on history (some might say the direct opposite of the future), certainly made one pause, take a moment, and think. “History is full of revisions of history, we’re continually trying to project our own meaning onto the past. When you’re doing futurism, you’re doing the same thing…” Hmm… Jasmina had a good way of describing this (or humanising it) as well; “Even when you write something about your own historical period, if you write from your emotions, you reach other people from other countries, other cultures, and other languages."

At one point, Jasmina describes how she and Bruce were discussing events and the way they met and communicated over the Internet. Jasmina goes “I said my friend is dying, he said my cat just died – [I will say] a person’s a person, a cat is a cat - and he will say ‘but love is love’… [I think] the bigger the misunderstanding, the better the relationship”. Touching, in a strange way. Bruce on the evolution of English; “There will be global influences. The idea that [in the future] you have to write in Queen’s English is not what’s going to happen, instead you’re going to see the permeating effect of stuff like blogging practice… SMS style English’s, these types of electronic English … by mid century there will be global English which is the descendant of contemporary English, and it’s going to sound pretty strange.”

It was interesting to notice Jasmina and Bruce’s differences in the way they described their ideas, and how well they really work together. While discussing globalisation (not that there were really any hard-defined topics); Jasmina described her experience at the airport; “I was looking at the towns, [and] in every one of these towns in the world, I have women bloggers who’s [sic] going to take me to her home, feed me, dress me if I need it, find me work. We will have the same point of view, we will talk about life, and do something useful”. Bruce, on the other hand, had this to say - “There really is a creative class of people, sometimes linked to the Internet, sometimes not, for whom national boundaries, global boundaries, linguistic boundaries don’t really make a lot of practical difference, they’ve got GPS, they’ve got cell phones, they’ve got Internet… and right now [this class] is slowly eating away at the previous order.”

When asked how much of what comes next will be outside the market, Bruce replied, as always, with his own well thought-out answer; “We marketised a lot of stuff… markets are a good servant, and a bad leader, but people forgot that markets can starve - people are in breadlines, and it’s tough… I think we’re going to see some global scale wars show up to do some of the heavy lifting. I think in a lot of these cases, the things that we suspected to be our weaknesses are actually going to be our saving grace… in odd, ironic and peculiar ways.”

On this topic of war, sanctions were described as an inherently evil way to cripple countries. Bruce seemed to both despise sanctions, and grudgingly respect them as a brutally effective way to cripple a country (not that anyone would ever want to cripple a country would they?) - “If you want to wreck somebody, pretty much sanctions will do it. You can turn a society inside out, and they really will suffer... they’re a cruel method, but they do wreck countries. They’re not a hollow, peace agreement thing to do.” Again, with her innate ability to bring a macro-level discussion down to a more individual level, Jasmina simply stated “sanctions mean you have hospitals without medicine...”

In her unendingly positive, thoughtful way of looking at life and events, Jasmina also brought out the light and hope that can be found in such difficult and torturous times. “All of a sudden you realise that solidarity, friendship are really much more important than the things that you think you needed, like money… I think you can kill people, you can kill economies with sanctions, or with war, but you can’t kill creativity… This is how societies survive dire straits, I saw it happened, we survived.”

On that happy note, the interview was wrapped up, only a mere hour and a half long and 45 minutes over schedule, but the audience barely fidgeted at all. Spellbound.

Once the interview was over, Simon Flower came out and played his set as people headed over to the bar to drink, chat, and de-intensify their brains. All those lucky punters who went to the Orcon Great Blend were also recipients of a special edition Simon Flower CD, created solely for the event and featuring a range of great tracks.

In terms of a disclaimer, there are undoubtedly things I’ve missed out, and I’ve surely interpreted something one of the guests said in a way that wasn’t intended, and I do apologise for that, but I guess it’s almost inevitable with any second-hand source of information. You know what I recommend to get around that particular dilemma? – come along next time! Stay tuned to the Orcon website for the when, the where, and the how to get your ticket.