The Wake

Andre 3000’s animated counterpart, music teacher Sunny Bridges of Cartoon Network’s new series, “Class of 3000,” lopes up a hill on the computer screen projected onto the Weisman Art Gallery’s wall. “Together, we’re gonna tear down the walls of convention with a wrecking ball of creativity,” the voice best known for “Hey Ya!” exclaims. Steve Killingbeck, founder of punygames.com, clicks on “Auditorium,” and a melting pot of student musicians appear next to Sunny. Killingbeck clicks on Tamika, a guitar player with the eyes of a vixen and hair like a crashing ocean wave. Green boxes pop up next to her, each holding a separate music note that can be dragged below to compose and play an original song.

This interactive computer game was designed for six to 11-year-olds, but that doesn’t stop Killingbeck from bobbing his head to the beat as he builds song after song, demonstrating the technology he programmed for the two dozen students and professionals gathered at the year’s second “Emerging Digerati” meeting. The monthly event, staged by the U of M’s Institute for New Media Studies, hopes to build dialogue between innovators in disciplines ranging from computer science to visual arts, said Anne Preston, the night’s curator.

Killingbeck is sharing his knowledge of “Flash,” a program for building games, movies, and web applications, alongside technophile and recent U of M graduate Colin McFadden and multimedia guru Dave Schroeder.

Connor is just one player in the growing legion of “digerati,” or “persons well versed in computer use and technology.” Swap the terms “d” for an “l,” and a PowerBook for a textbook, and you’ll find the word’s origin: literati. The literati emerged in the 19th century as “men of letters,” intellectuals whose interests lied in “issues of social or political import.” Confucius is said to have established the School of Literati, a breeding ground for Chinese politicians, and the Encyclopedia Britannica cites the first literati as Asian scholars “whose poetry, calligraphy, and paintings were supposed primarily to reveal their cultivation.” In his book “The Twilight of Atheism,” Alister McGrath also writes that the emerging literati were “socially alienated, theologically literate and anti-establishment.” Which may explain the following exchange I had with one of today’s digerati.

“What are you doing here?” the man asked me between speakers. “You don’t look like one of us. You’re a normal person,” he explained, in a friendly, but clearly distressed, voice.

“I think you’re normal,” I replied, to which he pointed out the preponderance of longhaired men gathered around us.

I’m not sure how this digerati exposed me as a fraud so quickly. Maybe he noticed the way my eyes glazed over when the night’s talk turned to derivatives, helper applications and remodeling interfaces. Or the way I frantically typed notes, recording the speakers’ every utterance. (Another man later asked me if I was the night’s stenographer.) Or perhaps the gleam bouncing from my shiny silver ballet flats, an anomaly in a sea of sneakers, marked me as “other,” a breed of human not fit for the digerati class.

Despite the vast knowledge gulf separating my liberal arts educated self from the technically-educated crowd, Emerging Digerati, on the whole, was a welcoming experience. I still can’t tell you much about simple vector animation tools, but I can tell you where to go to compose your own Outkast-inspired funk box tunes—cartoonnetwork.com/games.

The last Emerging Digerati meeting of fall semester will be held December 4, at the Weisman Art Museum. The series will continue in the spring semester on February 4, March 5 and April 2; .