The world’s smallest movie is A Boy and His Atom, made by IBM Research to showcase their mad skillz. It’s animated short about a boy playing with an atom, but the twist is that it is made with actual atoms as pixels and animations were done moving those atoms around. It’s truly spectacular. To me it says something else: tech is nothing without content. It is no coincidence that IBM chose to make a film to demonstrate what they can accomplish. Culture has much stronger appeal than tech in this way. We can take part as an audience when it is presented as culture, where as the documentation engineers no doubt circulate to one another is completely useless for outsiders. Another example is from when the World Wide Web was invented at CERN (the particle accelerator lab) some twenty years ago. The first file that was uploaded was a photo of band, namely the CERN house orchestra Les Terribles Cernettes. Content gives tech purpose.
