Artistic [and life] partners Jay Dedman and Ryanne Hodson run a blog called RyanIsHungry, where they feature a series of videos about folks who are “hacking every day life.” They have been video blogging since 2004 and maintaining the site since 2006. Long story short — Jay and Ryanne find people who are doing cool things with their lives, things that don’t typically involve buying things or working in standard work employment scenarios and they tell these peoples’ stories. They’ve traveled all over the country to find folks to talk with and learn from and they just relocated to rural Virginia, where they will focus on personal and sustainable agriculture. They talk here about how they started video blogging, why they do all of this out of pocket, “Back to the Land 2.0,” and how punk rock (and zines!) helped to change their lives.

Make Something Happen: Looking at the “about page” of RyanIsHungry, you write that you “feature the stories of individuals hacking every day life.” I really like that. What do you you mean? Where does that come from?

Jay: Well, we started in 2006 when we moved from Manhattan to San Francisco. We were looking for a project to do together. We had both been video blogging and the Al Gore movie had just come out and we were naive about a lot of stuff. For a while, we had a “green” video blog. For the past few years, though, we have been evolving into that motto. We have looked at how it’s not about being green or buying green products. We are more interested in finding people who are hacking into their own lives and taking control that way. That to me is where that motto came from.

Ryanne: We were looking for people who were doing this stuff and we were trying to find out about what they were doing so that we could know for ourselves. We look for people who are living differently and not doing it the way that they’re told through the forces of consumerism. You don’t have to buy anything, actually. You can make it. You can find people to help you make it, whatever it is. We were exploring those ideas through people and ourselves.

MSH: How did you come upon video blogging?

Ryanne: We were doing it in 2004, before YouTube had come around. Jay was one of the first to start doing it. I found about about [what he was doing] through other people who knew Jay. At that point there was this small handful of people who were posting on blogs.

Jay: We both worked in TV at the time. Ryanne was at PBS and I was at CNN. We weren’t the first people to post video online in this way, as there was a small community of people who thought of the concept of not just posting video here and there but using videos as posts in themselves.

MSH: How do you find the people and projects that you feature on RIS? Is it primarily online, word of mouth, or both?

Ryanne: Some people email us and say, for instance, check out or friends doing so and so in New Mexico. In that case, we did just that and checked them out. Then those people in New Mexico send us ideas of folks to concentrate on and reach out to.

Jay: Like I said, in 2006, we were green. This time I mean that as in inexperienced in the ways of a lot of this stuff. In the past two years, we learned a lot. There are more and more people thinking about this sort of thing, as you likely know. The community is built up of all sorts of people. There are green and eco-activists and folks who are concerned with peak oil. People aren’t just concerned with thinking about green lifestyle; they’re also considering needing to take control of their food and water supplies as they become worried about where energy will come from in the future.

MSH: Was your transition to San Francisco related the direction in which you wanted to take the site?

Ryanne: We moved to San Francisco because there were a lot of geeks there, obviously, because Silicon Valley is right there. And it is a huge house of environmental activism. One of the first things we began researching was cars that ran on vegetable oil. We heard about it and didn’t believe it. Really. So we looked into it and made a video.

Jay: And we went there because we had tech work there. Now we’re in Virginia after learning everything that we have learned. We have moved to a piece of land where we plan on cultivating food. Here, we plan to interview farmers, and we plan to talk to people who are living this life, and who are taking control of their own food and water.

MSH: How does communication technology factor into new-primitivism? In the past, back to the land movements were somewhat isolationist with their feelings about technology. What you’re participating in seems to be a Back To the Land 2.0 sort of thing.

Jay: That’s such good question. I encounter this all the time when I read through the history of 70s with the movements of mass migration among the hippies. They got away and no one was in touch and they were isolated. It sort of failed as a movement. They had problems and it fell apart. We’re meeting more and more people who have moved away from urban places and have used forums and email lists to share information about how to live life in a more sustainable way. A lot of these people are also making their living online. That’s what we’re doing and we’ll really be putting it to the test this year.

Ryanne: Part of what we’re doing is participating in the community education element and in doing so, we’re educating ourselves. How do you build a water ram? That’s what we’re trying to figure out now. A huge component of using the Internet in these ways is keeping ourselves from isolation. How do I do this? That? How do I bake these cookies? I can look it up online. That is huge.

Jay: We just joined a community supported agriculture group. This woman and her husband grow food and people buy shares of what they grow.

Ryanne: We signed up for their CSA (community supported agriculture) after finding them online. It’s great. They basically use their front yard, which is five acres in size, and grow on a part of it. It is amazing to see people my age doing that.

Jay: Part of us moving here to Virginia is that we’re simplifying our lives so that we can spend more time on producing these videos. The time we had in San Francisco was relatively little. We could spend a couple hours here and there on each story, but there were a lot of distractions. The pieces felt like they were from local TV news stations. Here, we plan to spend more time following this farming couple. Maybe we’ll spend a few months with them. We plan on going much deeper than we have yet gone.

MSH: Do you you have any new plans for how you will distribute the videos in the future?

Ryanne: We’ll stick primarily to the website for that. Some of the videos are published on other sites and we use YouTube and other video-sharing platforms. We have had some of them screen at small film festivals and that’s been really cool. It is always nice to know people are showing our stuff.

Jay: We would like to start a forum on the site. I would like to provide a place where people can talk about the sort of projects they’re participating in.

MSH: How do you fund RIS?

Jay: We make our living online. We make videos for non for profits and companies and we do web projects for people.

MSH: So you’re saying it is out of pocket?

Jay: Yeah. We do it in our spare time. It is like an art project for us. We learn as we go. When we drive somewhere to do a story, we’re going to learn about all of these things we encounter. Like, how do you capture wain water? Or whatever. We’re doing stories about stuff we want to learn about.

We should be clear, though, that for a year, we did have a deal with a company called PodTech. They paid us a couple of hundred dollars for each video we allowed them to put on their site. It’s not that way anymore, but it helped us get started.

Ryanne: [Doing this] has really changed the way we live. We moved to rural Virginia because of what we have learned. That’s a testament to everything that has happened [since we stated].

MSH: What were the two of you doing in your own lives before this that inspired you to take this road? Not a lot of people would be so radical about learning in the ways that you have.

Ryanne: I went to art school for five years and then I started working in TV, which isn’t a traditional way to go. I worked at PBS as an editor and I was focusing on art and performance at the same time. Jay was doing the same thing at CNN. We were making crazy little videos and trying to get them on the Internet. We were artists trying to find the best medium with which we could connect with other artists. We were learning and meeting great people through video blogging and that changed our lives.

Jay: Ryanne and I grew up listening to punk rock. Now we’re in our late 20s and early 30s and we are beginning to take into consideration where we want to spend our time? It’s limited, you know? Do we want to spend that at a company for several more decades? Where do we want to raise kids? That’s sort of a punk rock mentality.

MSH: It seems like a lot of projects like yours, or ones that I get really excited about, have some sort of background in punk music or zines.

Ryanne: The Internet has has been a great way to carry out that sort of thing. It’s a place where you can show other artists or recipes, or how to make things. It is what zines were for me in high school. It makes sense that it all goes back to zines and punk. We’re getting older. I am 28. I mean, I loved my job at PBS but I wanted to do my own thing.

Jay: And how much more punk rock can you be than doing your whole life yourself? We’ve shot a bunch of stories about people like ourselves, who are our ages, who have bought land and are raising children. It is the most exciting way to live sustainably.

Ryanne: People are tired of doing what is expected of them. They’re tired of buying and tired of going to Wal-Mart. They want to know what alternative there is.

MSH: What was the first project that you took on that made you realize that this is something you were going to stick with doing and invest so much of your time into?

Ryanne:  We have friends in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. They cashed in their retirement checks and they moved there from New York. One worked on Wall Street and the other worked as a programmer. They moved to the desert and just started building stuff. They started trying this new way of living. They experimented. It really opened my eyes. We made 5 or 6 videos about them and it touched a lot of people. Quite a few of our friends saw them and couldn’t believe it. We then visited friends making the same thing happen in Vermont. They actually went and they did it.

What excites us about all of this – about blogging and moving out into this environment – is that this work is our life. I don’t see it as an expense. Making these videos isn’t taxing. It is a great excuse to meet people. It would be weird to call and ask people, “Hey! Can we come see what you’re doing? Can we hang out for a while and be friends?” When we do these stories, it’s a key into what people are doing. And that’s really cool.

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