Hold on to your pants, this one's gonna be a big one.
I'm sorry for a lack of posts. It might not seem like it to you guys, but alot has happened in the last few days, and I just haven't gotten the chance to make a blog entry about all of it. So.... here goes.
Last Friday we started the day with some classes then headed down to the HQ for the Come Out and Play festival at Eyebeam in southern Manhattan. Before we talked to anyone about the festival, we took a tour of the Graffiti Research Lab (R&D Lab officially), one of the three departments of Eyebeam. This was actually pretty exciting for me, as it demonstrated again the power of just being in a city with lots of interesting people. We were met by a guy (I don't think we ever got his name, he's pictured with this paragraph, along with a robotized representation of him) and he one of the same guys who led the graffiti walking tour of Williamsburg that I posted on last week as part of Conflux. He told us what the department was up to, and it seemed very interesting. The quick synopsis is that you get a fellowship to work in the department for one year, and they seem to accommodate whoever gets accepted pretty well, but all projects that are created in the graffiti lab must be open-source, and if they are hardware projects, full schematics and whatnot must be provided to the public. While there, the graffiti team showed us some of their new projects, and we talked to a few of the other people working in the department. The most notable for me is a woman (again, I forget her name and I forgot to take her picture, very sorry) who has created a great number of interesting things, but I actually recognized her work by her bikespoke LED images.
After we were done with the Graffiti Research Lab John took us to Postmasters, one of the more prominent new media galleries in NYC. We talked to the curator of the gallery (pictured) for quite a while about the emergence of new media art in the gallery art scene, the problems with selling new media installation pieces, as well as several other problems facing the new media art industry. The current pieces installed in the gallery were all new media pieces dealing with wild birds in one aspect in another, ranging from "new media bird feeders" to bird perches that light up and play pleasant sounds when the birds land on them. The curator was incredibly smart, witty, and insightful, and the trip was overall rather enjoyable.
After we were done in Postmasters, we walked back down to Eyebeam and the director of Eyebeam showed us around to the two other departments, but neither caught my interest near as much as the Graffiti Research Lab. At about 6:00, Come Out and Play kicked off with some opening speeches and some interesting games. Projected on the building across from Eyebeam was Space Invaders 2006, a version of the classic video game controlled by a person's body by way of a motion-sensative camera placed in front of them. Also, there was quite the interesting game/demonstration/concert put on by two gentlemen, who played a long improved duet, with the added twist that their guitars doubled as controllers for videogames, and that each note on the guitar corresponded to a different button for the videogames they were playing. The first game they played was Mortal Kombat (pictured) and I was highly amused. At first they did a little dance with the characters to show off the control, then actually fought eachother, and while it wasn't like watching professional gamers, the control they exerted over the game was most impressive. After a few games of Mortal Kombat, they moved on to the SNES version of Mario Kart, and it got even better. I was very impressed with how well they were able to play the game using a guitar as the controller. I was kind of upset that I didn't have audio recording equipment on me, but you can take my word for it that their duet was pretty good, so the fact that they were able to both play a game against eachother, while not just smashing random notes and making it sound pretty good was most impressive.
During the opening, I met up with my brother Cody, and spent a decent amount of time with him during the entire weekend. After the opening dealie, Cody and I jumped into the festival and played Journey to the End of the Night. The game took place between 9:00 and midnight, and had players running to six different checkpoints throughout mid and south Manhattan, while at each checkpoint you get a hint as to were the next checkpoint is. The whole time, the players are being chased by taggers, and once tagged the players put on a different color armband and become taggers themselves. The rules dictated that only travel by foot and mass transportation were allowed, and Cody and I subscribed to the theory of the tortoise, and tried to play the game completely on foot, thinking we would miss most of the taggers via this strategy. One thing we didn't count on was how freaking huge Manhattan is, and before we gave up shortly before the third checkpoint, we easily walked 6+ miles.
On Saturday I worked on my own projects until after dinner, and met Cody and others at Eyebeam at 7:00 P.M. for the Street Games panel discussion. They had quite the impressive array of panel discussants, and the whole conversation was pretty interesting. The panel consisted of Frank Aliquo, Jesper Juul, Roy Kozlovsky, Frank Lantz, Jane McGonigal and was moderated by Nick Fortugno. If you're interested in getting the background on any of these characters, a quick Goggle search will do it. I'm too lazy to find a link for each person, sorry. After the panel I hung around Eyebeam a bit then checked in for the night.
On Sunday Cody, myself, and a few other people on the New Media Roadtrip met up at Washington Square park to play Pervasive Minesweeper, Cody's game in the festival. The game went pretty well, although was burdened by people showing up late, off and on rain, a crappy/unreliable wireless connection which Cody needed to set up the games, and some of the phones used not really working with the technology. However, in the end we were able to get through half a good game (before I blew our team up), and I think it proved to be pretty solid in theory, but just had everything going against that day. After the game we met Chris (I mentioned him a few posts ago) and he gave us a tour of China Town and Little Italy. In Little Italy there was a festival of sorts, with street vendors and games lining both sides of the streets for blocks. Most notable for me was the snake woman. There was a "freak show" corner, and one of the attractions was a snake with the head of a woman. Though I know that it is some visual trick most likely using some mirrors or something, I was whole-heartidly impressed and more than willing to give up a dollar in order to see it. Unfortunately they didn't allow pictures of the snakewoman, so I can't fully share my happiness with the world.
We then went to dinner and walked down to see The Ugly Man, a play which Chris directed and his girlfriend Jennifer starred in. Although it was most bizarre and pretty violent, I did enjoy it quite a bit. While I thought it rude to take pictures during the performance (I didn't even check to see if they banned photography) I did take this picture in the lobby, which I think summed up everything exciting in the show far more than one picture of the actual show could have. Well there you go, those are my crazy antics from the last few days. There will be more adventures in the next few days, with a trip across the pond over to London a week from now.
.:August
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