Locatively Aware

A Walk to Remember

Hey All,

As part of our program, we had to create a unique walk or "mis-steps" project which we conceptualize and enact in Amsterdam. Below is the overview and reaction to my walk.

Title: Bi-Polar Hydrophobia

Duration: 2 hours, composed of eight 15 minute segments.

Concept: For those who don't know, Amsterdam is a city of canals. Nearly every street corner you stop at in central Amsterdam has a canal visible in at least one direction, as you can see by this map.. I was trying to get into the mindset of someone who was completely hydrophobic (afraid of water) and what it'd be like to take a walk through Amsterdam. After further thought, I realized that if I just walked while being afraid of water, I'd just end up far from the center eventually and there'd be no water to be afraid of. To combat this problem, I then put myself into the shoes of a person suffering from multi-personality disorder, wit one personality that is extremely afraid of bodies of water, and the other that is very fond of water and stays near it at all costs. The transition between the two characters happens every fifteen minutes. When the change occurs, I either do my best to get as far away from canals as I can, or ambitiously seek out and follow any canal I can. At the end of every period, I take a series of photos to document how successful I was in either being near or away from water.

Reaction: I have to say, this walk was one of the more eventful and enjoyable walks I've been on during this trip. I started at the Noordermarket about fifteen blocks west of Centraal Station in the role of the personality who loves water and followed the Prinsengracht down for 15 minutes, then switched personalities and started running until I couldn't see water any more.

After a while, I realized that it was rather impossible at some areas to go anywhere without coming to a canal, where I decided that it was ok to cross a bridge while in a state of hydrophobia, but I had to do it while running and it had to be in the exact center of the bridge. While this wasn't a problem for the larger bridges because they all had nice big medians between the two lanes, this was a problem for some of the bridges which were one lane and rather long. I tried my to time my run over the bridge to work with traffic, but unfortunately was forced to obstruct traffic twice. Once it was just for the last few feet of the bridge, but the second time I was about 5-10 feet onto the bridge when a car turned to cross it from behind me. It was too late to turn around, as doing so would require me to stand at the edge of the bridge or jump over the car, both of which I was unwilling to do. So I crossed the bridge as fast as possible with the driver behind me quite upset and yelling at me.

Also, on another pedestrian bridge, the very center of the bridge was unfortunately a bike path. Again, I tried my best to time it bikes, but as I was running over the bridge, this bike came out of no where and hit me pretty much dead on. The biker was ok, though rather upset. The collision knocked me over, but after checking myself briefly, I decided that it wasn't harmful, but just shook me up a bit.

This new approach to a walk made me explore the city in a brand new way. The fear of water made me go down many small alleys that I usually don't travel through, and found out that several of them are quite beautiful. Also, while following canals I found some very interesting scenes and aspects of the canals. The most notable scene involved a group of four middle aged men standing in a small semi-circle at the edge of one of the canals. They were all staring down into the canal, where a few feet away from the edge a series of air bubbles were coming up from the bottom. While I'm sure it was just a group of guys coming home from work and noticed some anomaly in the canal producing air bubbles, the sense that I just walked into the scene of a mob hit was just too great, and I resisted the temptation to pull out my camera and just walked past them as fast as I could.

In conclusion I'm very glad that I went on this little walk, as it let me experience many things that I just didn't have the drive or mindset to experience before. Also, if you are, in fact, hydrophobic, I would probably not look into moving to Amsterdam in the near future.

.:August

Mosaic Mapping

Greetings,

As part of the program, all students were charged with designing large-scale projects to carry out during our travels. In an attempt to explore different ways of representing maps to reflect personal experience in specific locations, I will be creating maps of each city which are composed of pictures from those cities. My hopes are that these collection of images will tell more about the city, and more specifically, about the experiences of our trip while in those cities, than a normal map can. Admittidly, these maps also lose functionality as practical maps at the same time, without any legible street names, clear lines of streets, or landmarks. The maps are constructed using a mosaic-producing program, a map of the given city created from several other maps in an attempt to produce a mosaic-friendly source image, and thousands of pictures taken by myself and other students on the trip. Given the lack of printing facilities while on our trip, I'm just using computer monitors as the means of presentation. However, when I get back to Carleton, I would like to print them out, create a map-esque cover for the back, and fold them into little pocket maps as their final means of presentation. The following image is the first finished map, with three more following within the next few weeks. The map displays lower Manhattan and northern and middle areas of Brooklyn, New York. For ease of loading, the image below is rather low quality, although a much, much larger version of the image can be found here.

.:August

Amsterdamish New Media Artists

Hallo,

The last two days we've been visited by two different new media artists from Holland. On Thursday we were visited by Marc van Woudenberg (greatest name ever) of xolo.tv. Xolo.tv (from what I can tell) is a company which videoblogs for large companies. I think he got a bit of a harsh reception, as I think a few in the group saw what he was doing as a bit of selling out. There were long discussions about the progression and use of the internet, blogging, video blogging, and the internet in general. What we concluded was that the internet (from a blogger/scholar's point of view) was just entertainment and not really any solid scholarly content, even videoblogs which were trying to be smart. I think the final conclusion is that the internet is just going through it's adolescent phase of fart jokes and extreme sports.

On Friday we were visited by Thijs de Witte (craziest name ever) of Pips Lab. Pips Lab is a new media performance group based out of Holland that tries to take inspiration from all different artistic disciplines and combine them into a single entity. He showed us several videos, finishing with a video of one of their live performances. What they do is seriously crazy. The performance includes live acting, song performance, video mixing, crazy light technology, audience participation, and so much more. They actually were one of the first groups to design the technology for "light painting" in which you use a source of light and a video camera to save movements of the light and save it as a single image. For example, if you took a flash light and waved it in a big circle in front of you, the program would produce an image of a large connected circle. My favorite part of the show involved Thijs doing some seemingly random actions for a camera, then later these actions were "remixed" to animate to a song. The neat thing was that the remixed video was edited before the show. He used audio cues from a song that was being played by the band to get act his actions at the right times, and then the program automatically edited the video into the new remixed form. I'm hoping to get a video and perhaps an interview out of the people from Pips Lab for my senior project on remixing.

.:August

A Shout-Out from Holland

Hey Guys,

I landed in Amsterdam, spent the night walking around town and finding food, went to bed, and woke up sick. I was pretty much bed-ridden for four days, so I missed a considerable amount of class related presentations and such. After a few good days of rest and decent Turkish food, I was ready to go get'em again.

Wednesday morning we made a trip out to the Waag Society in central Amsterdam. The Waag society is based in the oldest building in Amsterdam, I believe so anyways. It was either the oldest building or the oldest public building. In any case, it was built as a gate-house a very long time ago. It had changed its purpose many times over the years, ranging from a gate-house, to a center for the different guilds in Amsterdam (such as the masonry guild, with evidence of their craftsmanship at left), to a building used for medical experiments (more on this later), to the new digital media house it is today. The Waag society itself is a very diverse group who work on many different facets of new media, ranging from documentaries, to urban games, to setting up live video conferencing. Our hosts Floor and Sam (left to right above) were very, very happy to see us, and were quite excited to hear about what we were doing. Before we left for lunch, they charged us with the task in using the Waag in any way we could think of to make our own little new media projects.

A little detail which I intentionally left out above was that the sketches and painting of Rembrandt's famous Anatomy Lecture of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp were created there. As such, much history and fame of the building surrounds the creation of one of Rembrandt's most famous paintings. A group of roughly 8 of us though that it'd be fitting, what with the new media focus of the building these days, to recreate the image with a more modern look. We arranged ourselves as closely as we could to match the people in the original painting, but with the "corpse" of an old computer substituting the corpse of the original. Once the photo was taken, the project was then in my hands, as I ran it through Photoshop in an attempt to get it look a bit closer to the original. You can see the comparison of our final product with the original below.

.:August

C U London

Hey Guys,

To wrap up our visit to London, John invited this fellow named Simon Davies to come and give a little talk to our class. Simon a member of Privacy International, a human rights watch-dog group that tries to keep tabs "on surveillance and privacy invasions by governments and corporations." (As quoted from their information page) Simon is somewhat of a professional scholar. What he seems to do is try to find out as much as he can about what governments and corporations are doing to restrict privacy and infringe on various rights, and raise awareness of them. He started the class with a 45 minute lecture of what he does, which I assume he gives everywhere he goes. He was quite good at convincing me that big brother is coming to get me. After his initial schtick, it became a class discussion in which we tried to see his view on different aspects of privacy in surveillance. This is a pretty hot issue in general in England, as London is the most heavily surveilled city in the entire world. You don't notice it at first, but there are literally one or two CCTV cameras at nearly every corner in central London. He through statistics at us saying that CCTV doesn't actually deter crime by any considerable margin, and that if not stopped there won't be anything that we do in our private lives that the government won't know. While this may be a bit of an exaggeration, that's where he was going I think. It was all and good, and for the most part I believed what he said. The most impressive aspect, however, was how forceful and concise he was in his speech. I can see that he's quite good at what he does.

After that we had the next day and a half to ourselves to do whatever. I spent the time to go get some last minute gifts for my friends and family while I was still in England, and went to packing for the flight to Amsterdam. Apparently, the airline restricts each passenger to a single bag that can't weigh over 44 pounds, or else you get fined rather strongly. In any case, we had a pretty nice farewell dinner hosted by our friends at IES. I had a vegetable curry that was pretty tasty, and it was followed up by a delicious fruit sponge dessert (pictured). Well, London was a load of fun, but it's time to move on. I'll write again when I'm in Amsterdam.

.:August

Museum: Revisited

Hi2u,

So this post will just be a kind of photo essay of my trip on Sunday. Having recovered from the exobarant amount of museums I saw in New York, I thought it would be fun to mill around the British Museum and see what all the fuss was about. Apparently, all the fuss is about one of the largest natural history museums in the world. The size of the building was simply staggering. Even with five hours devoted to seeing its exhibits, and keeping rather fleet of foot the whole time, I missed entire wings. It was equally, if not more, impressive than the Met in NYC. While I am a sucker for Greek and Roman sculpture and vases, the British Museum's collection of Egyptian and African art was very compelling. Without further ado, here's some pictures.

A shot of the exterior entry of the British Museum.

A section of the frieze from the Parthenon, in Greece. The fact that the British Museum has it, and not the Greecian government is the topic of much debate. More about it can be found at the wikipedia page here.

A mask used by Gladiators in ancient Rome. I thought it was nifty.

A couple of mummified cats. Creeeeeeeepy!

This one is really, really interesting. This is an Egyptian mummy, but wasn't mummified like the most well-known ones. This unfortunate dude was trapped under very hot sands for a few thousand years, and preserved his body very, very well. Definately one of my favorite exhibits.

Here are one of the statues from Easter Island. They look very impressive in person. Not quite sure how the British Museum lawfully aquired this one, though.

And what would a trip to the British Museum be without a little Ganesh?

.:August

It's Friezin'

Why Hallo Thar,

The amount that I've taken in in the last fews days has been quite staggering. On Thursday our class jumped into the Frieze Art Fair. The Frieze is a four day long fair that is a collection of roughly 150 of the top art galleries from around the world, in which they all show off their best and brightest work. Aside from those exhibitors, it is marked by a collection of artist's talks and film screenings which occur during the course of every day of the Frieze. In an attempt to find artistic resolutions to exploring new things in the cities, our class took a 24 hour block and produced several audio pieces based on several different aspects of the Frieze, cut them together, and produced an audio documentary for Resonance FM, a art radio station based out of London. While everyone in the group helped by producing their own small pieces, mad props has to be given to Terin Mayer, who cut all the pieces together and made the final project, as well as coordinating all the pieces and offering assistance where he could to all the groups. A final cut of the audio piece can be found streaming on his blog.

The Frieze itself was quite mind-blowing. There was just SO much work in this building. I just walked the site for a few hours and tried to take in as much as I could, but it got a bit over-whelming. There was some absolutely beautiful photography pieces, some bizarre sculptures, and hundreds of paintings. I was blown away by a great deal of the art, but some of it just fell into the "bizarre modern art" classification, at least to me. I posted some pictures of my favorite works that I saw while there. After several hours of art-viewing, I made my way to the film screening room for the final screening of the day. This was actually quite exciting. Stuart Comer from the Tate Modern (remember him?) was put in charge of curating one of the screenings for the Frieze, and decided to include a documentary that was produced an edited by our professor, John Schott in the early 1970's. Stuart made the film choice long before he knew that we were making the trek to London as part of our trip, so John being there for the screening was just an unexpected bonus. The documentary itself was about a rather important art auction in New York in the early 1970's, and apparently as the auction is showing up in art history books now, John's film is becoming rather popular as well. I enjoyed the film a great deal, and it was quite nice to see some work made by my advisor and professor for the last four years of my academic life.

The next day we had a class/workshop day in the morning, then made a trek out to the Bartlett School of Architecture. There we sat in on a class taught by Nic Clear (pictured), a professor of architecture. John had met Nic by some odd connection on the internet, and didn't actually meet him in person until we got to his classroom. Now, as a disclaimer, Nic is not what I would think of as a typical architecture teacher. When I think about architecture, I think about drawing blueprints to buildings or figuring out how to remodel kitchens. Apparently there is this new push in the architecture field for students to make more creative and abstract based projects. To start the class, Nic introduced his program and his background, then showed us a collection of roughly 15-20 video projects made by his students in the last two years, intercut with some ideas on modern architecture by Nic himself. These videos were quite imaginative, varying from buildings dancing to abstract shapes wizzing around to some stop-animation of screws and wires. It was quite sobering really, to see architecture students to be making video art which was simply incredible, while me the humble art student hasn't come close to making anything so breath taking. After the videos, we sat with Nic and his class and had a quite long conversation, from such topics as the move of art and media at Carleton, the shifts in the architecture fields, and possible collaborative projects that our two schools might do in future years. But after all the barrage of images and whatnot in the last two years, I'm ready for a nap.

.:August

Big Brother's Watching Someone, and it Rhymes with "Ewe."

Howdy,

This morning was spent at the Tate Modern. We were able to finally see the exciting new installation, which appears to be sci-fi twisty slides. I assume they have a much deeper meaning than twisty slides, but that definition will allow me to sleep just fine tonight. After mobbing around the twisty slides, we were met up with Stuart Comer (Pictured), the Tate Modern's curator of film and video. Stuart is an American, and I believe a Carleton graduate, but I'm not 100% sure on that second bit. We were brought into a small screening room, and he showed us a piece of video art that explored surveillance and the club scene in the 1980's. As with most of the people that we've met on the trip, Stuart was very smart and facilitated quite an interesting discussion of the impact of video and film on the museum community.

After our meeting with Stuart, we took a rather long tube ride to a CCTV center of one of the boroughs in London. Although you definitely notice a large amount of cameras around London, I don't think it's really possible to take in how many cameras watch you on a given day. We were given a tour of their facilities, and it was about what you'd expect. There were several people sitting at computers, watching and monitoring feeds from hundreds of cameras. While we were there, they were monitoring a woman sitting down to eat her fried chicken lunch. Apparently there was something suspicious about her chicken, or something she was doing, but I didn't notice anything out of order. The CCTV center is funded by the government, but aren't actually part of any police department. They work kind of closely with the police, by calling them to alert them of any unusual or unlawful activity, although they themselves seem to have no actual power beyond observation. To prove their power of observation to us, they had saved the video of us waiting at the bus stop on our way to the center (pictured on left). The directors of the center were rather open to questions. It definitely was a wake-up call to me about just how much of what I've been doing in London has been caught on CCTV. Oh well, time to go dig a hole in the ground and wait for Armageddon, I guess.

.:August

This Post Really Bends My Circuits

So I had a rather exciting last couple of days. On Saturday morning I took a two-ish hour bus ride up to Oxford town. Much like my connection in New York, I have a friend who lives in Oxford who I met while working at my summer camp. Her name is Niks, and is currently studying at Oxford (or some other school in the town, I really forget) to be a nurse. She showed me around the town a bit, went to a quaint little pub that she likes, and I spent the night on her couch. The next morning we did a little more sight-seeing around town, including a visit to the local cathedral. Although the town as a hole was really pretty, this building really took the cake. The architecture was just so breath-taking. The picture to the left is one of the towery things in the front of the cathedral. After a walk around the cathedral, we said goodbye and it was another two hour bus ride back to London.

The rest of Saturday and most of Sunday were dedicated to getting back up to speed on my Mosaic Maps (more on that in a few days when i have more to show.) On the contrary, Monday was full of suspense, surprise, excitement, and the desecration of children's' toys. Why yes, ladies and gentlemen, it was a circuit bending workshop with the ever-friendly Ben (pictured). For you uninformed folk, circuit bending is the manipulation of existing electrical circuits in order to create fun and interesting new results. For our workshop, we tore about noise-making child toys and played with their insides. At first we just used our natural electrical fields to "massage" the electricity around the board, which resulted in the weaning and waning of the typical noises that they'd produce. We got a bit more intense after a bit, by introducing additional wires, resisters, solder, and all kind of crazy things. We then experimented with some nifty hardware hacking, in which we combined a car speaker and a cardboard box to make our very own amp. After some nifty demonstrations of some of Ben's favorite hardware hacks and bent circuits, and a little jam session of all our own contraptions, we bid Bed a good day. A photo essay of the workshop produced by our professor, John, can be found here. The idea of circuit bending piqued some of my own interests in remixing. While many people, probably including me, live in the paradigm where remixing means a musical mashup or a collage, this new-ish form of live, creative remixing of every-day electrical appliances seemed like an interesting expansion of the definition for me.

.:August

London's Blogging

Avi: "London."
Gemologist: "London?"
Avi: "Yes, London. You know: fish, chips, cup 'o tea, bad food, worse weather, Mary f***ing Poppins... LONDON!"

--Snatch

Y Hello Thar,

I must apologize for my lack of posts since I got to England. I've been kind of swamped with trying to conjure up some of my projects, and am still combating jet-lag. Also, you must excuse my lack of pictures in this post, as I can't find my rechargeable batteries for my camera and the old ones ran out.

We've had a some exciting adventures in London so far. We arrived at 6:15ish in the morning on Tuesday, and due to a particularly slow bus didn't get to our residence hall until about 10:30. Once we got all of our stuff moved in, we spent a few hours with a woman from IES (the group we're partnered with for our stay in Europe) in charge of much of our accommodations while in London, and she ran us through a small tour of our area, got us our Tube (subway) passes, and gave us an orientation of what we should expect during our stay.

After that we went on a guided bus tour of London. All these events were just an effort to keep us from sleeping all day and to help cure jet-lag. It didn't work the best however, as 90% of us ended up sleeping for most of the bus tour, including me. After the bus tour, our tour guide took us to the British Museum and gave us a brief tour of some of her favorite exhibitions, including the Rosetta Stone, the frieze from the Parthanon, and some mummies! After that went to a lovely Italian restaurant and had a welcome dinner hosted by our friends from IES. I had a vegetarian lasagna, it was tasty. We went back to ISH (International Student House, where we're staying while in London) and quickly crashed.

We got up (pretty late) the next day, had a few hours to ourselves to explore the area or catch up on sleep. I chose the latter. At 7:30 we met up at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. This is a recreation of the original Globe, with a large standing pit for most of the audience in the middle, a thatched roof, and they even went as far as to grow the correct weed to be used in the sod to create the structure. There we saw "A Comedy of Errors." It was pretty funny, and highly amusing. One thing that I thought was odd was that they had woman actors, and if they went so far as to recreate the original structure so carefully, I don't understand why they wouldn't recreate the plays more faithfully. The picture is care of Julian from my trip (that's the back of my head in the front of the image.)

The next day we went to some guy's place, but I didn't go as I got split up from my group on the Tube, and just found my way back to ISH. However I did do some research and was able to find my way to our next destination at 6:00, the Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA). They had a single artist in exhibition when we went, and it was very... modern and minimalist. For one of his works, he removed half of one of the walls in the lower gallery. His other exhibit was a loop of 4 minutes of black film and 4 minutes of white film projected on a screen. I wasn't quite sure what to think of it, though I am started to get more of an appreciation for seemingly pointless or simple artworks, such as these. The ICA is hosting a comic arts exhibition of sorts this weekend which I'm looking forward to going to.

This morning we woke up early and had class for the first time since leaving the states. It was pretty nice to touch base and finally do some discussion of art and new media theory. After a few hours of discussion and working on projects we broke up to go get lunch, then reconvened at the TATE museum of modern art. Although I think it's a museum of modern art, it had lots of modern art at least. We saw more of what we've been seeing at these museums: a Litchenstein here, a Monet there. It was alright, but I'm still pretty burned and probably didn't get as much out of it as I should have. Tomorrow is a free day where I'm going up to Oxford to go visit a friend I know from the camp I work at in the summers.

.:August