Locatively Aware

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

Across the Pond

Hello,

Here is a haiku for all you folks:

I am still alive,
Landed in London today,
Going to sleep now.

.:August

In The Future There Will Be Robots

Heya,

As our last big class trip, we ventured down to our third and final new media-esque festival/convention: WIRED Nextfest. Unlike our last two digital festival outings, Nextfest was hyper-commercial. Everywhere you turned in the large expo building, you saw another huge advertisement or logo for some technology super power or another. While the rebel in me hated seeing so many monuments to The Man, I knew that it wasn't all bad. Big money put into the convention meant that there were going to be some pretty nifty exhibits to be seen.

I could have never predicted it, but boy I was right. Everywhere you turned there was one nifty gadget or another, all claiming to be the evolution in their own field of technology or living. From doors that open according to your exact height and proportions to paint rollers that paint a rather intricate image instead of a flat coat of paint. The convention was arranged into many small sectors, defined by their use and application, ranging from the "Future of Green" (environment-friendly technologies), to the "Future of Entertainment," to the "Future of Security."

The one section I was most excited for was the "Future of Play." This area promised to showcase the evolution of game and play for the next generation. Unfortunately for me, this area was a rather big let down. It turns out that the future of play doesn't revolutionize the way we approach the idea of play or gaming, but rather introduces flashy and futuristic light, motion, and image capturing technologies into existing kids games. There was a version of pong which you played against the wall using the shadow of your hand as the controller. Likewise, there was a table in which you played a game of virtual air-hockey by using your shadow to knock around the virtual disc.

Luckily, there was one game that drew my attention. It's called "Kick Ass Kung-Fu." The game was developed nearly two and a half years ago, but is still revolutionary enough that it hasn't been mimicked that much since it's inception. The basic premise of the game is that the player takes his position on a large blue mat in an area surrounded by blue mats on the walls. A series of cameras locates the player by a process of rapid blue-screening, and projects him into an action fighting game much like the classic Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter. As the player moves across the playspace, his or her avatar moves across the virtual space projected to their front and rear on large screens. As enemies appear on screen, the player must attack them by using rapid motion to injure and eventually defeat the enemies. The software is sophisticated enough to recognize when the player takes a small leap on the playspace, and sends their avatar soaring through the air, as it tends to happen on the classic fighting games. While the line was too long for my tastes, it was really enjoyable to watch others really get into and enjoy the game. The most notable thing to me was how much more enthusiastic the older (about 20-30 year olds) players were about the game then the younger ones. It was because of this that this game stuck out among all the others, as most of the others focused and fed on the attention of a younger audience.

In addition to all these nifty gadgets, there was plenty of exactly what you'd expect to see in the future: robots. The robots ranged from foot tall robots that stood up on their own then did a little strut for the audience to an androidish Albert Einstein which walked, talked, and moved many-a-joints. The most humorous robot (for me) was the E-Bartender. You'd walk up to the counter, punch in what you wanted on a touch screen, and the bartender/computer system would pour and hand you your drink of choice. The "bartender" was a robotic body with a screen for a head, on which the face of a female or male (depending on user preference) would interact with the customers, asking how they were doing and whatnot. Obviously, someone trying to think of a project for their robotics program was watching a wee too much "Back to the Future II." The convention was fun, but seemed quite limited in the end, and I left after about 4 hours of browsing and interacting with the exhibits.

Now, it is time to say good-bye to the great New York City and jump the great Atlantic for more British soils. I was really worried about staying in New York before the trip, with a general distaste for large cities, but the city really grew on me. To illustrate this point the best I can, here is a quick anecdote: As I may or may not have mentioned earlier, roughly 50% of my diet while staying in New York has been muenster cheese sandwiches from a deli two blocks away from where I'm living. Nearly every single night for two weeks I walked down to the deli to order my muenster cheese sandwich for dinner. Towards the end of last week, I could tell that the store employees started to recognize me, especially the middle-aged Middle Eastern man who worked the deli every night. And two days ago, when I walked in to order my sandwich, I began ordering and the man working the deli said "Wait a moment..." looked up for a second then said "muenster cheese sandwich, no meat, with lettuce, tomato, and mustard, right?" Rather astonished, I assumed him that was, in fact, what I wanted. Then last night when I went to go get my dinner, I walked in, he asked if I wanted my muenster cheese sandwich, then I went to go get a soda from the back of the store. While he was making my sandwich, he started up some conversation, asking how I was doing, and eventually if I were a student. I told him that I was, in fact, a student, but I was studying abroad and that the next day I would be leaving for London as part of the trip. At this point he got noticeably chocked up, and asked again, obviously hoping that he misheard me. After some more conversation he told me to have a safe trip, that they'd miss me in the deli, and that if I was ever in New York again that I should stop by for a muenster cheese sandwich.

New York is awesome.

.:August

mu*se*um: A Building Which Objects of historical or Cultural Insterest are Housed

So as you can guess from the title, we spent the last three days visiting museums and other archival institutions of sorts. I personally would have prefered to try to disperse the experience out a bit, but our time in New York is quickly running out and if we were going to see them before we leave, it kind of had to be in rapid succession.

Starting on wednesday we went to the Museum of the Moving Image. Overall I thought it was an incredibly neat place, and if I had more time I'd really like to be able to come back once they rotate their collection around a bit. It was explained to us that they have a rather large collection, but comparatively a rather small museum space, so they only can have roughly 1.5% of their collection on display at any one time. The museum holds records of everything dealing with the history of the moving image, from early optical illusions, to the Edison kinetoscope, to movies, television, and video games. They had a lot of hands on project areas obviously built with school children in mind, but none-the-less was very exciting. Most notably for me, they had a pretty cool collection of video games. They had the game system built by...some guy, forget his name right now. Anyway, one of the games available on the hardware he produced was a game of table tennis. A little while after he made this, a fellow by the name of Nolan Bushnell saw it, copied it, and sold it as a little videogame named Pong. Yeah... and I got to play it. Sadly, I didn't think to get anyone to take my picture as I was playing this. Oh well.

The mouthpiece worn by Marlon Brando for the Godfather movies.

The (a?) original puppet of Yoda used in the first three Star Wars movies.

A collection of the wardrobe used in the film version of Chicago.

In addition to having an impressive collection of film and television memorabelia, they also had a large amount of production equipment, including an impressive array of mics used in films over the years.

Original Tron and Pong cabinets. The Pong cabinet wasn't on/working, but the Tron one was. I played it for a bit, but came to realize that it's true that they've made games a whole lot easier over time, and gave up after it gave me a good whipping.

After we were done with the Museum of the Moving Image, we moved on to the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). The MOMA was pretty fun. It had a wide range of art, ranging from a massive Monet to the traditional non-sencical modern art such as several basketballs floating in a fish tank. My favorite part of the trip to the MOMA was actually realizing how much I retained from my Art Since 1945 art history class I took last spring. They had a very nice collection of pop art (which I especially enjoy). They also had a lot of Picasso. Like... 5 rooms of Picasso. I respect what he did for the art world and all that, but it was a bit excessive in my opinion, but that's just me.

Ah..... modern art.

My favorite Lichtenstein ever. I was so excited to stumble upon this.

Joseph Kosuth's "One and Three Chairs." Ever since I first saw pictures of this a few years ago I thought it was quite an impressive piece, especially when confronting issues about iconography.

Japser Johns' "Target with Three Faces." Much like Lichtenstein, this is one of my favorite Johns' pieces, and I was tickled to see it.

This one looked pretty cool, I didn't recognize the artist though.

After the MOMA we all raced downtown to attend a cocktail party. Some trustees of Carleton College were hosting a fairly large (about 100 people in attendance) cocktail party for Carleton alums, trustees, and our group. We were actually a rather central figure in the night's activities, as John gave a fairly long speech about how great our trip is, what fantastic things we're doing, and why alums should feel good about giving the college money. Ok, so he didn't actually say the last part, but I think it was implied.

A shot of the cocktail party.

Early on Thursday about half the group went down to the Whitney Museum of American Art. It was a smaller museum compared to the MOMA and especially the Met, but it had a fairly impressive collection from what I could gather. John arranged a guided tour of the big exhibit there right now for our group. The exhibit focuses on Picasso's influence on American painters of his time. It was fairly interesting, with American works of art set side by side Picassos. Unfortunately, the Whitney didn't allow any photography at all, so no pictures for Mr. Blog. It was quite unfortunate as they had one of my favorite Warhol pieces on display: "Nine Jackies."

After we were done with the Whitney, one other student and I decided that it would be fun to hike on over to the Metropolitan Museum (the Met). In retrospect I regret not taking a picture of the exterior to show off how truly gigantic this building is. We had about 2 hours and fifteen minutes to explore the museum before they closed for the day, and we were able to hastily walk through 4 of their many exhibitions. We started with the Egyptian area, hoping to see some mummies, but alas, there were none. We then moved through the Arms and Armor exhibition on our way through the museum, and decided to check it out as it looked really cool. It was, more or less, a collection of war-things. None of the items on exhibit were particularly old, maybe six or eight hundred years at most. But they were quite neat, especially the collection of ancient Turkish guns and Samurai armor sets. We then went over and checked out the Greek and Roman section, which turned out to be tons and tons of vases, with some random things in addition, including some pretty statues. With our last half hour we walked through the modern art corner. I wasn't particularly impressed (considering we had just gone to two museums pretty much specializing in it) but it was pretty cool, none-the-less. Most notable it had one of Jackson Pollack's most famous paintings: Autumn Rhythm. With the Met closing, my adventures for the day ended, and I went back to Ihouse to work on some projects.

The wall of an Egyptain temple ruin.

An awesome helmet from the Arms and Armor exhibit.

A lion statue from the Greek and Roman art exhibit.

Oh so many Grecian vases.

A pretty sweet Georgian O'Keeffe painting. I don't actually know much about her, but I know my mom was a fan.

Jackson Pollack's "Autumn Rhythm."

Today we left Ihouse about noon to go to the southern part of Manhattan and visit the Archive for Contemporary Music. We were actually quite lucky to get into the place, as it's not actually open to the public. It turns out that Bob, one of the head guys from the archive, is a long-standing friend of John's. In any case, the archive is really cool. It's their goal to have two copies of every commercial album released since LP's were invented from all around the world. They rely completely on donations, but as it stands they have roughly 2 million albums in the archive. Although, as you might think, it's pretty hard to organize 2 million albums, and as it stands a large amount of the archive is still in roughly organized boxes, or in some cases completely unorganized boxes. In addition to the mind-blowing collection of music, Bob had some pretty amazing stories. Most notably was how he acquired the help of a Columbian drug cartel in order to get to inland Columbia to attend a music festival.

This is Bob. He knows pretty much everything about music and is all around awesome.

The archive doesn't only house albums.

But that isn't to say that it doesn't house a metric crap-ton of music.

*Squee!*

Well that's enough for now. What with all these pictures, this post turned out quite large. Tomorrow is Wired Nextfest, and should be a hoot AND a holler.

.:August

I Came Out and I Played

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

Avant-Garde to Animation

Hi Again,
We had a big day yesterday. We started off with a morning full of meetings (as we usually do) designing and refining some of the group projects that we've been working on. Then around 1:00 we took a long stroll (which turned out to be even longer than it should have due to faulty subway directions from a certain professor) down to the Anthology Film Archives.

The Anthology Film Archives seems to be one (if not the) premier institutions for archiving and preserving avant-garde films. We met up with John Miripiri (pictured), the director (I think) of the archives. It just so happens that John is also a Carleton graduate from the late 1970's or early 1980's who first got interested in avant-garde films by taking the avant-garde film class at Carleton with John Schott, my advisor and the fearless leader of this new media trip abroad. We watched a few short avant-garde films in one of the theaters located inside the archives building (an image of one of the films is pictured, sorry, but I can't remember/find the director or name of the film.) We then took a tour of their facilities, highlighted by the standing archives themselves, roughly 10,000 avant-garde films stacked several feet high completely filling the room.

Once we were done with John and the film archives, we got an hour break to wander around lower Manhattan. I got a quick muenster cheese sandwich (a staple in my New York diet) and walked around the numerous record stores found in the area.
At about 3:00 we walked down to Tisch and had a small tour and talk with John Canemaker (pictured at right), the head of their animation department, and from what I can tell, quite the heavy weight in the academic and industrial animation. All in all, Tisch looked pretty awesome, though I didn't get a chance to see any other departments other than the animation department.

.:August

Coney Island and Beyond

Hey Y'all,

This was our first "day off" on the trip, where John (the trip advisor/professor/leader guy) doesn't schedule any meetings or anything, and we can do anything our hearts desire. A group of us (Julian, Rachael, Jeremy, Jenny, and some girl whose name I don't know yet...) met up at the International House lobby and hopped on a long subway ride to Coney Island in an attempt to be good little tourists. Once we got to the subway station and on a subway, it took us a bit over an hour to get there, but luckily we only had to change trains once on the way over, and the trains were pretty empty on both ways, so that was kinda enjoyable.

So we got off at the Coney Island station and just started walking, incidentally towards the beach. We eventually (after walking by an incredible number of abandoned carnival rides, which I guess were retired for the season just a few days or weeks ago) reached the beach and walked down the boardwalk for what turned out to be quite the distance. After a bit, we started looking for lunch, as it was about that time, and everyone went to some famous hot dog place, which it turns out isn't too famous as I hadn't heard of it before, nor can I remember the name. They didn't have any vegetarian option (being a hot dog place) so I just settled for some french fries. However, Julian ordered a hot dog and some cheese fries (this will be important later, trust me.)

We walked on for a bit longer, then decided to stop at some tables/chairs on the edge of the boardwalk and eat. To our immediate right (or left for some of us I guess) was the beach, and a bit further some body of water which may have been the ocean, not really sure. On the beach right next to us, there was quite an impressive collection of sea gulls. For some reason, Julian thought it was a good idea to share his cheesy fries with the local avian life. To say the least, they were quite enthusiastic to receive his gifts, and many jokes were had involving Julian recruiting the birds into his army, and fun was had by all. However, at one point Julian became quite bold and decided it was a good idea to hold an especially cheesy fry high above his head, and he got several birds to hover above him, but none were quite bold enough to accept his offer.

After that little show, little else happened of note on the excursion. We walked down the boardwalk a long ways, walked around the beach for a lil' bit, walked back all the way to the train station, stopping for some cheap delicious mango on the way. We took the entire hour plus subway ride all the way back home, and chilled for the remainder of the night, catching up with a personal friend of mine who lives in New York named Chris and eating at a particularly tasty Mexican restaurant.

.:August

(Note, this post is actually two days old, I forgot to post it... sorry)