So this is pretty fresh news but looks like i’ll be doing some work with the Barbarian Group this summer. They’re a pretty well established interaction company, with a history in innovative interactive website work, but now doing commissioned installations, independent projects and even gallery art work, occasionally. They just finished working on the Photoshop express project. It seems commercial, and it is a lot of the time (it’s a company), but it’d be tough to find a good company that is equally as packed with cool funny people who have artistic sensibilities too; doing alternative projects. One of the professors I TA’d for works there.
It’s co-founded by Robert Hodgins, mastermind behind Flight404, the popular Processing, animation blog. He heads up the S.F. office. I exchanged some emails with him and we wound up with something that’s not quite an internship but more of a chance to go work on my own stuff, help them brainstorm, do some intern work and just be awesome. I’m super excited about it.
What this means: I will most likely be kicking it in San Francisco for about a month and a half after mid-late July. The first half of the summer i’ll be teaching in the pre-college program in my department, making some paper. There are still many details to iron out in the next few months, which is why I’m reluctant to say anything too definitive. But my summer seems to be fleshing out in this direction.
Well, Nina B got into town the other day, so we went out for a spot of mid-day adventuring. We took a stroll around Echo Park and saw the lake there, which is really pleasant with a nice view of downtown. Then we walked around Little Tokyo, which was cool, but a small let-down for me. I’m not sure why, but I was expecting it to be a bit bigger and more authentic looking. Maybe more fish markets and ramen stalls… Took a walk around the arts district too, which is where, to my understanding, a lot of loft housing for artists is opening up. There’s a small artist colony there called the Brewery, that people live in. They have open studio walks a couple times a year. Also SCIArc is there too.
I haven’t been doing as much exploring these past few days because i’ve been cooped up inside working on my new website. It’s a major summer goal that I had been delaying until settling in here; Mostly because I knew it would require a self taught refresher course on html and css. That’s what the past few days have been, honestly. I’m finding the whole process quite frustrating because I can’t help but mixing the designing and coding process, which most people agree should remain oil-and-water-ish.
A lot of artists think that because they have some kind of aesthetic sensibility, that automatically qualifies them to be good designers too. PAUSE. I learned two years ago when I first put up a website, that this is a gross misunderstanding. Design is hard. It’s easy to spot good design, but sitting in front of illustrator dragging around text can be…well, humbling. And furthermore, it’s counter-intuitive but “simple” design is (in my opinion) the hardest! That’s the challenge I’m facing right now. I took my last website down because
I felt it had too much. And there were too many sections that I wasn’t updating (or that I never even finished, really) which is a clear indicator that they’re not needed. My new website is going to be bare-bones: 8 or 10 Projects, Some info, A statement. Clean and simple, but easier said than done.
I think it’s going to be another action-packed weekend. Among some the the things i’m hoping to check out are Little Tokyo’s annual Tofu Festival, and the beginning of Nisei Week, LA’s big Japanese festival. Check out the Tofu Festival website — there’s a cartoon of a soy sauce bottle saying “don’t forget to use a condiment”. Well alright.
Not sure how I missed this at SIGGRAPH. It must have been in the trade show that opened up after I peaced out. Anyway, I think it’s really interesting:
The Walker Art Center keeps a blog called New Media Initiatives. They recently posted a couple links related to the development of multi-touch interfaces.
