A collaborative proposal between myself and classmate Nova Jiang has been accepted to the GLOW festival in Santa Monica, which will be happening this summer.
The event is a dusk-till-dawn party on Santa Monica Pier and Beach, inspired by events like Nuit Blanche in Paris. From the website:
With the historic Santa Monica Pier and adjacent world-famous Santa Monica Beach as their space, artists will be commissioned to create unique and inviting works of art that welcome the public to be both audience and actor for twelve celebratory hours.
Our proposal is a simple installation that we’re calling “Moon Theater” which will involve a small stage set in the sand where people perform shadow puppets and hand puppets. The hand shadows will be beamed up to a gigantic moon sculpture on the beach, by the water.
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.
If you are interested in interactive art and digital music, you’ve probably watched this video on youtube about 1,200 times already, or have seen other works by Toshio Iwai. Now, if you had decided to set aside $1 each time you watched that video, you’d have enough to actually purchase one.
Last Tuesday, there was a UK launch of Iwai’s Tenori-On, which is now being made by Yamaha. It’s pretty amazing to see a piece of digital interactive art being manufactured as a high-end product. But then again, for Iwai, that concept is not completely foreign, as one can see by the success of other endeavors like ElectroPlankton for Nintendo DS. Still, for me it is interesting to consider the strange space between commercial product and art object that Tenori-On occupies: Even though the price is outrageous by ordinary commercial standards, it does tend to foster a sense of art-object “preciousness”. Plus, the “launch party” photos look more like an art gallery opening. How much could it seriously cost to manufacture one of these? It reminds me of Jacob Ciocci from PaperRad talking about the fishiness between selling a DVD in an art gallery for hundreds of dollars vs. burning one free for his friends.
Check out this website for a more detailed account of the launch party
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.
Sorry I didn’t get a chance to write from Siggraph. The installation went smoothly, but I always felt bad sitting at the computer while other people were working!
First things first: I didn’t make it to the zoo. I know, I know; No need to twist the knife, people. But SD is so close to LA, I’m sure I’ll see panda’s soon enough.
A few words on Siggraph: It seems to be one of those events that is worthwhile to show in, at least once if you get a chance. The collection was unapologetically odd, however. There were a couple big names, some even CMU and UCLA related. But then there was also a TON of painfully mediocre digitally manipulated photography. I mean, c’mon people! Aren’t we over this yet? I got that feeling about some of the media art projects too, but mostly from the projects in the “Emerging Technologies” section. Oh, I also got a peek at Microsof Surface, which is basically a giant iPhone on its side by the look of it. I think the most interesting feature of Surface will be its ability to interface with physical hardware. To me though, this is a clear sign that its initial marketing will be almost exclusively to hotel lobbies, phone stores and things like that. For example, imagine going into a phone store, placing your phone onto the surface and, using some interface, dragging ringtones or package options into the circle drawn around your phone or something like that. Or putting your mp3 player (made my Microsoft, duh) on it and dragging mp3’s from your library onto the area where the player. Then they go wirelessly into it. What annoyed me about the presentation of it though was how they talked about gestural interfaces as though nothing like it had ever been conceived, completely omitting any mention of all the other research being done by interaction designers in the field of multi-touch and gestural interfaces. Jeff Han, comes to mind.
Events will continue there all week, but I only planned on going for the installation. I am kinda disappointed about missing a few things, notably the (slightly out of place) Siggraph fashion show, the animation theater will all the 3D animation shorts, and a performance by DMA alum, Takeshi. Some cool work I saw there included Ingo Gunther’s WORLDPROCESSOR project, Mark Shepard’s Tactical Sound Garden, Shawn Lawson’s Wu Wei.
San Diego is a lot smaller than I thought. There seem to be some interesting pockets and the weather was nice, but overall I don’t think i’d ever want to live there. I spent most of my time around the southern end of the city, by the convention center and the “gaslamp district” which is full of overpriced restaurants that cater to the convention center’s company credit-card type crowd. The padres were playing at the nearby stadium so that area was also full of bros. Also bike-taxi’s are HUGE there! As an unexpected and pleasant surprise, though, I also got to see my friend Ali again, who was volunteering there.
To sum up — Siggraph: Kinda cool/kinda weird. San Diego: Meh…
Oh, and don’t ever, ever, ever drive a rental car to Tijuana…ever… (ever). There’s a story there, but i’m too embarrassed to tell it!
I’m off to San Diego tomorrow for a couple of days. I’ll be helping Osman Khan install his piece, SEEN, in the SIGGRAPH gallery. I’ll try to update from San Diego if possible. SIGGRAPH is an annual conference on creative research of many different sorts.
I’m looking forward to seeing SIGGRAPH, as I’ve often heard quite a bit about it. If I have any free time, I really want to go to the San Diego Zoo and see the Pandas. They fascinate me…
I was at a gallery show downtown last night and in the adjacent building I just happened to see this excellent project by Graffiti Research Lab that I’ve seen online many times, being “performed” live:
The whole system was really impressive and robust. People were having a great time using it and tagging their names up huge on the side of the building.
