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.
Week one of graduate school is officially complete. I wouldn’t say that I’ve been working my fingers to the bone yet, but It has certainly been a mentally engaging week, full of group and individual meetings, small presentations and introductions. And while I do feel much more comfortable around the facilities, I am still not settled in to a work-conducive environment yet. That will hopefully be remedied this weekend when I move all my crap into the studio.
So I thought, for whoever is reading this blog anyway, I would give a brief rundown of the presentation I gave to my Dynamic Media class (which is basically my studio course). Christian Moeller, our professor asked us to chose a theme and give a brief presentation on it. Then we had a day to come up with 12 ideas for a project that could be done relatively quickly. We met with him individually so that he could rifle through them speedily and subject us to his curt, German sense of judgment: 
NO.. NO… YES… CRAP…. BEAUTIFUL… BORING…. YES……. WHAT ELSE? It felt a bit like having a blood exam, but in the end I was surprised to hear him refer to my ideas as “entertaining”.
My presentation hovered around several ideas that are of interest to me at the moment: the spectacle of technological breakdown and dysfunction, purposeful/clever misuse of technology, instances where beauty is revealed through error… I’m interested in the exposure of the mechanism and the exploitation of it’s shortcomings. This relates to some of my earlier research on the work of the structural filmmakers and the artists they influenced.
My ideas were all over the place, but the most interesting and feasible ones, and also the one’s Christian gravitated towards, were a series of lo-fi mechanical sculptures that would mimic or reflect on neurotic human behavior. The titles were things like, “machine that tries to draw a perfect circle”, etc. I’m attracted to this idea of building imperfect machines because A) I’m bad at building machines and B) I’m interested in the process of discovering the most natural/imperfect way to make a machine do something. I also think it could be more challenging, say in the example above, to figure out how to make it not draw a perfect circle (making a robot draw perfect shapes is probably very simple.
These ideas aren’t revolutionary, but I think they’re interesting and also, they’ll put me on the path to working on something here and potentially lead to different/more unique projects. Being creative is a process and it has to begin somewhere, even if if that somewhere is heavily influenced by existing work/ideas.
