the countdown begins

t-minus 15day 2hours 32mins until 01SJ as i start this post. my objective or role is that of anthropologist/art historian/critic/art tourist this time around. i am trying to plan a live remote from the event on friday and i need to talk with my homies in the Ho to see what I can arrange. the plan is to use two easy tools the laptop suspension device called Connect-A-Desk and some rig to get a second shot.

Connect A Desk @ Yahoo! Video

i have been thinking about a helmet or shoulder mounted cam. my colleague Amy Ruddick pointed my attention to a lesser known Pedro Almodóvar film called Kika where they have this awesome rig for remote camera operation.




I have no idea if I can fashion such an awesome rig in time, but the sheer design of the telematic costume is stunning, and is accordingly designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier.

New shirt in; think I will wear it tomorrow

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

almost the whole of august

well this has been quite a ride, the promise to post everyday for the month of August. i almost made it except that the first week of classes ground me down and i was simply exhausted on last Friday and Saturday.

Rubaiyat: "wanna try another month? do you have it in ya? i find this very inefficient method of communication by sending you a message via my blog extremely fun(ny)."

software and the bureaucracy

so the first week of classes has once again an amazing learning opportunity. i created some tension with the CAS technology support group by requesting a free software for the lab machines on the first day of classes. the support group is stretched thin and they thought they had finished for us. things worked out after i explained that it was an emergency, that i had 2 weeks until i absolutely needed it.

since that first day dust up, i have discovered that they did not include what my colleagues and i think are basics such as: Firefox and Filezilla. last semester we had requested and they had eventually given us an Admin account for urgent issues and this isn't there either :/
i don't mind installing Firefox, etc. it isn't a big deal.

the lesson is that we need to be very exacting about what we need each and every semester. i am pulling together a master spreadsheet to send to them with the message that we want to be good team mates, but we are still learning the best ways to work, sorry.

!!!!Free!!!! Processing and Arduino course.

Online Course:
Processing and Arduino in Tandem
Creating Your Own Digital Art Tools

this is happening on Tuesday evenings Aug 30 to the end of Sep.

first solder

tonight everyone of my 18 electronics novices successfully assembled a Blinkenlights kit! i am truly excited by the possibilities. i wrote a diatribe on the nature of public art, culture jamming, and intervention. i am tempted to publish the rant here.

this could be very interesting

last night i started my re-striped phys. comp. class. this year we are not going to take it slowly, we move into micro-controllers right away. i borrowed heavily from the syllabi of a good friend Steve Durie from CADRE to make up the schedule and syllabus, in addition there is a cross class collaboration planned to have students of Arch. Ceramics and Digital develop final projects together.

i applied some lessons i learned last semester:

• don't go too slow, my last students handled the technical practice fine


• you need your own tools, ya wouldn't expect to borrow a 00 watercolor brush in the other studios


• have fun, cause mayhem

i gave IMNSHO was a stirring speech about the wealth of resources, the generous community around Arduino, and how cool it is to fail bombastically and gloriously. and i showed the trailer for the Arduino Documentary. i guess i will see what the enrollment is on Wed. if we do maintain most of the 20 students it will be one hell of a semester.

fantastic idea

SAIC, one of my favorite institutions, has a 1.5 credit hour foundations program for all first year students called SAICWired. it teaches the basics of the Mac desktop, simple image composition and color correction through Ps, blogging skills, and simple web development mostly targeted towards gallery building. in other words, digital fundamentals for every student in the program, basic skills for participating in the contemporary digital society.

i try to compress this info into 2week period at the beginning of my classes and thus i lose 15% of my teaching time to basics. many students still need to pick up these basic skills, and it doesn't matter if they are going to be a painter or prosecutor, these are fundamental contemporary skills. the SAIC class is 90 minutes once a week for one semester. what a deal!

i will be borrowing from this! and i will be trying to get it written into our program!

how honest is too honest

i like to think that i try to be transparent, i find that it is too cumbersome to try to measure out what i should and shouldn't say to people. this is especially important because of the contemporary and public fashion that i communicate on forums as unlikely as this and as pervasive as twitter/FB. i do occasionally withhold something if i think it will pain another in some way. all of these hypocrisies aside though, i still find the questions of how truly honest i can be, a perplexing question.

i have several goals to improve myself——my work, life, livelihood, etc——i am not satisfied with all, i really want to pursue these goals and see where they lead. i will be that way for a long time to come because i have been that way for a long time, period.

i am concerned (sometimes worried) about the way utter honesty will effect my relationships. if i share goals honestly there is a possibility that my employer will think i am brash. i don't want them to think that i can't imagine or don't have interest in bringing those high value goals to the current situation. but if it leads other places, well this is the path i have chosen to be on. the politics of it all!

just now, i see that this may be a source of a deep seated wanderlust in me. Herman Hesse's novel Narcissus and Goldmund has a lot of brilliant philosophy about bring true to one's nature and one of them is a wanderer, i should pick it up again.

a day to beat all

many days in the recent past, i have been simply stymied in my research of other classes that line up the intent i have for mine. i would look hour after hour for similar course syllabi and often i would find something that in name appeared promising only to quickly discover that the instructor teaching philosophy or methodology was at odds with my work.

this evening things have suddenly turned a corner. i found a site or two that was kindred and that of course opened a plethora of resources. in fact, i am tired. i am not overwhelmed, just so impressed and eager i have been consuming a lot of material quickly. one thing i would like to leave my readers with tonight is the teaching philosophy of David Kasdorf, an artist from Penn State Altoona. he offers this brilliant description of his teaching philosophy and advice to young artists at the top of his syllabus! go David:

1. Art is one of the hardest and most uncertain paths you can choose in life. I think often, students choose to pursue Art in college because they think, and rightly so, probably, that Art is an easy path through college. It is after graduation that it gets difficult. Let’s face it: You have no real marketable skills, few job prospects, and thus a very uncertain future.

2. As an artist, no matter what medium or media you choose to work in, be it writer, visual artist, actor, film maker, dancer, whatever, you are always at the mercy of other people’s opinions. Rejection is something artists must get used to quickly. To be an artist you better develop a thick skin.

3. In most professions in life one learns, - and in order to succeed - masters a specific set or sets of skills. Visual artists, and that is essentially what we are in this class, need to invent their own sets of skills. No one cares if you can paint a “Picasso."

4. There are many artists who have had long and successful careers without ever learning how to draw.

5. These days, many visual artists change and move between media as easily as they change their socks.

6. The one thing that artists most need to learn is the one thing that is impossible to teach. That is rigor in the studio. Forget “Inspiration.” To be successful one needs to work and work and work.

7. Work comes from work. Trust the process.

8. If you need to ask what your grade is you may not have the right temperament to be an artist.

9. When you go to New York it seems that everyone is an artist and it’s almost true. As a result, no one in the business - collectors, dealers, curators, gallery owners - cares about your work. People are jaded; they’ve seen it all and have been pestered to death. For some this is very difficult to deal with. Others see it as liberating. Since no one cares anyway, take risks, do what you want.

10. You’ve all heard the term, “avant-garde.” The only avant-garde left in this day and age is expression of self, what it is that makes you tick. We can call that “Personal Vision.” That’s what people want to see.

11. No one talks about how well things are done or the level of skill one possesses in any certain medium. That doesn’t mean it’s not important and we will talk about that in this class. It’s important to understand, though, that it’s just the first step.

12. No one cares either how an image is created. It’s the image itself people care about.

13. I like to teach. I like students, at least most of them, and I care about them; I want students to succeed. I like to give students good grades and send them on their way happy. When students are absent a lot or late, or when they’re not motivated and unprepared, I stop caring about them so much. It doesn’t mean I stop liking them. It just means that I put my energies elsewhere.

14. Art is always a matter of choice. The decision to be an artist is yours to make. The decision of how hard you work is yours, too. It’s your decision to sleep in and be late and it’s really up to you as far as attendance is concerned. If you need me to motivate you, I encourage you to pursue something else in life.

15. Grades are a fact of life. I would prefer not to have to grade students but that’s just not part of the equation. The grade you get in this class depends first and foremost on your level of engagement. That means that if you work hard, show up, be prepared, take risks, participate in critiques and discussions, you’ll do fine. The quality of your work matters too, of course. Somewhere around the middle of the semester I’ll tell you where you stand. You can talk to me anytime about your grade, although I realize that's not in keeping with #8 above. Don't worry, I didn't really mean #8 above. You can talk to me about anything, actually.

16. Computers are a tool. A very powerful tool but really, just a tool, like a pencil. And you need to know this: I do not teach software – I teach art. If you have enrolled merely to learn Photoshop, or to show a prospective employer that you have had college-level computer instruction, then you will doubtless be better served to purchase the software and sign up for a technical certification course.

17. I encourage deviation. If you don’t like the assignment feel free to do something else. If you want to do Flash animations, or video, by all means, do so. It would help me, though, if you talked to me first.

18. I consider critiques to be the most important in-class component of any course I teach.

OH the research!

well i was in a pinch last night to find some materials and zing! a whole new set of artists, art, and inspiration unfolded from discovering some Canadian physicomp artist-nerds, notably Peter Flemming and Norman 'the NorMill' White. i have been inspired by one of Flemmings experiments and I look forward to sharing a prototype with you very shortly...

the syllabi are coming together

and dates are aligning, just got off the phone with my collaborator Adam Shriverdecker, the workshop dates that i projected are good and we are green lighted. this is an unholy union betwixt Digital Media and Architectural Creamics, muhahahahahaa. i am really looking forward to this experiment. we have scheduled peer workshops where the students of each class will teach their focus to the students of the others to create a mini project. after the hybrid student teams will design and build a cross disciplinary project for the Final. i wish i was taking this class :D

reaching out

i notice that i am engaged in quite a few moments reaching out this past month. i am very interested in developing my contacts in the SE region. this morning i dropped a note to the director of the AUX Festival. AUX is an Athens GA music, art, and technology festival that occurs in the spring. last year, i came across the listing for AUX 2 weeks before the event and i just could not organize a trip in time.

earlier this summer, i discovered an organization in Atlanta name Flux Projects who are supporting really interesting artist projects, on small to medium budgets. i am very keen to watch what they are bringing to bear as well as applying for a grant. i was very impressed with their director, Anne Dennington. during our chat she was advocating for artists to be paid a living wage for making art, w00t!

i have made contacts and started conversations additionally with hackerspace organizations in Dallas and Brooklyn (the outer limits of the SE ;) and as i listed a few weeks ago, i am proposing local art and technology workshops to generate community locally.

& finally i am trying to cook up a proposal for the Receiver festival in Charleston SC; the only bummer is that it is scheduled just before our Spring Break this year and i am trying wrap my mind around what kind of project i could unpack and set up in a few hours to a day maximum.

manifestos!

what happened to the manifesto as a form of art? the form: manifesto, is a counter culture anti-academic relief valve to the obscenities of life. it is theory that takes more the shape of poetry than rationality and logic. is the manifesto dead because of the consumerist post-utopia we live in?

i suspect that this is because manifestos are dangerous. they are compelled question the authority of systems to which we grow dependent and blind. they compel us to criticize the criticism and critic! i think i will require my students to include a manifesto in their portfolio websites this semester. extra points for obscenities and irrationality.

viva la MANIFESTO!

800x art

the Justin Bieber teenpop anthem Smile apparently is the source material for Echoes Across the Astral Wastelands by Photon Wave Orchestra, a beautiful haunting 35 minute soundscape.

apparently, pwo applied a 800% slowdown to render their work. Burkazoid, a user on Audioboo, seems to have put the nail in the coffin publishing what he claims is 800% speed up of Echoes... of course, i am downloading my own copy to slow and verify and before the take-down notices appear :)

the questions here are explosive and a fascinating test of IP law and authorship. it is pretty obvious that the two pieces have completely different base audiences. i think one could even make the argument that the new piece is going to drive the consumption of both materials. i, for one, would have never listened to the poptart's song if it weren't for the discovery.

so if we were manipulated by leaked information to drive an internet meme, the music industry wins because they got me to listen to the consumerist lament(not to mention the free advertisement they are getting right now)! if the source of Echoes was never discovered, it would be a niche piece; listened to and appreciated by those of us who listen to the ambient genre.

my opinion: i believe Echoes Across the Astral Wastelands is a separate entity, influenced heavily by the pop music, and the existence of which 'economically' and popularly benefits both pieces by the popular noise it is creating. brilliant!

power

i was wrong about the transformer last night. a branch weighted by the rain & wind touched the power lines. no wonder that i smelled oak bbq.

Test by MMS

Test of post by email

i have never had a good reason to use this system until tonight. our transformer to our house exploded at about 7PM. i made a post earlier but might as see if i can do this.

stupid fun club and current tv

i was thinking about old friends the other day and i remembered a fun event James Stone and i helped coordinate last year with Mike Winter, a principal with the Stupid Fun Club(SFC), a Berkeley entertainment-gaming-think tank. Mike had made an interrogation machine known as the docuBot which would ask you questions culled from interrogative methodologies.

DocuBot was unveiled during the regular Tuesday night openings at the SJSU School of Art and Design. it was a great time. we had a room which we had draped the room with all black fabric, the bot had an impossibly bright light which shown at the interrogated subject from what you would call the 'face' of the machine.participants could only enter one at time for the DocuBot ran the 2min sessions.

Ali and i dressed as agents of (what i dubbed) the 'Dept. of Homeland Robotics'—black suits and shades and he had a SRL to take pictures of the crowd! we DHR agents also handed out invitations to be interrogated (i need to find out if Ali has picture of us in our disguises). it was a stunning success and we had a line all night.

fast forward to the recent past(last week sometime)
i was checking in on the SFC website. they now have a manifesto (which i need to write about soon) and they have an email to sign up to beta test SFC projects. of course, i signed up. a few days later, i was invited to join the beta event code named "the Creation Project", a crowd sourced narrative that is being made into a high value television production for the Current TV network. they are going to start shooting the pilot this week, so i am a bit of a late comer, but i am really intrigued by the concept. they have designed a small social network to develop the entire program. the characters, setting, plot lines, costumes, artwork has been a crowd sourced project where they directly respond to the input, creativity, and feedback of the membership. i am finding the niches where i can contribute and there are some really interesting questions being posed such as: how the voting effects the actual production and whether good writing will be subsumed by the 'noise' of the crowd.

i lurve Adium

i was intrigued by a post on the Lady Ada* website. the note referred to a technique of using IRC for the UStream chat/back-channel. i am a huge fan of Ustream and have been known to use it occasionally. one of the drawbacks is the chat. the video and chat running in the same browser winder grinds my machine cycles. when i was reading about the IRC settings the tutorial was using Pidgin and i was clued into the fact that Adium is built on the same programming backbone, purplelib, too bad they don't(didn't) support IRC. oh well it was worth a peek to see if things have changed...

wooot! the Adium beta has IRC! praised be! let the trumpets sound! did i say woot? here's a link to the beta if you wanna try it.

so i tested the suckah and it did great. pop out the UStream video channel on a browser winder and fire up IRC. my anecdotal evidence is that there were 100 plus people on the stream and i had maybe 20 sec lag. W0000T!


*Lady Ada for those of you who are uninitiated is one of the coolest proponents and geeks in DIY hardware and Phys Comp. they do a Saturday night show on UStream called Ask An Engineer. check it some time. her sites are ladyada.net and adafruit industries

confessions

i must confess my sins, now that this blogging experiment is almost half way done. about two weeks ago i pondered if i was interesting and fastidious enough to continue the professional bent of this blog and not let it mire in trivialities of my personal life. i have already discovered that i have good writing days and poor writing days. i have found that i sometimes overflow with topics to make short commentaries about and other days i struggle to figure tap out 5 or 6 sentences for the day(which adheres to my aforementioned wishes).

on the days in which i can write about myriads of things, i have seen a trend develop. i am writing pretty well developed drafts and scheduling them for future publication. this way i can let a bit of time pass and check the draft for competency, edit, etc.

the most so far is four posts in one sitting. one for that day and three scheduled for later. it seems to me that columnists and professional writers must do this as well. i pose a question to you, Rubaiyat(as I know you are my most regular reader and the progenitor of this damned challenge): is my 'pre-loading' the blog a cheat? or simply a gaming of the system that makes sense?

okay i will take feedback from any other reader too... hmmm, i need to jet. another post idea is coming to me :D

recommendations

it is a strange day. not a bad day but just one of those days that feels that it has a different rhythm to it. today, i followed up on writing a recommendation for a colleague. out of the blue one of my former students from SJSU made contact and wrote a lovely recommendation of my work teaching Art74 Introduction to New Media. it was awesome to hear now that more than a year has passed. and now back to prepping for my classes.

a reunion?

every CAA is an awesome event; i get the chance to reunite with my former colleagues and discuss our progress, opportunities, and challenges. it seems that every year there is a discussion that we should organize some kind of reunion. tonight i was on a web chat with one of the principals at Alpha One Labs, a Brooklyn Hackerspace; i have been looking to visit A1 Labs and plan to try to schedule time to visit the space during my trip to CAA in NYC this February.

as we chatted and bounced ideas, i mentioned what i do and that i would be in town with some colleagues. he then hit me with an offer: "if we want to have an event at A1, we just need to ask." bingo! wouldn't A1 be a cool place for a CADRE/SJSU reunion/party? imagine a bot building-beer bash with Brooklyn geeks and hackers. just the thought makes me smile.

my recovery from the sleep i missed has been slow so this will be a short post. the semester begins on Monday the 23rd this year! i am in the process of reworking the websites for my classes with a heavy focus on simplifying the material. i looked close at what could be combined today with small reworkings of the design. here's my progress so far.

new Dali museum

on Sunday we attempted to go to a Thai temple for brunch, but life got in the way and we missed our 'window of time'. instead we ate at a seafood dive in St. Pete and drove around looking a lovely houses. in the Salt Creek neighborhood there is an artist collective that i need to try to visit the next time i am down.

there was a nice surprise was as we drove around the waterfront: a peculiar and striking piece of architecture stood out. i got to drive by the new Salvador Dali Museum construction site; last week images from the site and the new building were posted on the flickr pages and current events blog of the HOK architectural firm.

spectacular!

i missed Monday postings, i was focused on driving back to the p'cola, a few last minute visits with family before i left, and saying goodbye. meh.

agents, sheesh!

my lovely Bride attended the performance i mentioned a few posts back by herself since i have made a last minute run to the land o' lakes. Rebecca volunteered to help close down the gallery, but before they had finished three or four young military guys wanted to take a look around the show and they were given about 10 minutes to see.

Rebecca said that they were really excited by the space, which is cool; i don't normally think of early career military people being into the arts. i like when my expectations are blown up as much as i like to explode other peoples' preconceptions. it seems before they had left she had signed up three volunteers for gallery sitting and she had pimped me out—at least one of them got vocal when she told them about the electronics workshop i have proposed to run at the gallery—and business cards were distributed.

pimp, agent, advocate, whatever... i am going to give her half of my cards when i get back to town.

spambots :P

an Asian spam bot tries to log sex chat lines here twice a week on my comments. i am not angry, nor even frustrated, just a little perplexed o.0 the mail comes as a totally foreign language, all the links are Asian domains... can it actually pay them anything? they will never get accepted by this blog. i should collect them for a week and see if the links change. maybe it is just an auto sender.

the Burden Identity

yesterday i visited the Contemporary Art Museum (CAM) at USF; the show which closes in a few days is Broadcast, an introspective on the nature of artist utilization of the old mass media. how did the one to many model shape us? what strategies did artists use to circumvent the gauntlet of FCC, advertisers, and affiliates? there were many excellent projects that create interesting documentaries of the beginning of the McLuhan global village against staid nationalistic perspectives. Other projects portent the fragmentation of old media central command by introducing methodologies that deliver the means of production to anyone crazy enough to use them such as a pirate radio station set up in the gallery and live so that the public may sit down and use the equipment at will. Or TVTV/Top Value Television's projects where the artists develop their own network to engage the methods and gain access to the leadership of the world.

another formative piece in culture jamming/DIY culture is a reel of 4 Chris Burden videos known as Four TV Commercials, 1973-77/2000. the compilation of work was originally developed and aired on Los Angeles and New York market broadcast stations in the 70's. the collection includes: T.V. Ad: Through the night softly, Poem for L.A., Chris Burden Promo,and Full Financial Disclosure. The video which has been relatively left in it's native quality of the time was shown through a 20 inch CRT. abundant amounts of the video interlacing, static graphics, and low resolution reflected a distinct aesthetic experience of the pieces, even though i fully believe the intent of the artist was indictment of the market system, advertisement, and mass media. nostalgia and a creepy feeling about high definition and 3d which has been growing within my psyche recently, reinforced the attention i paid these seminal pieces. crumbweb has a copy of the statements on the reel, here.

a funny thing happened on the way to the inter-library loan

a colleague shared a title that he uses for his classes the other day, whoich i wanted to look at it before i commit to the $75 book. a quick jump to worldcat(oh! i love thee!) revealed that the State University System aka Union, had half a dozen hits at other campuses including two major schools only a few hours from the p'cola. i also noted that USF which is close to my mom's house had a copy. since i am on the road for a few more days i assumed, "cool i can look at the USF copy while they ship one of the closer copies to my campus". can you hear the fail horn coming?

yep they shipped the USF copy, or i assume so because it is due now in early November, obviously a faculty checkout. only 2.5 weeks until fall semester! eeeek!

prophecy

i am visiting family before the grind of the semester begins anew. one of the benefits to being in this household is the insane numbers of subscription networks on the old boob tube. my grandfather has access to this googolplex of narrowcast networks because it is tied to the programming bundle that contains the western/cowboy sub-genre of American tv and film which he favors. i avoid subscription tv in my day-to-day life so this is fun to look at the niches all of these groups are trying to carve out.

one such narrowcast network is the Science Channel and i spent the last hour watching 'Prophets of Science Fiction' a documentary on the predictions and work of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. sure this program was pulpy, contained cheesy historical reproductions of the science labs, and was large on hype, but the thesis was compelling. the show recounted of the predictions that Well and Verne had made in the pursuit of the art of writing. and doubly compelling as it pointed out political/moral differences of the 19th c. techno-deterministic utopianism of Verne versus the 20th c. Modernist disaffection and social concern of Wells. both writers engaged set the bar for speculative fiction as well as assuredly inspired the engineering and science by blueprinting the ideas of the submersible research vessel, time travel, and nuclear weapons. once again a fine example of the vital contribution and necessity of the arts to drive culture, not just record it.

electronics meet ceramics

i met with Adam Shiverdecker today. Adam has proposed that we combine certain elements of his sculptural ceramics course and my phys. comp. course. i am truly excited that this seems like a great opportunity to teach my students about physical construction and Adam is interested in expanding his students' awareness of using kinetics, communication, and HMI in their projects.

we talked about putting together teams of students from both sides to design and fabricate a culminating project for each team. we discussed many different sources: Tim Hawkinson, Natural Born Cyborgs, Hertzian Tales, and Art & Today

this will be a really interesting experiment.

advice for the undergrad on the C grade

one day last week, i had a rather interesting chat whilst on a popular medieval fantasy MMORPG (bet you can figure out which one). as i got pwnd just outside the Westpark Workshop the conversation turned to how to decide whether or not to go to grad school. in itself an excellent question and posed in quite an interesting social venue.

that being said, the one thing that has stayed with me is a curious intricacy of my friend's timetable. my friend has to take a dreaded freshman course during senior year. it is one those 'prep' courses where i believe you only get 1 credit and you have to listen to different speakers every week and do a fair amount of composition. the issue is that m friend put it off, but the class is a requirement. no exceptions.

"When you can take the pebble from my hand, it will be time for you to leave."

or recieve a BFA as it is.

i am curious as to what the reaction from my teaching colleagues will be to the advice i freely offered. i told my friend to be blunt and honest with the professor.

i am a senior, i am here to fulfill the requirement, and i want XX for the grade.

i find it liberating to have a student say "I want to get a C, that is my objective." i know right from that moment the amount of time to expect that this person will put forward and i know the amount of time i should spend on counseling the student. the goals are clear.

one thing that i learned from the past year is that while teaching undergrads at the state level, i will be extraordinarily lucky if 15% of my students want to pursue 'my type' of career in the fine arts. i will still require myself to teach at a high level, the work will still be geared to the para-professional who truly wants this as their career. the damned fact is: that it is hard to be in this profession. so if a student sets the goal with me and they want to try to hit 85% of the material with some aptitude, well hell yeah let's hit it. a C shows aptitude, not mastery and it is a fine grade. however, if you want a professional mark then step to it.

hmmm, what do you other college teacher types think?

venue

i attended the opening of Munch-Key Business at Artel Friday night. and i give the curator, artists, and gallery kudos; it is a very good show. I think this maybe the 5th or 6th show in the new space at the old county courthouse. beside having the stately ghost of history embedded into the marble, it is just a beautiful open space. each one of the events and/or openings has drawn several hundred attendees. and in comfortable fashion. i know it has been said many times before, but this is a wonderful step up for the organization.

it allows all manner of new possibilities, such as the workshop I am proposing. next Friday, one of the active Artel members is organizing a performance. i traded cards and briefly discussed the possibility of this becoming a part of an ongoing venue for noise art as one of the performance methodologies.

i have wanted to bring the SHARE organization to this area, there are at least 2 students working in experimental sounds at UWF. one of them is a performer and maybe we can start a P'cola SHARE. so i am assuming there are some others close by. i will attend the performance art event next Friday will hopefully get this ball rolling too.