a residency at Signal Culture (Owego NY)

for the past 24 hours i have been in what is known as the Finger Lakes area of Upstate New York. several months ago my application for the residency program at Signal Culture was accepted. the program bring researchers and creative interested in experimental processes in art and media to the village of Owego to give time to work on a project. i was awarded a two week stay and i elected to come in between semesters.

over the next two weeks, i will be practicing/experimenting with using EEG (electroencephalogram) data as a systems control input. yep brainwaves to run name-your-choice-of-physical-hardware. last summer i proposed a theatrical project to enable two actors to run puppetry from their biometrics. that project wasn't picked up and the project was put on the shelf. i applied for the Signal Culture opportunity to give me time to open it once again.

today was a day to look around get my bearings, visit ancestral grounds and meet one of the principals in the project. Owego is a town on the banks of the Susquehanna River the are settled since the 1700's has the feeling of a Victorian era boom town built on lumber, farming, and industry. i am just getting familiar and I will tell you more as time goes along.

Signal Culture is in a three story brick building on North Avenue, a main artery through the center of the village. for my time here, i have a spacious 400-500 sq. foot studio with tables, tools and equipment/components. a big bedroom and private bath attach to the studio. the kitchen, dining room/library are on the 3rd floor as a shared resource with the other residents and the founders of the program. i feel incredibly fortunate, and i am very grateful for the support of Signal Culture and the UWF Art Department who have made it possible for me to be here.

when it rains it pours!

YAY (mini)Maker Faire is coming to Atlanta! ...while i am in Istanbul. Wow. That was one of the fastest let downs in history.

¡you! yes, you. you need to go. unless you are accompanying me to Turkey this is a special thing, i was at Maker Faire 1 and 2. do not miss this opportunity.

http://www.makerfaireatl.com/Atlanta_Mini_Maker_Faire/Home.html

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

3 Fundred Million

There are many things that were amazing about CAA 2008 but, I feel I need to report on an important project I learned about from Mel Chin and spearheaded locally from Mary Rubin called the Fundred Project.

At this point Mel asked me to swear you to secrecy. Please only pass this info to the most sane individuals you know. ;) This project is so amazing I volunteered to participate.

Fundred is an artist intervention to remove the lead out of the soil in several communities in New Orleans. As you might know lead poisoning has been linked to cognitive disabilities but it is also linked to crime and violence. This poisoning hits the children the hardest because they exposed to more of it for their size and weight.

Mel has concieved of a project to collect the 300 Million that it would take to clean this up from student artists drawing their own Fundred Dollar bills. An armored car converted to burn vegetable oil will travel the US collecting the 3 Fundred Million and deliver it to Washington to 'pay' for the clean up.

To learn more see: Fundred Project. Agent, your password to the site is: Paydirt

check out this kick ass site! watch other luscious video projects. post your work!

http://www.post-videoart.com/

-kn out