Psychogeography Lives
The course I teach at Hunter College in the IMA (Integrated Media Arts) MFA program called Psychogeography is very process oriented, but that doesn’t keep the amazing students from turning fully formed projects into the world. Annie Berman’s great video Street Views, “shot” entirely in Google Street View, made for class last year, just won best experimental short at the Rome Independent Film Festival and has been screening widely. Jason Fox, who also took the class last year, has programmed the latest season of Flaherty NYC screenings at Anthology Film Archive. Jason closed out the series with an awesome augmented reality film walk called Pot Luck that took viewers to sites around the East Village to see work by Catherine Chalmers, Stefani Bardin, Alan Raymond and others, intriguingly sited and triggered by local signage. We made a little bit of a spectacle of ourselves.
Watching THE PASTA FACTORY CLOSES by Jacqueline Goss,
Michael Gitlin, and Ben Gitlin-Goss at 65 E 2nd Street
STREET VIEWS Trailer from Fish in the Hand Productions on Vimeo.
Engaging the User
Oyster City, our AR walking tour and game app opens the APP chapter of the new book by Paul Martin Lester, Digital Innovations for Mass Communications: Engaging the User (Routledge, 2014). Lester even picked up our questionnaire from the join-the-mailing-list form: “Would you eat an oyster from the NY Harbor?” “Yum!” “No Way!” “Maybe in 80 years.”
The Last Brucennial
I am totally tickled to participate in the Whitney Biennial counter event The Last Brucennial, equal parts happening and exhibition. Read about it here, here, here, and here. Here is an interview with Bruce High Quality Foundation in Art and America and here it is on Facebook. The line for the opening was as long as the line to get into opening night of The Whitney Biennial. My contribution is a video, Perfection is the Enemy of the Good, the standalone version. It is probably the driest piece there. List of all artists here.
Meat Cleavers and Screensavers for the New Age
Despite being snowed out one week and changing the date, we had a great turnout and a great time at our evening of six minute performances called “Meat Cleavers and Screensavers for the New Age” at Kunsthalle Galapogos, presented by This Red Door on February 10th. The artists met during last summer’s LMCC residency on Governors Island and the six minute constraint is inspired by the six minute ferry ride from Manhattan to Governors Island.
Artists (in order of appearance): Karl Erickson, Elisabeth Smolarz, Rachel Stevens, Meredith Drum, Kimberly Ruth, Jamie Diamond, Jody Wood, Tamar Ettun and the Moving Company. I projected dueling quotes from two books with the same name: Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland; and Art and Fear by Paul Virilio, while flipping over a cassette tape with an album by The Cure on either side when each quote began. See the standalone version here.
High School, Gold Keys and a ‘Banksy’
Heading back to the ferry on Governors Island
This has been the week of brilliant high school students. On Thursday we held our first workshop with students at the Urban Assembly Harbor School on Governors Island. In the Oyster City themed workshops, spearheaded by my terrific collaborator Meredith Drum, we are working with students to design 3D, virtual “monuments” to mark sites on the island that we might add to the treasure hunt node of Oyster City. The super bright and engaged on-the-ground experts who come to the island every day to study ocean engineering, scientific diving, aquaculture and other projects centered around marine stewardship are a pleasure to work with. A special thanks goes to Sam Janis, who has helped us organized the after-school workshops and who is deeply involved in the Billion Oyster Project .
On Friday I was a juror for the digital art category of the Scholastic National Art and Writing Awards. Top award winners get a gold key and artists and writers like Andy Warhol and Truman Capote got their start with early accolades from Scholastic. Since we finished a little early I sat in on some of the “Future New” panel and was truly blown away by the interdisciplinary work high school students are doing. Conceptual performance video, mapping tap water sample collection in different parts of San Francisco, an algorithmic system that generates bright abstract animations, a beautiful, intricate interactive shape game inspired by oragami and realized with a 3D printer and elegant string installation in public space drawing attention to spaces where people live on the street were only a handful of the amazing projects.
Afterwards I bought a fake Banksy on the street from a vendor in Soho, just to remind myself to keep it light.