Recently in happenings Category

gee and i’ve only met barlow once
Originally uploaded by xian

was JP Barlow idly doing the comparisons today, or is this more like secret-admirer spam?

I do the white man’s overbite. Please @kentbrew, point that camera over at @cynk. ah. better. thnaks!

hackday stage
Originally uploaded by xian.

I’m going to name the robots Foo and Bar. We still haven’t announced the musical act that will be performing on this stage tonight.

So far I’ve heard Cody Simms and Neal Sample (Cody and Neal, hmmm….) give a great overview of YOS (with great visuals by Micah Laaker), and am now listening to Allen Rabinovich explain how to hack with Flash and Flex.

At 2pm I’ll be talking about patterns and stencils and how they can help coders build better interfaces.

My Ignite talk, Grasping Social Patterns
Originally uploaded by duncandavidson. Here are my slides.

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UPDATE: and here’s some YouTube video shot from the audience (the very beginning of my talk is cut off):

Here are my slides from my talk at Xerox Parc (the BayCHI monthly program meeting) on April 8th:

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When I get the audio, I plan to put together a slidecast to synch the slides to the talk, which should be more valuable.

Oh, and consider viewing the slides in full-screen mode. They should be a lot more legible that way. I did my best to optimize the source files.

Started off Saturday morning with Kick ‘08.

Namedropping: Talked to George Kelly, Erin Malone, Anil Dash, Jessamyn West (yay!), Simon Willison, Owen Thomas, Hugh Forrest, Micah Alpern (briefly, passing on the escalator), Janna Hicks DeVylder so far….

If you’re interested in social web design, how to model identity, presence, and reputation, and how to create and align incentives with the behaviors you wish to encourage in your online community, then join Ted Nadeau and me for a Core Conversation on the topic of “Online Identity: And I do give a damn about my bad reputation” at South by Southwest interactive this March, in Austin, Texas (of course).

UPDATE: Alex Lee in the comments asked me when my talk is scheduled for. It’s on Tuesday, and I think it’s in the morning but not sure about. Will update with exact info when I have it.

UPDATE II: It seems that we will be doing our core conversation in a late slot (5pm) on the last day (Tuesday, March 11) of the interactive portion of the conference. I say if the conversation is good, let’s continue it into the evening over food and libations. Maybe we’ll even launch a startup over beer and barbecue.

Our survey of the zany madcap futuristic scenarios of the 21st century takes us now to the year 2055, where we will learn from “a post-apocalyptic workplace situation comedy” called Mankind’s Last Hope who conquered the human race, why, and what they’re keeping the remnants of our ragtag band of homo sapiens alive for (hint, it involves greeting cards, scrimshaw, and protein).

A while back my friends Dan aka Cecil aka Dan and Jeff “The Pompetus of dBase” Green collaborated on the aforementioned sitcom, writing a pilot and ultimately an entire first season. My participation has been limited to table reads and watching an early undress rehearsal of the theatrical staging of the first three episodes in play form by the Virago Theatre Company

These three episodes are now slated to open October 26 at Rhythmix Cultural Works (2513 Blanding Ave, Alameda) and run for two consecutive weekends.

Cecil aka Dan aka Cecil has more information on his bblog, where he also features a preview of the show’s new theme song, penned by erstwhile Stryker keybist Brent Jeffers, so you know that’s got to rock.

I always wanted to consume must-see TV filmed before a live studio audience and now that chance is coming mega-soon, as the kids will say in the year 2055, if there are any kids left alive.

The Illuminated Corridor meets the Internet Archive. What does that even mean? To find out, I went to the source, Oakland artist, musician, and impresario Suki O’Kane:

wake up!: What is the Illuminated Corridor?

Suki O’Kane: The Illuminated Corridor is a next step in outdoor cinema: a nomadic public art installation that creates site-specific illumination of public space, drawing on local traditions of film and live music. Using the model of temporary public art intervention, we mask street lighting and relight facades with projected video and film, accompanied by live musical performance.

Launched in the Summer of 2005 and involving a collaboration of over 75 Bay Area filmmakers, media artists, sound artists and musicians, the Illuminated Corridor catalyzes new work, showcases diverse collaborations between performative projectionists and performing artists, and covers a vast territory of film and music genres.

That sounds really interesting. How do people respond to it?

They perambulate, mostly, caught in the various gravitational pulls of the simultanous work the way folks are drawn to, or driven from, works in a gallery setting. Two unique things happen: the viewers walk among the performers who are set up in the middle of the street, unmediated by stage or velvet rope; and the view is not traditional. No projection screen or makeshift shower rod proscenium is used. The image goes directly onto facades, which absorb and reflect in very different ways, bitten by age, use and grime.

We’ve been asked, and by as many artists as audience members, why we would permit light to get swallowed up by the facades when we could cloak, Christo-stylee and light a place up like, well, Christmas. We might someday, but for now we’re confusing matters by experimenting with the perception of where illumination is coming from in a Corridor. Is it what the artists are applying? or is it what the facades are releasing?

How many times have you done this before?

We are Number Six. From the original Bayennale version at Jack London Square to the encyclopedic circus of Oakland Ironworks we moved to an exquisite corpse model: a righteous cut-up of Vertigo outside the LAB built from a deft edit of the film by Sarah Lockhart and assignment of notes from Bernard Hermann’s score. We reconvened at the spiritual home of the IllCorr, 21 Grand Art Gallery, in the Fall of 2006 with Mobility, a themed performance that asked artists to consider the range of meaning in the word: from the darkened lot of Saturns to the creeping gentrification of Northgate to the iconic story of 21 Grand itself, displaced three times yet continuing to grow as a central force in Oakland arts.

Then, with enormous irony, we were the inaugural performance on The Great Wall of Oakland, an 8-story windowless facade addressable only from the rooftop of the Broadway Grand, a condo project that evicted and razed 21 Grand as a first step in realization. Good Times, which they were, was the name of the piece we commissioned local composer Dan Plonsey to create for an eight-piece string ensemble.

What’s the theme this time?

Prelinger on Prelinger. This Corridor seeks to illuminate the Prelinger Library, a private research library open to the public with collections encompassing some 50,000 books, periodical volumes and printed ephemera. The Library is linked to the Prelinger Archive, a collection of ephemeral films that are a key creative resource to artists of the Illuminated Corridor, and serve as a touchstone for the broader community of film, sound and bricolage artists. For many of the artists participating in this Corridor, it’s a love letter to the Prelingers for their contributions to the creative commons, their stewardship of the artifact, and their encouragement of appropriation and associative discovery.

The Corridor will take place during the Library’s traditional Wednesday Open House evening hours, where we are inviting people to lose themselves in the stacks of an extraordinary library turned inside out for an evening.

Why? No really. Why why why?

Corridors have a lot of subjects in them: public art, expanded cinema, intermedia, cultural intervention and reclamation, and this particular Corridor is meant to press questions straight from archive.org: how do we protect our right to know and our right to remember. But we try to never forget that it is simply fun to watch movies outside with the neighbors. Innocent, ad Hoc, unfiltered, community-based, with a transgressive overtone (we were meant to use the building to hold the contents, but we’re using it to show some cinema), it’s hard to walk away from a Corridor without feeling like you just got away with something. We want to transform these spaces, so that when we all return there in the course of our normal day, we can never see it in the same way again. Ephemerally imbued. Like that.

~~

So there you have it. The Illuminated Corridor, a collision of public art, live music and film, next happening on Octoer 3, at the Prelinger Library, bounded by Eighth, Folsom and Rodgers Streets in San Francisco, CA.