The bulletin board and thumb tacks are a standard system of connectors to be found in any office. The addition of batteries, wire mesh, and LEDs transform this system from physical to electrical.
The the left and right side of the bulletin board are covered with wire mesh which is connected to the power and ground of the battery. LEDs are connected to push pins with wire. A bit of copper foil is placed at the base of the tack to ensure a connection with the wire mesh.
The C-Town Dress is a look at modules and my obsession with plastic bags. On the modules side, I was thinking about modules as pockets or containers and I wanted to see how I could reinvent or take a second look at some preexisting form. As for plastic bags, I feel as though I am plagued by them. I hate waste and these are materials that accumulate rapidly and involuntarily. I spent a lot of time trying to avoid them and realized it was close to impossible, so have recently been trying to come up with creative ways to repurpose them.
The dress is composed of 46 plastic C-Town shopping bags (C-Town is my local supermarket). The handles are snipped off and the sides are tucked in and then sewn to provide reinforcement. The top of the pouch is then rolled over to provide support for the soon to be pocket. The pouches are assembled in columns and then in rows, forming the front and back panels. The two panels are then sewn together, leaving the appropriate openings for arm and neck holes. All bags are left open as pockets, including those that comprise the sleeves.
I’m interested in the subtleties of what we perceive and also of the information that we put out into the world. I’m also interested in traces of ourselves that we unconsciously leave behind. Once I made 10 people I was close to take pictures of their unmade bed every morning for 30 days. I like to think about ritual and routine and the simple choices that we make in intimate spaces that make generic rituals uniquely ours. The thing about people is that they have the potential to be so incredibly observant and they can know the ins & outs of another person so well. No matter how many preferences I set, my computer will not know me or the ebb and flow of my personality and mood. And I’ve been thinking about connections that can be made within a network of people – group datalogging. Obviously completely impractical & creepy & infringing, but what if there were a way to ‘watch’ a group of people in a given space at a given time, to ‘watch’ the day of everyone who is close to you and compare it to yours? Or else a comparison between you and all of those strangers that you end up sharing your physical space with in the course of the day. This morning I was in an insanely crowded subway car and at 8:46 we stopped for the 9/11 moment of silence. It was so odd to be so physically close to all those people and have no clue as to what sort of experience they were having. What would a graph look like for each of us for that period of time? How were our experiences similar or different, and how could that be observed?
The Muttering Hat is a physical embodiment of the negative thoughts that often crowd one’s head space. Displayed it the form of a hat, a pair of angry, muttering balls (representation of the negative thoughts) are tethered to one’s head. These balls can be placed in a variety of location to indicate the intensity of the thoughts. Times when the thoughts are very loud and overwhelming can demonstrated by the balls being stuck to hat, covering the ears. This causes all other sound to be obstructed by the muttering. When the negative thoughts are less present, the balls can hang at the shoulders where the muttering can barely be heard. This is, in a sense, a play on the “voices in your head”. The advantage of having them be externalized and detachable is that you can share them with a friend.
Audio is played from a hacked MP3 player. Speakers are embedded in the angry balls.
The play button of the MP3 player is intercepted and replaced with a soft switch so the system can be activated and deactivated by squeezing the tether line.
The muttering audio can be heard here.
Tim McNerney, Zach Layton, and I came up with a system for public participatory collage-making.
Steve Jackson, Marti Grimminck, and I worked on a project called Video Routes. It is a sketch of an idea of linking geo-tagged video together in order by a predetermined route, so a geographic journey can be made conceptually via video. This particular version is a mash-up of YouTube, Yahoo maps, and Wikipedia. We like the idea of pulling video from sites like YouTube so that there is a variety of source material – each time to travel a route there is the potential for a different experience.
The view from Water Taxi Beach in Long Island City. Care of Megan MacMurray’s camera phone.
Tim used his phone to post photo of us hard at work on our final directly to my blog. Once again using Shawn’s perl script.
I posted this photo with the perl script directly through email rather than the phone.
I uploaded this video directly to my blog using blip.tv’s automatic cross-posting.