blog (July, 2007)
ingenuity: progression, projection
Cleveland's 3rd annual Ingenuity Festival is already a week past, and I haven't yet squeaked about it here. I wrote half an entry the week prior, intending to promote the fest and my part in it, but I was too tangled and busy preparing, and left it undone.
In Ingenuity's first year, I walked through the festival a few times and paused for some music. I spent a lot of time at last year's 2.0, digging great music/dance (DJ Spooky and SAFMOD beat me up,) art installations, and goodfun (get-down in the rain,) and did a brief Capoeira performance with Shakthi and Taliesin on stage with Moises Borges and his band.
This year we made a somewhat bigger Capoeira roda for the festival's opening Samba of 1,000 Drums parade, but that was mostly just a break for me on Thursday evening before returning to my cube at CleveMed for a late night, prepping software and devices for the next day's Cavani/FES/CleveMed collaboration.
Friends from the Cleveland FES (Functional Electrical Stimulation) Center (Katie, Andy, Juan, and Dimitra) asked if CleveMed and I would like to work with them in a collaboration with the Cleveland Institute of Music's Cavani String Quartet. Over a number of months we experimented in acquiring EMG from the musician's muscles while they played (using CleveMed's BioCapture and Kinesia systems), and capturing motion data with FESC's equipment to generate model~animations.
Day-of-show -- at CleveMed in the morning and State Theatre in the afternoon -- was one of the most stressful I've known, but everything really just came together by evening performance-time, and both shows were about as good as I could've hoped. The members of Cavani are amazing musicians and people, and their delivery of Dvořák's "American" was beautiful. The devices and visualizations provided another (sometimes stunning) dimension to the music, as hoped. All of the projections, stage calls, queues, and speaking parts (probably the root of my greatest stress) went smoothly, as a result of focus, attention, and generosity from everyone involved.
Photo by Imagine24 (Some rights reserved.)
More pics: 1,
2,
3
I owe thanks in a lot of directions: FESC friends and colleagues, the Cavani musicians, the stage management and ops people at Playhouse Square, my supervisor, Craig, (both granting me this freedom and for life-saving pair-programming assistance in the final moments,) the rest of my conspirators at CleveMed for making top-notch tech, and Rich Weiss from Ingenuity for gluing us together with logistics and motivation.
I'm already looking forward to next year's festival, and forming vague plans for a project. The intersection of art & tech is one crossroads where I could set up shop, (or at least be happy just hanging out on the curb.)
meaningful mindless chatter
She was goofing around:
"I'll leave you a comment on MySpace, or
write on your wall in Facebook, or
tag a link for you on del.icio.us",
and began flinging flickrs, Google Calendars, LinkedIns, Upcomings and Twitters --
fad upon mimeographic fad --
til she erupted into a dizzying spell of
"blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog -osphere",
and an exasperated, "but one's really saying anything!!".
In fewer than 4,000 days, we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective story and put them in front of 1 billion people,
-- Kevin Kelly, We Are the Web (2005)
Sometimes overwhelming and pointless and empty.
The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves... You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.
-- Socrates, "Phaedrus"
He says disciples, though, whereas our new media means democratization. We should celebrate and experiment and practice.
Discovery and exploration and browsing; moving about and looking at many things; the linked structure of the web; when you come across a link, it's a distraction engine, which, in terms of the memetic incest, is actually a great thing. It's how we get past that incest; we're brought from one site to another.
That is so fundamentally different from the basic idea of how we communicate in print; in print you're trying to cover the topic, and be comprehensive, and be done.
-- David Weinberger on podcast: Technometria: Everything is Miscellaneous
The process continues; between the lines and off the page.
today's private enterprise
Every modern career is heading for entrepreneurship.
The "I work at one company for the rest of my life" is gone.
In fact, you are becoming a small business, or you're becoming somewhat of an entrepreneur -- even if your elected career path is "I work for this company, and then I work for this company, and then I work for this company,..." -- because you're transferring jobs between them, and you have all the issues that a small business or entrepreneur cares about: the brand of you, what you do, that sort of thing.
The skills learned from entrepreneurship are applicable to any career path.
-- Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn,) Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture: Choosing the Entrepreneurial Path (Stanford Technology Ventures Program) [starting at 35 minutes; my minor edits]
Early in the same talk, Hoffman compares entrepreneurship to jumping off a cliff and building the airplane on the way down.
I remember my bridges and ledges; the longer I'd stand and peer over the edge, the more difficult the leap would become.
Peak Suburbia, and Suburbia 2.0
we had better prepare to make other arrangements for living in this country, by which I mean specifically re-localizing, de-globalizing, with an emphasis on local agriculture wherever possible, the emergency restoration of passenger railroad service and related modes of public transit, the rebuilding of local commercial infrastructures, and a radical rethinking of how we inhabit the landscape under New Urbanist lines.
In any case, those who keep wringing their hands over the bulldozers leveling the plots of prairie, or cornfield, or desert -- those distressed folks can direct their anxiety elsewhere. Worry less whether one final strip mall will tilt up out in gloaming, and think harder about how you are going to feed yourself and your family in a couple of years when the stupendous motorized moloch of American life begins to sputter, and the Cheez Doodle shipments can no longer make it to your supermarket shelves, and all that is "normal" melts into air.
-- James Howard Kunstler, Peak Suburbia, (Clusterfuck Nation)
I've been tossing around some ideas for a plant/seed/produce/tool-sharing site to grow a community around local gardeners, (urban, rural, and in-between.)
It seems a nice blend of [my interests in] web, software, ecology, and local community -- helping to build that economy/ecosystem that'll become necessary as our current concoction collapses, (as Kunstler continues to promise.)
I need a good project, but it might be more than I'm up for right now.