This is not a website
Experience Design
I’ve been designing experiences since my college days, which have involved interdisciplinary cross-pollination, blindfoldedness, and tele-presence, and been taken place in venues ranging from my living room to the Playa. This video of one of my blind feasts shows sightless diners enjoying a delicious, utensil-less meal, allowing them to marinate in whatever bite they happen to be eating right now. In the summer of 2005, I discovered dans le noir in Paris, and have since observed dark dining emerge as an international phenomenon. Had I only thought to get professional with it and other escapades in experience design. Well, now I am.
So Close Yet So Far Away
So Close Yet So Far Away is a tele-dining experience I choreographed for Valentine's Day, which was sponsored by the Berkeley Center for New Media. People at Berkeley sat at tables for 2 across from their laptops, and via videochat, shared dessert with their long-distance Lovers sitting elsewhere in the country, or elsewhere in the world. This was an experiment in social tele-presence, and I envision tele-restaurants & tele-dance floors forthcoming. Check the write-ups on WIRED and my personal blog for a longer description, and our practice video for a quick flavor.
This Might Be A Love Story
This Might Be A Love Story is a true story about a long-distance relationship between myself and a fellow in New York. (Think reality TV meets web TV meets lifecasting meets Love, ish.) Due to the personal nature of this project, I asked Current TV to take down their documentary about it via none other than Al Gore himself (amazing, ask me in person), but since it reflects my penchant for new media experimentation, I offer my story of this story.
The Graduates
The Graduates is a weekly radio show I conceived of and produced on KALX, dedicated to graduate student research at UC Berkeley. On the show, I interviewed grad students across campus on topics ranging from web-enabled paintball guns to the training of US marines for Iraq. Podcasts can be downloaded from iTunes U, and recommendations include: Jeff Silverman on supernovae (for which I won a Collegiate Broadcasters, Inc. Award), Matt Earp on music in the Web 2.0 era, and Anand Kulkarni on crowdsourced intelligence. Out of everything on this website, listening to one of these may give you the best sense of, well, me.
Second Life Eco Tour
The Second Life Eco Tour is a mini-documentary I co-produced with sponsorship from the Serious Games Initiative of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars. It chronicles environmental and governance-oriented activities in the virtual world of Second Life, such as the Green Islands Project, which enables residents to offset the carbon cost of their virtual property, and Eolus One, developer of virtual interfaces for managing real-world energy systems. Read more about the Second Life Eco Tour, and watch the mini-documentary.
Wikipediart
I like to play with Wikipedia. I use it as a way to understand my thoughts, by making entries for things like social graphs and virtual terraforming, and letting Wikipedians clean them up. I’ve also used it as a medium of communication, to get a hold of Kevin Kelly (see bottom of Life and Literary Career), though my ploy survived for less than one minute. So I like to break the rules a little, but I swear officer, it’s a work of Wikipediart. But I didn't mention this to Jimmy Wales when I had the great pleasure of interviewing him.
Public Performance Art Therapy
Public Performance Art Therapy is how I refer to my uses of performance art as a mechanism for public health, not dissimilar from former-Bogotá Mayor Antanas Mockus’ use of mimes to alleviate street havoc. As one example, this video shows my weekly monochromatic interventions on Sproul Plaza.