this is not a website
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 two across from their videochat-enabled laptops, and shared chocolate with their long-distance Lovers who sat elsewhere in the country, or elsewhere in the world. the event got picked up by WIRED, and a write-up can be found on my personal blog. this video gives you a flavor of it tasted like.
this might be a Love story
this might be a Love story is a true story about the evolution of a long-distance relationship between myself and a man in New York. (think reality TV meets web TV meets lifecasting meets Love, kinda.) viewers/voyeurs are invited to check the blog for the beginnings of everything + all of our videoskypes. if that feels too voyeuristic (hi Chris), start with a blog post describing what it is. and if you want something in between, some folks at CurrentTV fancied the idea and produced a video about it, called Video Chat Love Story.
blind feasts
I’ve been curating blind feasts for friends since college (read: the very late nineties). this video adoringly shows how blindfolded diners are fed a finger-licking feast (sans utensils), allowing them to sightlessly 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. well, now I am.
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 graduate students across campus about their work on topics ranging from web-enabled paintball guns to supernovae. podcasts can be downloaded from iTunes U and Garageband. I'm having a terrible time selecting a few to recommend, but this will be a rotating exhibit:
>> Jeff Silverman (Astronomy) – supernovae
>> Matt Earp (School of Information) – music in the 2.0 era
>> Brian Pollack (Journalism) – his film about the training of American marines for Iraq
>> Laura Greig (Art) – her web-enabled paintball gun
>> Anand Kulkarni (Industrial Engineering and Operations Research) – crowdsourced intelligence
Second Life Eco Tour
the Second Life Eco Tour is a machinima I co-produced with sponsorship from the Serious Games Initiative of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars. it chronicles environment and governance-oriented activities in the virtual world of Second Life, such as the Green Islands project, which enables virtual property owners to offset the carbon cost of their sims, and Eolus One, which is developing virtual interfaces for managing real-world energy systems. read more about the Second Life Eco Tour, or watch the machinima.
Wikipediart
I like to experiment 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 (scroll to the bottom of Life and Literary Career), though my ploy survived for less than one minute. but my favorite use of Wikipedia is as free online hosting for small text-based works of art. I added a little something to the meaning of "crush," and even though I removed it seconds later, my edit (see the example for 2008) will hang out in the history tab for as long as Wiktionary shall live. ok so I like to break the rules a little bit, but I swear officer, it’s a work of Wikipediart.
public performance art therapy
this is how I refer to my weekly monochromatic dancing on Sproul Plaza (see playlist), among other miscellaneous acts of public creativity. public performance art is a grand thing to seed the streets with. art therapy means healing via the creative process. and public performance + art therapy = public art as a medium for public health.