Snow, Upgrade, and PO
Lots of small things to report about my life this past week, but I have to run to teach a class. I went to Boston with Yael and Bettina for the first The Upgrade! Boston, a monthly new-media lecture series Yael coordinates that happens now in New York City, Vancouver, Montreal, and now Boston (with talks about instituting it in Tel Aviv and somewhere in Scotland). Yael gave a talk and I got to meet the executive director of Art Interactive, the folks who run Turbulence, and George Fifield, who organizes the Boston Cyberarts Festival.
Wednesday the plan was to drive back to Troy, leaving really early, so Yael and Bettina could make it back to campus to teach at 10 in the morning. It snowed the whole way back though, and the roads were in really awful condition, so instead it took us six hours to drive back (including a brief diversion after we were already hopelessly late for lunch in the Berkshires) and we didn’t get there until 1:15. At 1:30 I had a good meeting with my advisor, and at 2 I helped out with a collaborative 3-point long-distance intermedia performance with Pauline Oliveros running things on our end. We played with collaborators in California (at Mills College) and in Marseilles, France (where the audience was). I ran the computer and spent most of the time trying to get folks in France to move the camera so we could see (it was lodged behind the rather sizeable audience). Anyhow — the technology was neat, and it was fun meaningfully interacting with people so far away. We talked in class yesterday about other potential places where we could collaborate using this kind of a setup. More on that later.
Okay, class time.