The Elsewhere Political Party last night was hosted by the socialable and charming performance artists Douglas Kelly and Andy Sturdevant with moderator George Scheer, Executive Director of Elsewhere. Creative Director Stephanie Sherman also came in for the event and it was great to finally get to meet her in 3 dimensions (not on skype).
Special guests at the party included Mars 2012 presidential candidate Blake Mason and Simpsons and Family Guy animator Lucas Grey. This Why Obama Now labor of love animation by Lucas went viral before the election, and in its 4 minute format, was designed specifically for youtube and facebook distribution:
Lucas encouraged us to watch this beautiful Academy Award nominated short animation ‘I Met the Walrus’ by Josh Raskin using the audio of a Toronto hotel room conversation with John Lennon recorded by a 14 year old fan in 1969:
Finally, Bad Lip Read has a pretty funny and surreal read of the first debate:
Sniff-o-lometer and knob to go inside the box. Put your nose through the triangle for a more complete scentient experience. Note, those crazy spirals are actually what your sinuses look like under there, pretty incredible! Check this out from the Biologian:
Possible target scent from another artist’s project
Well, I should be going around Elsewhere smelling stuff right now (see previous post), but instead I filled out a survey for fellow Eyebeamer Jennifer Broutin’sSeed Pod project. She says:
SeedPod is an interactive farming module that serves as a platform for closing the loop between people and food. The structure will function as a scalable, modular system augmented by technology such as monitoring sensors, robotic components, and energy capture devices to facilitate ease and a deeper understanding of the process through which aeroponic vegetables are grown. A database and monitoring network is set up to determine growing needs and profiles of plant species in order to provide real-time feedback information in assisting with plant care. By bringing farming to urban areas, we will short-circuit the opacity of large-scale agriculture and create a feedback cycle for healthier, sustainable living.
She’s also created an interesting energy harvesting suit prototype (called PowerSuit. She says:
The PowerSuit is a micro-energy harnessing shirt that functions based on temperature differentials between a persons skin and the outside environment…The idea is to consider small increments of energy as useful towards a specific purpose such as lighting safety LED’s while running at night time on cold days. Fundamentally, this is a shift in how peope consider energy. Rather than constantly striving for tools and devices that are more powerful and less energy efficient, why not consider using small amounts of energy not typically utilized, and put towards more efficient devices such as LED lighting.
Here is a heat sink for the prototype:
and trying it on:
I’ve been sewing this sniff-o-lometer mask, so have been interested in some of the wearable sources, the LilyPad of course (mentioned previously on the blog), and the LilyPond is a place where LilyPad and other wearable projects are presented. Some really great sensors are presented here at How to Get What you Want, and lots of resource links on the left at high-low tech – I like the DIY cell phone prototype.
Another very beautiful project (not by Jennifer), electronic origami
You creep.
You creep into my dreams and show me what could be.
written on a scrap of paper with a manual typewriter and found on a window sill at Elsewhere
Thanks to a great meeting with George, Stephanie, Aislinn, Chris, Rob, Jesse and other Elsewhere staff, I’ve got a project plan, just hope to be able to complete it in the five work days I have left here!
The project is called an ‘olfactological adventure’ and consists of a brain-shaped sign and nose-shaped box that contains a ‘sniff-o-lometer’ mask-like device with a nose-shaped hole through which adventurers place their nose to focus on smells they find in the collection. The project is designed to encourage players to consider multiple senses when experiencing objects.
George confirmed my impression of the importance of narrative in the Elsewhere experience by encouraging me to focus on the way smells can evoke memories (a la Proust’s Rememberances of Things Past, thousands of pages inspired by the sweet orange smell of a cake like cookie called a madeline. I started some of the writing:
Beneath its visually stimulating surface, Elsewhere is a complex smorgasbord of olfactory experience. This olfactological adventure kit allows you to uncover hidden smells using a custom sniff-o-lometer. Use your nose, the sniff-o-lometer and the enclosed scentient chart as a guide to locating some of Elsewhere’s unique scents, or chart your own course by finding smells and describing them yourself in our handy guidebook.
Warning: Remember that the smells of Elsewhere can unlock memories and transport you to places of dreams and fantasies. While smelling, you may find that vivid details flood into your mind. Use the pen included in this adventure kit to direct this deluge onto the page for future nasal travellers to read and enjoy.
Elsewhere is a chaotic land wrought with harrowing adventure, heart-pounding romance, rare beasts of all manner and proportion, whimsy and wonder, hidden gems and forgotten treasure, and sudden twists and turns. It is a land both terrifying and beautiful that has been known to enchant visitors upon first arrival, only to turn them inside out and upside down until no one is sure which way is where or what. Time bends into strange, unrecognizable shapes, and you may find yourself lost for days, weeks, or even months at a time.
from A Field Guide for the Social Butterfly, Elsewhere
I’m spending a couple of weeks at a residency at Elsewhere, a very unusual place in Greensboro, North Carolina. Residents live communally with staff and interns in a 3 story building in south downtown, presently there are about ten of us here, some from as far away as Jakarta, sharing meals and working.
The building was a used furniture, fabric and curiosity shop that has been in the same family since the 1930′s. The current executive director George’s grandmother Sylvia amassed a huge collection of items that are now the museum’s archive.
When Sylvia died, George, a writer, started inviting his friends to visit and find inspiration in the extensive collection. This evolved into the not for profit residency program that I am enjoying today. Everything feels in process here, it is a very exciting atmosphere where anything seems possible.
What I am starting to realize from SMW’s Bio-ethics of Beer sci fi fantasy project, time with Bread & Puppet over the summer, some new investigations, and as I dig deeper into the recesses of my brain for an appropriate project for this residency, is the power of words to create and transform reality. Although you could look at Elsewhere and say that it started with an old building and a strange collection of things, but what I am sensing here now is that the collection and the history has come alive through the interpretations and writings of George and others. The stories bring the community which brings the artwork, and much of the work here to me functions as a kind of fiction, beautiful to look at but only meaningful in relation to the magical history it implies.
Where is Elsewhere? Elsewhere is always there and here, here and there, somewhere. Elsewhere is a paradox, an illusion, possibility. Herein lies the experiment…this place proposes a re-arrangement of things – our assumptions, diversions, responses, timings, visions – a re-arrangement of our objects and our selves…Elsewhere is a museum and a home. It’s a life on display, intimate life, unusual life, sometimes impossible life, an utter fantasy living squarely within the really real. So too, Elsewhere is in-between this and that…you’ll see what we mean when you get here. As you will come to know, a careful calibration of intention and chance, order and chaos, sanity and madness, public and private, reorients our most basic presumptions about mind and matter, things and meaning, suggestion and referent, process and practice, and the whole ecological systems of art, ideas, life, what it is to be human, after all, as in, to keep a history alive as you invent new ones.
from A Field Guide to Customs & Culture of the Elsewhere Commonwealth
An artist’s interpretation of the history of Elsewhere through its objects:
For part of my orientation, the cool kitchen coordinator Emily played me this short Gus Van Sant film:
I’m here for the election, some performance artists will give a ‘play by play’ on the big day:
Street swingers in the swing state
Education coordinator Chris took a 6-person Surrey on a spin to promote the election day events
Artists’ projects include this participatory ‘book of books’:
A ‘core sample’ of the building’s three floors:
Residency coordinator Aislinn shows the site of the core sample
The three floors
Aislinn’s project is a boardwalk upsidedown tour of Elsewhere.
Visitors hold a mirror up to the ceiling and pretend they are walking on the ceiling for the tour. I used to do this with mirrors all the time when I was little!
Patching a wall, Elsewhere style!
More artists’ projects (there are literally hundreds!):
For my project, I was considering making some collaborative garments (social clothing for more than one person) out of the unbelievable amount of fabric here and have been doing some silly sketches:
Interesting article about social web analytics in The Atlantic this month.
If you want to see how someone came to your site, it’s usually pretty easy. When you follow a link from Facebook to The Atlantic, a little piece of metadata hitches a ride that tells our servers, “Yo, I’m here from Facebook.com.” We can then aggregate those numbers and say, “Whoa, a million people came here from Facebook last month,” or whatever.
There are circumstances, however, when there is no referrer data. You show up at our doorstep and we have no idea how you got here. The main situations in which this happens are email programs, instant messages, some mobile applications*, and whenever someone is moving from a secure site (“https://mail.google.com/blahblahblah”) to a non-secure site (http://www.theatlantic.com).
The author Alexis Madrigal shows a graph of how this ‘Dark Social’ plays out in the numbers on the Atlantic’s site.
His summary (and paradigm shifter) from the article is strangely satisfying to me, the idea that there is still a shield of darkness in our social netiverse:
1. The sharing you see on sites like Facebook and Twitter is the tip of the ‘social’ iceberg. We are impressed by its scale because it’s easy to measure.
2. But most sharing is done via dark social means like email and IM that are difficult to measure.
3. According to new data on many media sites, 69% of social referrals came from dark social. 20% came from Facebook.
4. Facebook and Twitter do shift the paradigm from private sharing to public publishing. They structure, archive, and monetize your publications.
Whew! Just getting caught up with posting everything the SMW has been up to lately! Our video documentarian Daniel Maestas created a great promo of the BeB project with narration by design lead on the project Gabriel Melcher. I presented this video at the International Sculpture Center’s conference in Chicago (alongside our resident genius Russell Bauer presenting his super cool West Again ISEA2012 project and presentations by WFAE president and SAIC faculty member Eric Leonardson and artist and Columbia College Grad Director Paul Catanese).
I’ve blogged about the Crystal World project before, the work of artists Martin Howse, Ryan Jordan and Jonathan Kemp. There’s a new article on Further Field about an exhibition of their work at The Space’s White Building cultural center in London including some great images, like the one above and this installation image:
Here’s more information about the project from the exhibition:
Our contemporary technological society is founded upon computers that are highly ordered sets of minerals. The Crystal World sets out to stem the flow by reversing the action, and extracting the minerals to build its own systems. The exhibition followed on from a 5-day intensive public laboratory, extracting minerals from computers and re-crystallising them through experiments.
Went to see Girl Talk last night with my friend Raj. Girl Talk is the sampling genius of Gregg Gillis, building songs by making strange combinations of mostly 80′s/90′s pop. This was the first time I had seen him live and he put on an amazing show. I expected the show to have an ironic vibe, but Raj nailed it when he said he thought the music wasn’t so much ironic as reverent, with quick references to familiar songs that are totally transformed through surprising layers.
One has to wonder, though, just how does he get away with all this sampling? This article argues that he is protected through fair use and points out that he makes all his albums available for free (for example All Day includes samples from 372 songs and can be downloaded here). But giving away something for free that someone else is trying to make money on is not going to protect anyone from a lawsuit, as I learned when a student of mine who was a Star Wars fan posted clips of the movies online and received a ‘cease and desist’ letter from Dreamworks lawyers.
Everyone trying to answer that question seems to be quoting this article by paidcontent.org’s Joe Mullin:
So why hasn’t Gillis been hauled in front of a judge by the music industry? Probably because he’s the most unappealing defendant imaginable. Gillis would be a ready-made hero for copyright reformers; if he were sued, he’d have some of the best copyright lawyers in the country knocking on his door asking to take his case for free…
At the same time, the record labels have a healthy business going selling music sample licenses, the economics of which aren’t threatened by laptop musicians like Gillis. Established artists aren’t going to follow the lead of an upstart like Gillis-they’ll keep paying for their samples, especially since some have the hope of being on the receiving end of sampling royalties one day. They’re surely watching Gillis’ “provocations” closely, but in this case, artists and labels are smart to let sleeping dogs lie.
In this video Gillis describes the mash-up process he uses
Here at SXSW 2010 DJ Spooky (aka Paul Miller) and others discuss the legalities of Girl Talk:
