Jen and I have been making bets on Flickr photos since we first became friends in 2006. It started when we noticed a ton of photos on Flickr from large scale public events like Newmindspace pillow fights and bubble battles, roving street parties like One Night of Fire, and crazy costume processions like the Mermaid Parade. We would attend these happenings and then bet on how many photos from the event would be up on Flickr by the end of the week tagged with an obvious, agreed upon tag. Whoever was closest won a free drink from the loser the next time we hung out.
The game was both a criticism and celebration of NYC's penchant for over documentation of public space spectacles. It was also a way to not take that last sentence too seriously.
In 2007 we had an idea to become a part of the game! We would choose a sure-to-be over photographed happening, then the two of us would don shirts with the text "Tag me on Flickr as JasonWinsTheBet" or "Tag me on Flickr as JenWinsTheBet". The main rule would be that we couldn't offer unsolicited explanations of the bet. We could only tell people about it if they asked first. And no bribing! At the end of the week, whoever was tagged the most received a free dinner from the loser!
At Burning Man later that year, Jen rolled up with a surprise. Her mom had made the shirts for us! Awesome! They were even pink and blue like the Flickr logo! We agreed to tuck them away until we could find the perfect event at which to unveil them.
Unfortunately, no one had taken into account that humans are not flat, but in fact, cylindrical, and my tag—JasonWinsTheBet—which is two characters longer than Jen's tag—JenWinsTheBet— was often lost under my arm pits or just partially obscured by my slender physique.
Jen ended up winning the bet 5 to 0 because of these flaws, but maybe also because she's prettier to look at. I took her out for dumplings and tried not to gnash my teeth too much. After all, this was only round one.
I think we'll submit this to Conflux next year. Hopefully I can convince Jen to wear the shirts all weekend, and then the loser has to buy drinks not just for the winner, but for everyone who tagged the winner on Flickr!
Last month I was invited to participate in the Conflux Festival! What an honor! Conflux—"the art and technology festival for the creative exploration of urban public space"—is one of my favorite happenings in the fall. I was asked to lead a workshop and to exhibit Pixelator at Conflux HQ.
I've struggled with how the Pixelator should work in a gallery setting because one of the most important aspects of the project is that, in its natural environment, the Pixelator filters unwanted information in public spaces. (My conundrum was: if you can control the source material and the space, then what's the point?)
What I ended up proposing and installing was the Pixelator Lounge, which features a double-sided Pixelator suspended from the ceiling. Live digital television is projected on the back, a single armchair provides a perfect spot from which to view the pixelated image on the front, and Nevin's incredible album Rambler fills the space with an ambient soundtrack. I think adapting the project to this method of media consumption—invoking a living room setting and piping in actual live television—addressed the conceptual challenge nicely. People seemed to like it, at least!
As for the workshop, I figured what I could most offer was a way of seeing: a way of noticing and reimagining the city. My lecture and walk was entitled Adventures in Urban Alchemy, and it gave me a chance to define the specific practice of urban engagement I'm interested in. If alchemy is the art of transformation, then urban alchemy is the art of transforming common public structures and systems into rare moments of unauthorized culture. It mixes street art, culture jamming, and pranksterism into a whimsical, site-specific, moment of public engagement.
The workshop went so great! The whole group was very participatory, and we came up with some awesome ideas. Hurray! Also, Fast Company wrote a really nice piece the day before the talk, and I was invited back by David Darts, Conflux's Curatorial Director, to lead my talk/walk again with his media literacy class at NYU.
I was invited to submit a project to Winkel and Balktick's annual "Stranded" party, an event for people in the Burning Man community that, for whatever reason, are not at Burning Man. This year the party's theme was the Galapagos Islands, dovetailing off Burning Man's "Evolution" theme. One thing I really like about Winkel and Balktick's parties is that they focus significant attention on creative works in the event space. Fiscal support of art projects is actually built into the budget.
Thinking about ocean islands, extinction, and evolution, I remembered a childhood game from elementary school fairs: for one ticket you could rent a fishing pole, "bait" it with a paper fish and dip it behind a booth. Behind the booth, below your line of sight, an attendant would remove the fish and replace it with a piece of candy and tug on your line. Awesome!
I wanted to recreate this interaction model, but in three dimensions. So I constructed a triangular "pier" or "shore" from plywood stage platforms, inside which a 12'x12'x17' "pond" of folded poster board was suspended. Prospective fishers left their shoes for collateral at the Fishin' Pole Rental station and received a fishin' pole, a temporary fishin' license, and access to materials with which to construct their own bait: play-doh and pipe cleaners. Once their bait was ready, fishers climbed onto the shore, lowered their bait into the fishin' hole, and waited. Underneath, Fishin' Hole staff exchanged bait for beer fish (a can of PBR with googly eyes, fins, and a tail), water fish (a water bottle with googly eyes, fins, and a tail), or candy fish (candy taped to a paper cut-out of a fish). Creative bait was rewarded with beer fish. Bait that took some effort was rewarded with water fish. Half-ass bait was rewarded with candy fish, if anything. Sometimes fishers got a bite within a couple minutes. Sometimes they spent thirty minutes without a nibble. The pond was pretty much fished to extinction by the time we left at 3 a.m.
Reactions were enthusiastic, as they are any time you're giving away free beer. While there were certainly some petulant and entitled moments, many fishers were creative, excited, and grateful, and really, the evening was a smash success. Perhaps most important, the patrons were very happy. Balktick cited the Fishin' Hole as his favorite interactive art project, and Winkel invited me back.
Some of the best interactions of the night were completed unplanned and unexpected. One reveler showed up to the party with an alligator hand puppet, found his way underwater, and started snapping at fishing lines. The fishers LOVED it and for long stretches of time completely forgot about the original task at hand because they were too busy trying to feed the alligator. Heather, who was helping under water, decided she didn't want the second half of a sandwich she'd brought along and decided to hook it to a fisher's line. That catch became a legend; for the rest of the evening, people were asking if the pond was stocked with any more sandwich fish.
Unfortunately, because the project was so conceptual, the photos don't do it much justice, and one of the main things I would improve is the Fishin' Hole's aesthetics. But the project turned out to be pretty evocative:
Transactions are typically judged by their speed and efficiency, but the Fishin' Hole purposefully created a communication barrier which slowed down the transaction and created less precise communication. Though spoken language is more precise than play-doh figurines, it isn't perfect either.
Creative works are often meant to last and be admired by many, but fishers created art objects for bait that were intentionally ephemeral. Many collective hours were spent crafting play-doh and pipe cleaner masterpieces, only for them to never be seen again.
For urban dwellers, fishing is neither safe nor are opportunities readily available. Engaging in a simulacrum of the exercise seems a crude gesture, but is a strangely comforting reminder of the uncertainty and chaos we're surrounded by, whether in the middle of the woods or a bustling city.
I continue to be really interested in interactive party art. It can create really magical experiences for the less-than-sober, and the limitations are challenging:
The project can't be fragile or too precious.
The interaction model must be immediately apparent or easily explainable.
The project must reward interaction immediately but must also reward sustained interaction.
The project cannot rely on audio.
Really, I'm quite proud of the Fishin' Hole and can't wait to do it again. Super huge thanks to Matt, Albert, Heather, Naomi, Jen, Aaron, and Abe for all your tremendous help. I couldn't have done it without any of you. Thanks, friends!
Some suckers at an outfit called Good Magazine decided I was one of the top 100 most important, exciting, and innovative people, ideas, and projects making our world better and changing the way we live.
Oh my, there's so much more to write about! More soon about the Fishin' Hole at Stranded, my talk and installation at Conflux Festival, and my jaunt around Iceland...
The Print After Parties are a series of unauthorized notional raves thrown in the abandoned distribution infrastructure of crumbling print institutions. (They're pretend parties, not real ones.)
While dead tree publishers loudly lament the fate of their aging information delivery system in the wake of the internet, enterprising trailblazers have found cheaper, faster ways to successfully meet public demand for celebrity gossip and sex scandals without razing forests, filling dumps, or obsessing over boring foreign affairs.
Abandoned by floundering media conglomerates, thousands of neglected newsracks command valuable real estate on busy street corners across New York City, remnants of diminishing demand and a disintegrating economy. Many have already been reclaimed and transformed by urban alchemists, whether as canvases for stickers and paint or clever conceptual works that turn the once important vessels of information into repositories for garbage.
The Print After Parties continue this line of collaboration with blinking LEDs, disco balls, cut-out silhouettes, and handheld radios. When the last vestiges of a collapsed empire litter the landscape, there's only one thing to do: throw a bumpin' party and dance on the ruins.
As someone with libertarian instincts, I’m sympathetic to the "It's their property, they can do whatever they want" argument.
However, there are many laws restricting what a landowner can or cannot do with their land, especially in dense urban areas where someone's actions on their property affect a lot of people not on their property. There are many compromises we pay to live around other people, and I expect most people would agree with many of them.
For example, you can’t modify buildings that are deemed historical landmarks, blast loud music at all hours, or release harmful chemicals.
Public advertising isn’t innocuous building decoration; it’s well-funded and highly engineered to modify the way you think. It frames discourse, influences language and behavior, and sets cultural standards and values.
Advertising is POWERFUL, and a city that values its unique history, culture, and culture makers - like NYC - is right to regulate its visual landscape, just like it regulates other gray areas in the realm between public and private.
Third-party sign regulations are already on the books! We’re just asking NYC to enforce its own laws and reap MILLIONS OF DOLLARS in fines in the process.
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Last month, Matt and I led a day-long mystery bus tour (in which participants have no idea where they're going or what they're doing, only what to bring and where to meet) for Flux Factory's summer series Going Places, Doing Stuff Part II. Our tour was entitled The Quest for Immortality!
I bought the new iPhone (3G S) last month. I love it.
Two years ago, when I decided to go with the Nokia N95, I didn't quite understand the importance of user experience design yet, or how much Nokia sucked at it, and how much Apple excelled at it.
The iPhone is just tremendously intuitive, and it takes one or two clicks to do what took five or six on the N95. That may seem trivial, but it literally makes iPhone navigation exponentially more efficient. Also, and this is really what exceeded my already high expectations: the developer community is incredible! Here are some of my non-obvious favorites applications:
My favorite app, though, is the official Geocaching app. Geocaching is a world-wide game in which people hide small "treasures", then post their GPS coordinates online so others can find them, trade treasure, and/or sign the log. In NYC, there's such a critical mass of caches that you can play spontaneously: if you're waiting for a table at a restaurant, if you're early to meet someone, or if you're ready for a venue change but don't know what to do next.
I've been itching to geocache since high school (really!) but never invested in a GPS unit. Dave was out from LA a few weeks ago and showed me the app. We found a couple caches and I was hooked!
The best part of geocaching is that you feel like you're in on a big secret. All of these caches are hidden in public spaces, right under the public's nose, but only those with the secret knowledge can find the treasure! With such specific and exciting knowledge, you develop a more intimate relationship with these public spaces. You form a mental map of the city based on these secrets, and when you're near a previously-found cache, you recall a specific memory for that location and feel more invested in that space. It's great! (This is also a primary argument for installing and appreciating street art.)
I've got my gripes about the iPhone, sure: I still long for tactile feedback; the camera is good but not great; I can't believe processes still can't run in the background; I still need to jailbreak for laptop tethering, video streaming, and to escape Apple's draconian app gatekeeping; AT&T 3G service is terrible in NYC (lowest in the nation!); AT&T unconstitutionally wiretaps my calls; and I don't really like giving into the increasingly proprietary Apple machine.
Ilya programmed an ambitious indie pop-rock festival at Wonderland last weekend called Exit 44 (referring to the exit on the BQE one takes when driving to Wonderland). It was a runaway success, and introduced me to some wonderful new groups in a crowded genre I generally don't have the time or patience to sift through. Here are some highlights!
Auto-Tune the News makes me so happy. It's just consistently exceptional. Michael Gregory takes clips of TV news talking heads, runs them through an auto-tune program to filter them into synthetic sing-song, and assembles them with original green screen footage into a fast-paced, stream-of-conscious style hip-hop medley.
The series is smart, swift, clever, absurd, and meticulously crafted. I can't wait for the next installment.
Start with episode #1 (below) and then continue with episodes #2, #3, and #4.
Jason Eppink and Matt Green threw a pineapple back and forth 67 times in one minute while singing Camptown Races, a new world record. They stood exactly ten feet apart while achieving the feat.
The duo set the record on May 20, 2009 at a World Record Appreciation Society event in New York City. Dan Rollman and Corey Henderson were present as witnesses.
Matt and I are working on our next world record involving flying fruit and vamped folk songs. In the meantime, witness history being made all over again by watching the video!
A couple weeks ago I followed my friends I Am and Posterchild around with a video camera as they participated in the amazingly successful New York Street Advertising Takeover. The ambitious project, orchestrated by Jordan Seiler of Public Ad Campaign, whitewashed more than 120 illegal billboards and replaced them with artworks by dozens of artists. I made a time lapse video of nine art installations by I Am and Posterchild (with one by Teeth)!
A few weeks ago, I noticed an uptick in the number of random French women attempting to befriend me on Facebook, along with an increase in non-referred traffic to my website. This could only mean one thing: the documentary I was followed around for in February had been completed and was airing on French television.
Indeed, here's my clip on blip.tv. (Or here if you like giant Quicktime files.) The hour-length documentary is called Global Resistance, and they devote a generous amount of time to Pixelator! If you watch the clip, you'll see me emerge from my secret bookshelf door. I have yet to document that myself!
I'm honored to find myself in the same documentary as The Art of Bleeding, Alexandre Orion (reverse graffiti), and Ji Lee (Abstractor and Bubble Project).
Also I was on a radio talk show called "Bulldog and the Rude Awakening Show" a month or so ago to talk about Take a Seat, and it went really well until I brought up Pixelator. You've got to remember: radio people really love their advertising.
Getting to Newark International Airport from NYC on public transit is mind-numbingly complicated and unnecessarily expensive. Most plebeians take the subway to Penn Station, then hop on NJ Transit and transfer to the Air Train. This ends up costing a total of $15 and a couple hours. You can get to Boston with that kind of money!
But I found a secret! The 107 Local bus from Port Authority Bus Terminal! It's $4.40, and usually faster, even in rush hour. It's totally sneaky too: you're dropped off across the street from a long-term parking lot, so you have to find an open gate, hop inside, and snag a free shuttle to your terminal. Saving $10.60 never felt so good.
Here are a few terms that have only recently entered my vocabulary but describe concepts with which I was immediately familiar. Hurray for precision in language!
FOMO:
An acronym for "fear of missing out", FOMO describes my existential crises when I walk into libraries and my intense panic when browsing through the dozens of events lists to which I subscribe. FOMO is pre-regret. It's ante-disappointment. It's never quite being content. It's going to a party and not having any fun because all you can think about are all the parties you could be at that are probably so much more awesome.
Individuals prone to FOMO often spend time in FOMO-management, in which they calmly and rationally remind themselves of their finite nature.
One can have varying levels of FOMO. A little FOMO is healthy and motivating. Unchecked FOMO can be crippling. For me, FOMO reaches deeply into my time-management, creativity, and relationships. I'm told FOMO wanes with age. I really, really hope so.
(c/o Lizzie)
completism:
If you search for "completism" on the web, most returns relate to collecting music, but it can also refer to, for example, an effort to read all writings by a particular author, to watch all films on a particular "Top 100..." list, or to take a dump in all fifty of the United States.
Completism appears to most normal people a tad obsessive. The idea of walking over all the bridges that touch Manhattan is interesting, normal people think, but why exert effort actually going through with the whole the idea? What is gained? To a completist, this line of reasoning is frustrating, even absurd. Why do people climb mountains? Because they exist.
Completism is also about finishing what one has started, about concluding perfectly. It's about closure and structure and clearly defined boundaries of "done" and "not done". I posit that individuals with backgrounds in engineering, science, and math are more prone to completism than writers, artists, and designers.
full-ass or full-assed:
To do something "half-ass" or "half-assed" is to rush through it, or to do it poorly and without attention to detail. Doing something full-assed, on the other hand, is to exert every effort, however impractical, to complete the task perfectly.
"Full-assed" is clearly similar to "completism", but while the latter describes the concept or practice, the former serves better to describe specific instances.
This is a portmanteau of "hunger" and "angry". You know how you can get irritable when you haven't eaten for a while? That's "hanger". You are "hangry".
I guess I've been thinking a lot about social media and social network sites, and balancing my growing distaste for the behaviors surrounding them, their potential misuse/abuse, and their fleeting nature (coupled with my desire to only invest my finite time and energy in things that last, relatively), with the sites' utopic possibilities, and more practically, their usefulness for relationship-maintenance as well as self-promotion (which I'm also coming to terms with, separately).
Maybe it’s claustrophobic to know this much about other people. Maybe we like the way the way we’ve been able to live over the past 50 years, the freedom to move where we want, date who we like, and insert ourselves into any number of social cliques, before we cast aside those who bore us and never look back. Independence is a gift, even if it’s lonely sometimes, and solving childhood mysteries may make people happier, but it doesn’t necessarily turn them into the people they dream of being. So we keep perpetuating the cycle of birthing and abandoning new online communities, drawing close and then pulling away, on a perpetual search for the perfect balance of unity and autonomy on the web.
I don't want to leave without pronouncing some sort of less-than-satisfied judgment on the article, or without offering my own analysis, because that would imply endorsement of the piece and create an appearance that I didn't spend much time in critical thought about the writing or its subject. But I don't want to appear dismissive, like I was obligated to take a swipe at the article from some absurd need to posture about my own obviously expert knowledge about These Things.
Yes, yes, and yes! I've been meaning to rant on URL shorteners since their recent Twitter-fueled comeback, but Joshua Schachter's piece (via Kottke) succinctly says everything I wanted and more.
Next up, a full rant on Twitter (not the service, which is certainly not uninteresting, but the behavior it's spurred and the attitude that surrounds it). Unless I find one to link to first.
But it probably won't use my favorite new portmanteau: narcissystem.
Last weekend, I had the distinct pleasure of taking part in Improv Everywhere's latest mission, Best Funeral Ever. Similar to past missions Best Gig Ever and Best Game Ever, several dozen agents descended onto the scene of a random funeral to make it tons better.
What an awesome way to say goodbye to a loved one, right?
EDIT: If you haven't figured it out already, this was an April Fools' joke and we didn't actually crash a real funeral. Here's the real story. The comments are just hilarious, but the best part is that a local NYC news channel reported the prank as real!
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Jen and I collaborated with Charlie Todd and Improv Everywhere to throw an art gallery opening on a subway platform last fall, and we all finally got around to putting it up on the internet! Charlie's write-up has nice photos and detailed explanations; my write-up has curator mumbo jumbo and a bunch of prior art! Check them out!
All of us took great effort to make the opening participatory, not just to create a spectacle. The evening featured a cellist, a bartender serving sparkling cider, a coat check, printed hand-outs, and a guest book. I think everyone who encountered the opening had a good time!
I was especially interested in how we convinced ourselves and those around us to play the game and to believe, for a couple hours, that these everyday objects were actually art. Jen did a fantastic job of setting the tone with the wall text, but everyone who attended the opening was complicit and added tremendously to the collective fiction. Together we were inventing new meanings and alternate histories, all of which could have been entirely plausible explanations for the objects we were examining.
This may seem like a silly exercise, but I think it can be pretty useful! It puts you in a position to re-examine the mundane, imagine others' intentions, and create new contexts for the objects and ideas you encounter every day. Usually we would just call that "acting", but in this case, so much of the pretending is internal that maybe it's not exactly theater? I'm sure there's an argument for both sides. Regardless, I found the gallery opening to be an exhilarating, tremendously creative experience, and the hundreds of people who passed through, even if they didn't join, at least encountered a fun, unexpected, disorienting moment.
Jose remarked to me as he was leaving, "this is a slippery slope." And he's right! There's something a bit dangerous, actually, about this game. A little distance is enlightening and engaging; a lot of distance is detaching or disorienting. I'm reminded not only of bad conceptual art, but of corporate speech and military euphemisms. The Museum of Jurassic Technology straddles the line perfectly, a straight-up existential thrill-ride.
(One little tidbit from all the research I did: wall text's beginnings were in legislation, to spare the public from paying for expensive catalogues at national museums! Fascinating!)
Last month I was invited to participate in the 
My favorite app, though, is the 
Ilya programmed an ambitious indie pop-rock festival at Wonderland last weekend called 
Did you know I hold a world record? Now you do!
Jen and I collaborated with Charlie Todd and 