One of the first sentences I listened to as I arrived at the Creative Summit was from Laura Raicovich, Director of Global Initiatives – “the makers of social changes are not politics – they are the artists”. Well, those were probably not her exact words, and I couldn’t agree less with this affirmation, but it does set the ground [...]

  In the end of the essay “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory”, Crary asks: “Are we still in the midst of a society that is organized as appearance? Or have we entered spectacular global system arranged primarily around the control and flow of information [...]? This is a very interesting question, to which I would answer ‘both’. Debord’s affirmations on spectacle are [...]

  This second part focuses on the readings by Acconci, Auping and Borden. Acconci has some interesting thoughts for me, following my take on Warner – he says publics need leaders; they are just waiting for one, otherwise, nothing happens. I believe this has a lot to do with what I think and was trying to explain in the last [...]

  In this first part I’ll discuss the essays from Warner, Lefebvre, Whyte and Goffman. These readings focus on the public’s behavior and pattern, ranging from subjects such as audience formation to behavior in public plazas specifically. Warner talks about how publics are formed and their characteristics. He arguments that publics are self organized, independent from governments or other institutions [...]

  Following the advice of reading these texts selfishly, the aspect that resonates more with my work from the selection of this week is context. I have been consistently a firmly believer that nothing exists with a context – either it is physical, social or a discourse behind the artwork. Therefore, it cannot deliver the same content wherever it is. [...]

This is the final for Open Source Animation, based on our Big Screens final (but not the same at all). What drives this is my schizophrenic relationship with New York City – either the city takes you in or you take the city in. For the software part of it, I’ve used the SpriteDemo Processing sketch by Nick Fox-Gieg. It can [...]

  Here’s the development of the project so far: Thanks to Nick Fox-Gieg’s Sprite Demo Processing Sketch, I’ve been able to put together people walking for our silhouettes. It’s a big time saver – otherwise we would spend forever trying to align a small walk in After Effects, not to say rotoscoping everyone thanks to the lack of green screens [...]

  Storyboard updated for both Big Screens / Open Source Animation finals. Besides After Effects, the plan is to use the kinect to retrieve 3d data from people. It should be done by either 3d scanning a stop motion video of them or using Processing + kinect to get image depth videos or still images. Here’s the story: For the [...]