NYC arrivals (the ITP, the grandstanders and the clash of cultures)

We arrived late on Sunday night from Dublin to NYC for the holidays, and boy does aerlingus have it down when it comes to passport control – we did it Irish side, so no waits in NYC. Sid was a bit cranky from no sleep on the flight, and mucho ducho jetlag, but “cranky for Sid” is still pretty OK, I’ve learned; the flight staff commented on how well behaved she was. Who knew?

Given her exhaustion, and the strange place, she was actually pretty amazingly friendly when we arrived on the Shaolin (Staten Island). Maybe she felt her roots, maybe she felt the love, maybe she recognized my parents. Who knows? She had many giggles and smiles between the grandparents, making them the happiest I think I’ve ever seen them.

Monday, after haircuts and a little baby clothes shopping with granny, we spent some alone time with Sid’s godmother, Nancy Young, in Manhattan. We know, like with Joao, she was the right choice – so great with our favorite lass. Then we sped over to the ITP Winter Show. Apparently, besides being the Harvard of Interactive, my alma mater was named one of Businessweek’s top 10 Design schools this year. Yay, ITP.

Admittedly, I was spending more time showing off my daughter to old friends I ran into, some of my favorite lecturers ever, than I was looking at the art. If you feel like looking up some of the great peops (so generous and wonderful and full of knowledge), try googling the likes of Red Burns, Marianne Petit, Tom Igoe and Dan O’Sullivan (not to mention Danny Rozin, but I didn’t see him there; and sorry for the lack of links, but this post is becoming epic).

As usual, the ITP show, with over one hundred interactive projects in a small Manhattan loft, was an overwhelming and saturated exhibition of lots of blink-blinkies, with heaps of potential grad students, former students, and gizmo-appreciators with their eyes popping out of their heads. It still impresses me to this day, tho I do get a bit sad knowing that I’ll probably miss all the most subtle and understated projects amidst the mayhem, because it’s just too much to take it all in; one simply can’t give these kinds of projects the time they deserve in an environment like that. Still, I did catch more than a few bits worth mentioning, so I’ll take time to play up three. (Note: I took terrible photos with my mobile that are on my flickr now, but the images you see below I found on the artists’ web sites, so consider them credited.)

I think my favorite room was actually one of the dark ones (what used to be a Mac Lab) displaying mostly video-like interventions. For example, there was Animalia Chordata, by Gabe Barcia-Colombo, an Oursler-like installation of people trying to escape from the bottles the were projected into. It was also interactive, in that the peops noticed you as you got closer and responded accordingly, but it was the beautiful and simple set-up of the video itself that made me happy. (As opposed to this photo, they were remarkably detailed – not just silhouettes.)

^{Animalia Chordata, by Gabe Barcia-Colombo}

James Nick Sears’ and Leif Mangelsen’s Orb was more impressive as a display than as an artwork, but the applications are definitely on the creative rather than commercial side of things (tho I can see these as impressive billboards, too). “A persistence of vision display rotated into three dimensions creates a sphere of color animations,” this is basically a circle of LEDs rotated really fast, and timed perfectly, to make a “global,” spherical animation.

^{James Nick Sears’ and Leif Mangelsen’s Orb}

And finally – and admittedly, my interest in this has more to do with how I might use the technology to eventually see undertoe into fruition – the Fantastic Piano, by So-young Park, Laurel Boylen, Shin-Yi Huang, Cho Rong Hwang. Quite a feat for an Introduction to Physical Computing class, this group’s project used water tanks with glitter in them, and pumps/air bubbles to swish them around, as their output. Hand-waving to make noise and water ensues, pictures at the link above.

After some playing with quite a few other interesting projects, I had dinner with a whole bunch of South African art-folks. There was Zingi Mkefa, a Joburg journalist at NYU on a Fulbright, Amy Kaufmann, the New Yorker / former Director of Constitution Hill and Sean Slemon’s wife, Dave Andrew and his wife Glenda, here on the Ampersand Fellowship. Was great to have my two homes meet up in one place (the East Village, no doubt!), and the pan-seared tuna at Apple was divine. We all agreed that Sid is the cutest baby ever.

Today, I’m off to meet Paddy Johnson of Art Fag City for lunch in Chelsea (hoping she can tell me what’s hot in the area), then a quick meet with Kate McCrickard, Director of David Krut Projects New York about who-knows-what, some time with my old friend Tony, and finally dinner with Greg Shakar, to see if we can finally make a plan for the aforementioned undertoe project, conceptualized at ITP circa 2001 (but still hot)!

More soon…