Graduation is Official

It’s official. I’ve graduated.  The graduation ceremonies took place in late May, but I held my breath until the degrees were conferred.  Earlier this week, all formalities and paperwork were completed, and my electronic transcript was updated:

The New School has an amazingly inefficient bureaucracy.  Princeton Review has ranked the undergraduate school, Eugene Lang College, as 2nd in the nation for Long Lines and Red Tape.  Just booking rooms for meetings of the University Student Senate was laborious, at best.  One snarky facebook group suggests that,”This school runs like an asthmatic duck with no legs.”  The administration is working to remedy this, though until they do, I’ve learned to assume that paperwork will get lost and that instructions on administrative processes are largely inaccurate. At a party this past weekend, another recent graduate joked about the nightmares she had about new and creative ways the school could fumble formalities, preventing her from receiving her degree.  I was having similar nightmares.  Now, I can sleep soundly.

As a dual-degree student on a five-year track to earn a Bachelors of Art and a Bachelors of Fine Arts, I felt the full brunt of the bureaucratic inefficiencies. The separate administrative bodies for Eugene Lang and Parsons often disagree on what the requirements for the dual-degree program are, and no one seems empowered to reconcile them.  Indeed, of the ten or so people I know personally who started out at the New School in this program, only two others completed it.  Most students are fully aware that the course-load to complete the degrees in the five-year time frame is significant.  They tend to drop out of one degree track upon confronting inconsistent requirements and administrators powerless to help students balance the demands of two schools at once.  I thank my academic advisers, Paul Ross and Brian Maasjo, for making the extra effort to help me through.  The dual-degree program is an amazing educational opportunity to pursue the fine arts and liberal arts with equal rigor.  I’m glad I found the allies to make it work.  This has been awesome, inefficiencies aside.  Given the New School’s comittment to promote interdisciplinary education, I sincerely hope that it will find ways to make the dual-degree program more accessible and efficient.

Yesterday’s Sun Shower

New Yorkers are complaining about the incessant rain that has delayed outdoor summer activities.  I’m not a big fan of New York City’s sticky summer heat, so I’ve welcomed the rain, especially if it means occasional scene like this one I captured yesterday.

Atlantean Adrift: Photos and Recap

So, it did rain.  The brave players at the Come Out & Play Festival who ventured out into the weather to play Atlantean Adrift were rewarded with a charming narrative, inspired acting, and a beautiful setting.  Check it out:

A folklorist waits the arrival of his students and the merman in the park of DUMBO, Brooklyn.

Come Out & Play Festival

Today through Sunday is the Come Out & Play Festival.  The festival, now in its fourth year, provides a forum for new types of public games and play.  Traditional games happen on a grand scale, digital games make use of mobile devices to get people out into the city, and unconventional games rethink public space and play.  

Sam Strick, Joe Mauriello, Clayton Grey, and I designed a game called Atlantean Adrift.  The game enlists teams of players to help a lost merman who has washed up on the shores of New York regain his spirits and return to Atlantis.  

Over 40 people are registered for the game, which is scheduled for 4:30 on Saturday in DUMBO, Brooklyn.  Hope it doesn’t rain!

Logo by Sam Strick

“From One Farmer to Another” Exhibit in Boston

This Saturday in Boston, a fair trade apparel company The Autonomie Project  is co-hosting a Celebration of of Fair Trade.  The afternoon of activities includes the exhibition of “From One Farmer to Another: Postcards in Solidarity” that I have been working on with Santa Anita La Union in Guatemala and Sanjukta Vikas Sanstha in India.  The exhibition was kicked off in Indianapolis in the fall.  The Autonomie Project is anticipating attendance of over 1,000 people.  I hope some of them will send me their thoughts on the project.  I unfortunately can’t be in Boston this weekend for the event.   One of my Guatemalan colleagues, Omar Mejia of Cafe Conciencia, will be speaking about his work with the coffee cooperatives.

Design & Technology Thesis: Lilliput

Lilliput is an interactive travelogue of personal photographs and recorded memories that explore the relationship between the seen and the remembered. The project derives its name from an island in Jonathan Swift’s fictitious travel novel Gulliver’s Travels. The island of tiny near-sighted people is at war with its neighboring island of Blefuscu over the proper end at which to crack an egg. This war is the source of the term endianness, a computer science convention for communication when information is broken into pieces for transmission and reassembled upon reception. The interactive travelogue of Lilliput attempts to produce meaning by assembling photographs and narrative memories in digital space.

(Best viewed in Firefox.  Be sure your audio is turned on.)

Many thanks to Gaelen Green for helping with project management, to Anand Krishnan for programming assistance, and to my thesis professors David Carroll and Adam Chapman.

In producing this thesis for a Design & Technology major at Parsons, I interrogated documentary ethics as they might relate to digital storytelling.  As much work has been done in developing digital methods for publishing, communication, and collaboration, it seems that techniques for digital, interactive storytelling have much room for development.  The last decade of scholarship on Baroque art and science, specifically on the Wunderkammer, produced a vocabulary for defining traditions of interactive narrative leading up to digital media.  Working with video game design this semester provided me with some immediate techniques for interpreting the art historians’ work on the Baroque for a contemporary digital art project.

I began thesis with the hope of getting a better grasp on interactive storytelling.  As production got under way, my familiarity with the ethics of visual representation hampered my ability to innovate.  I end this project more intimately aware of the tensions in documentary traditions and humbled by what I still can learn about interactivity and narrative.

World Fair Trade Day talk

Yesterday was World Fair Trade Day. The multiplicity of organizations and groups involved in the fair trade movement globally throw events and campaigns to increase awareness of fair trade initiatives. The Mercy Corps Action Center in downtown Manhattan hosted a full day of events and numerous vendors with the help of The Fair Trade Resource Network and The New York City Fair Trade Coalition. I was invited to speak about the two fair trade certified farming cooperatives I’ve worked with.

I opened my talk with a definition of fair trade, as approved by F.I.N.E.:

Fair Trade is a trading partnership, based on dialogue, transparency and respect, that seeks greater equity in international trade. It contributes to sustainable development by offering better trading conditions to, and securing the rights of, marginalized producers and workers – especially in the South. Fair Trade organizations (backed by consumers) are engaged actively in supporting producers, awareness raising and in campaigning for changes in the rules and practice of conventional international trade.

I went on to explain, with the help of my photographs, the histories of Santa Anita La Union in Guatemala and Sanjukta Vikas Cooperative in Darjeeling, India.

The question & answer portion of the presentation ran almost as long as the presentation itself.  I took many questions about how fair trade works as a certification system, which can be extremely complicated, as one might expect with any international trade system. Because my experience involves deep knowledge of a few communities, I can speak about fair trade on a granular level that is often glossed over when promoting fair trade to new audiences in the global North. I use this intimate knowledge to impress that while fair trade is primarily an economic justice system, the organization and engagement that fair trade certification requires of the communities enables them to implement that organizing toward social justice measures, from securing government aid for war time injuries to establishing schools in their communities.  A number of people said that they appreciated having such specific examples of how fair trade factors into the historical and political situations of the communities.

It was great to get so many engaging and critical questions. By the end of the presentation and lively question & answer session, the audience grasped the social justice implication of fair trade as outlined in F.I.N.E.’s definition and as experienced by Santa Anita La Union and Sanjukta Vikas Cooperative.

Thanks Kate Amanna for inviting me to speak and Mercy Corps for hosting the event.

Art, Media, and Technology Thesis Show

Parsons School of Art, Media, and Technology Thesis Exhibition

Friday, May 15-Tuesday, May 26
Opening Reception: May 15, 6-8 p.m.
Parsons The New School for Design,
Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, 66 Fifth Avenue

Parsons The New School for Design presents an exhibition of thesis work by graduating students in its Communication Design, Design + Technology, Fine Arts, Illustration, and Photography programs. Work on view will range from interactive games and multimedia installations to photographs, drawings, and sculptures. Parsons’ newly formed School of Art, Media and Technology was conceived to encourage collaboration across a variety of art and design media.

We’re so close to graduating.  The thesis exhibition is next week.

BAGnewsSalon: First 100 Days

Another BAGnewsSalon is coming up.  Huge thanks to Michael Shaw and Cara Finnegan for taking up many of my responsibilities as producer for this one as I wrap up my time at the New School.  Looking forward to the conversation!

Obama: The First 100 Days
Sunday, May 3, 2009
7:30-9: pm EST; 4:30-6:00 pm PST

This Salon will examine a cross-section of Obama Administration images leading up to this 100-day mark. We hope to consider various factors, including how the White House frames issues via pictures; what the images say about the character and capacities of Obama and his team; and whether the images evidence a new tone and attitude in the country now. The BAGnewsSalon is an on-line, real-time discussion of selected images between invited guests on teh BAGnewsNotes blog.

Discussants participating include professors Loret Steinberg (R.I.T.) and Nathan Stormer (U. of Maine), historian Michael Steinberg, photographer Brian Ulrich, Daryl Lang (PDN), David Schonauer (American Photo), host Michael Shaw, moderator Cara Finnegan (U. of Illinois), and salon producer Ida Benedetto.

Finished Internship at Local Projects

Last Friday was my final day interning at Local Projects, a media design studio for museums and public spaces.

I sought out the internship to understand how my diverse background might be of use in a professional media design studio.  Local Projects turned out to be an exceptionally good match for my interest in history, documentary practice, and storytelling.  The studio impressed upon me the solid roll of content driven and contextually specific creative practices in designing for public and institutional spaces.  I researched content and images for The National Building Museum, The National September 11 Memorial & Museum, and The National Museum of American Jewish History.  Even the most menial tasks sparked my imagination around changing standards of archives, memory, and social culture.  The work enthralled me, and I was honored to contribute.  The diverse and talented personalities working at the studio made it hard for me to leave.  I’ll miss everyone, as much as I’ll cherish the time in the coming weeks to work on finals.

Not familiar with Local Projects? Check out Dwell Magazine’s profile of Jake Barton, the studio’s principal and founder: