Here are some pictures of the Parsons students working on the linear zoetropes and their results. Now that I can make slide shows, I have to split the images by dimensions, so there are two slide shows.
Alex Kudera's first novel won an Independent Publishers Book Awards award -- the IPPY Gold Medal for Best Fiction. I wrote about him and his book, Fight For Your Long Day, a couple months ago. He's planning to give a reading in New York this summer. Who knows how fast his star will rise? Congratulations Alex!
Saturday was such a beautiful day I couldn't resist walking in the park across the street from my building, making me late to meet my sister and nephew in Queens. The park is tiny but beautifully maintained by neighbors. It has a small walking path around it. The pictures in the slide show below follow my view walking around the path, sometimes looking forward, sometimes backward, sometimes toward the middle. It also turned out to be one of the biannual Jefferson Market Gardens Children's Festival of Flowers, so there were extra flowers, families, etc. My sister and nephew came back and enjoyed the park too. Until we got hungry, made nachos at my place, and ate them on my roof. Here's the slide show: Update:…
I updated my art resume, having finished teaching the Collaboration Studio at Parsons. In the process I also found a post on my talk to the February Leaders in Software and Art salon.
Here are some videos and images of the displays the Parsons students put up in the corner of 5th Avenue and 13th Street. As usual, my camera is not great and my recording ability is worse. Cameras don't capture the medium. The final product also doesn't capture the challenge and work that went into creating the displays. Also, please see the course blog for lots of other images and videos of projects they did along the way.
We made the minimum on the Parsons Union Square kickstarter project! The project raised $5,017, just over the minimum of $5,000 we set (which is still below the what we'll need, but we'll figure out how to make it). Here's the latest updated we sent out. Update #3: We made it! Thank you! We made it! Just barely! Making it this close ($5,017 out of $5,000) means every contribution counted. Thank you to every one of you from all of us. We appreciate each of your contributions all the more for each one counting so much. We are that much more dedicated to making a beautiful display. Whether you contributed to help make New York more beautiful, to help students, to contribute to art, for…
Here is an update to the Parsons Union Square kickstarter project. Update #2: Video of the Fifth Avenue display Here is a video (just from my camera phone, sorry not great quality) of one of the displays in Parsons' window facing Fifth Avenue and 13th Street. As mentioned in the last update, this display is a big, genuine art piece, although still in preparation for the Union Square piece, which will be bigger and digital. Still, this one is pretty cool. The animation is a whimsical one of one of the students in the course, although everyone contributed to designing, building, and installing the display, as well as creating the animation in it. Many people walking by stop and look at it. Please check it…
Here is an update to the Parsons Union Square kickstarter project. Update #1: Prototype displays go up in Parsons windows, 5th Avenue and 13th Street The class has been preparing prototype linear zoetropes to be placed in the windows of Parsons' building at 5th Avenue and 13th Street, facing the street. We shouldn't call them prototypes because they are full art pieces everyone in the class participated in creating, hosted by a great institution, on display for the public to see. But they are preparation for the Union Square display, which will be bigger and digital. Below are some pictures of the students completing and installing these linear zoetropes. If you are near Manhattan, please come see them. By this point, most of the difficult…
Here's the mindmap for tonight's Fred talk. Slightly evolved from my last one. Not everything made it into the presentation. Drag it around and click around. To navigate use arrow keys or click white space and drag to move the map click the '+' or '-' icon at the top to resize the map click the "fit" icon at the top (to the right of the '-') to fit the visible part of the mindmap in the space available click nodes in the mindmap to show or hide nodes beneath them -- dragging, resizing, or re-fitting as necessary afterward [freemind height='500px' width='600px']/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/creativity_map_110423.mm[/freemind]
When you feel like a superhero it's hard not to indulge in sharing why you feel so great. Solving technical problems makes you feel like a genius when you get it. I've had two days straight of amazing progress. One thing after another fell into place. It all took a lot of research, trial and error, moving step-by-step, not biting off too much at a time. Most of that was software and deliveries coming in. For those who know, the software I'm working on was getting the Western Digital media players for the Union Square digital linear zoetrope display to work remotely, which requires getting into the hacker community for the product. For anyone who doesn't know, working with hacker communities means searching all over…
My friend, Sebastian Marshall, featured me in his excellent blog yesterday. His blog is on strategy, specifically about "Strategy, Philosophy, Self-Discipline, Science. Victory." -- apologetically about succeeding. He's an incredible guy living a life most people dream of, sharing how to achieve the same. His views are well thought out. His advice is actionable and sensible, but not what most people would realize at first. Mainly because he's thought through why some things are the way they are and how they could be different, then acts on it. Most people don't do that. Then he continues to experiment and refine. My post there is about some of the steps that helped make the Bryant Park big public art piece happen and that are making the…
A friend and I were playing around with logo ideas for the Freedombox project based on this email solicitation from the Freedombox Foundation for T-shirt designs: T-Shirt Designs --------------- One of the things we offered Kickstarter donors was a T-shirt. We are thus soliciting T-shirt designs. The theme of the shirt is Community Angels. It would be good to involve our current logo http://freedomboxfoundation.org/images/freedombox_large.png. Sorry, we don't have a bigger version of that. The chosen design will be printed on t-shirts that we will give to donors. Of course, if your design is chosen, we will cover you in thanks and make sure you get a shirt too. I will also buy you a beer next time we meet. Send designs in a free file…
I like memorable opening lines to books. Good ones can be poetry, or a whole book into themselves. Sometimes they set the tone for the book. Others are simply memorable for their simplicity. Some of my favorite (some from memory so please correct errors): "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant day when his father took him to discover ice." - One Hundred Years of Solitude "It was inevitable. The scent of bitter almonds always reminded Dr. Juvenal Urbino of the fate of unrequited love." - Love in the Time of Cholera "Call me Ishmael." - Moby Dick "Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin. My soul. The tip of the tongue…
As I write, the Union Square Parsons art project is gaining momentum -- at $614, we're over 12% of the way there. Supporting art is rewarding! So is supporting students and making New York City a better place for everyone. Your donation counts. Please check out the page to support it! Spread the link to friends. Enjoy me looking dorky on camera! http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/492851406/big-beautiful-public-art-by-parsons-class-in-union
Today I've been fine tuning tomorrow's talk, working on the Parsons display, and preparing for the Fred talk, now scheduled for April 23. A bit of preparation for my gallery show in May too. A lot of events coming up. May you live in interesting times too. Oh yeah, and another donation to the Parsons display! Please donate and spread the word! http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/492851406/big-beautiful-public-art-by-parsons-class-in-union
Another supporter donated! Please think about donating and supporting the arts, students, and New York City! Actually, don't just think about it. Do it ;) Here's the post about the project and the kickstarter page.
Already $178 donated for the biggest best most beautiful public art piece New York will see this year! Student-built! You can be next! Please contribute to this awesome project! See this morning's post.
My next big beautiful public art piece will be with my Parsons class in Union Square. You can help make New York more beautiful, give people something to enjoy in their busy days, help students learn and build experience. Visit the project's Kickstarter page and donate! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/492851406/big-beautiful-public-art-by-parsons-class-in-union About this project: We are 18 young talented art students and 2 professors in a class together at Parsons The New School of Design's Art, Media, and Technology (AMT) program. We are raising money to build a big beautiful interactive public art installation in New York City's Union Square. Our goal is to create a dramatic new interactive digital motion-picture display unlike any the world has seen, entertaining and engaging to all New Yorkers for free, in the…
Martha Graham, one of the great artists of the twentieth century -- Picasso-level stature and influence in her field -- entered my life late, in my 30s, when recording Julliard dancers for my art at Lincoln Center. They were perfect people to learn from, dancers actively learning her, describing a "Martha Graham revolution" I'd never heard of before. I'd feel bad about learning about her so late, but since then I've met plenty of people who haven't heard of her either. I understand she allowed few recordings of herself and her work. Her voice-over in the only one I've seen captures some elusive yet essential points about creativity, expression, discipline, repetition, and freedom. When I heard these quotes the first time they resonated like only…
I'm speaking on creativity at the next Fred Talk, April 10. Please come! A longtime friend emailed me after she went to the last one (I was out of town) telling me my talk was announced. Fred talks are do-it-yourself Ted talks with the slogan "Your friends' ideas worth spreading." Who says you need some huge conference for thousands of people that costs lots of money? You probably learned more from your grandmother than most of your teachers, let alone famous people you don't know. Let's do it ourselves! Sharing locally can do things pristine, beautifully-produced things can't. Who isn't a fan of do-it-yourself community building? A big part of why I'm doing it is that the people behind it give me the feeling they…
[This post is part of a series on creativity. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] I haven't gone into any detail about Altshuller's 40 principles. The main reason is I found that others already have and did a great job, so I'll just link to them. The other reason is that his principles are hard to get through. Some aren't that useful outside of engineering. A few will get you far and, more importantly, with practice will get you into the mindset of looking to apply known solutions to new problems instead of trying to solve them from scratch. As I've said, you'll solve…
[This post is part of a series on creativity. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] Here are some basics to TRIZ. After the basics, I'll interpret them. After examining all those patents, Altshuller and his team found that about 1,500 generalized solutions described all the specific solutions. Even simpler, they created 40 techniques, or "inventive principles," that would lead to those solutions. Using these techniques would allow you to use an existing solution to your problem. In your regular life you encounter specific problems, not general problems. Often the specifics of your problem are irrelevant to the solution and get in the way of…
[This post is part of a series on creativity. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] Altshuller called his ideas the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, or that's what the Russian gets translated to, which is generally called TRIZ. People pronounce it to rhyme with ease or is. As best I can tell, the ideas have been taken up in technical and scientific circles more than any place else. He came from technical realms and his analytical style lent itself to their style of thinking and problem solving. I learned the techniques in business school, and they worked great applied to product development and devising…
I just found out another friend published a debut novel getting great reviews. Alex Kudera published Fight For Your Long Day, with four-and-a-half Amazon stars last I checked. Alex and I went to Central High School a year apart, in college competed against each other in Ultimate Frisbee (I think his team, Wesleyan, beat mine, Columbia, more often), and shared a room in Paris for a summer. Eventually we played as teammates on a team called Blood in the 90's. His book puts him in the company of other friends who knew me before their debut books became huge. Zadie Smith of White Teeth (and other) fame, hosted me and my friend (and her Cambridge University classmate), Nasser, at her London apartment on our route…
Class at Parsons today was awesome and inspiring. The project due today -- a linear zoetrope for each group, internally lit -- was a big challenge. At the beginning of class a couple groups appeared to be having trouble -- missed communications, etc. They grouped together, rallied, figured out what they could do during class, and, by the end, nearly every group was nearly finished. I expect each will be done by the end of the week. (I'm hoping to get emails from each group as they mount each completed display). They keep surprising me. Whenever I mention an idea I've never done, one of them implements it better or quicker than I would have. Inspiring. Check out some of their work on the class…