PUBLIC MARKS with search summer

This poster (800×1000mm) was designed to summarize and explain the summer holiday of 2009: a roadtrip/ moving house expedition undertaken by my partner Marthe and I, from Norway to England and back.

Project: smart.rockets

Date: Summer, 2006

Language: ActionScript 2

Key Concepts: Evolutionary computing, genetic algorithms, rocket science

Perhaps, living a life is not for any specific purpose, survival itself is the most valuable thing.

New York secretes its fullest range of smells in the summer; disgusting or enticing, delicate or overpowering, they are liberated by the heat. So one sweltering weekend, I set out to navigate the city by nose. As my nostrils led me from Manhattan’s northernmost end to its southern tip, some prosaic scents recurred (cigarette butts; suntan lotion; fried foods); some were singular and sublime (a delicate trail of flowers mingling with Indian curry around 34th Street); while others proved revoltingly unique (the garbage outside a nail salon). Some smells reminded me of other places, and some will forever remind me of New York.

The rich, collaborative web applications being developed on the NASA Apps platform are built on the open-source Django Web Application Framework. This portal provides source code repositories, bug tracking and AGILE project management systems, and public-facing wikis for each project within NASA Apps.

These projects, while intended to be released as open source software, have not currently passed through the NASA software release process. It is anticipated that they will be released under the NASA Open Source Agreement (NOSA), and will be accepting user community contributions by the end of the summer.

Brian House and Jesse Shapins were two of the co-creators of Yellow Arrow, an early locative media arts project and social software platform. In summer 2008, they co-taught the studio/seminar “Critical Urban Media Arts” at Columbia. Here, they discuss the conceptual background of the course and the pedagogical methods they developed, including Periplurban, a new platform for urban media research.

J. Bennett Fitts traveled some 20,000 miles to produce “No Lifeguard on Duty,” an investigation of America’s forgotten roadside motels. These vestiges of an earlier era—when families packed into their cars for summer vacations via two-lane highways—now exist in various stages of operation and disrepair. With their parking-lot-adjacent swimming pools prominently in the foreground, the motels reveal a decayed Americana and a near permanent sense of vacancy. However, beyond the cracked paint and the decrepit chain-links lies the nostalgia of life on the open road.

Starting this summer, I will be leading small-group workshops exploring various topics including Processing, data visualization, generative practices, and tangible computing. With a maximum class-size of 10, these workshops allow for plenty of one-on-one instruction, as well as dialogue and discussion between all attendees. These sessions provide an excellent opportunity to learn new skills and to explore new ideas in a comfortable environment. Workshops are typically one day (7 hours), except where indicated, and include lunch, and all printed materials.