Black Rock City has been around as we know it for a little while now. The population has steady increased like any other town in America, the urban planning has developed to a point of satisfactory stability and the citizens understand the basic laws of the land. The “everyday life” here is not like any other place, however there are daily procedures by the citizens that keep sanity around. But, within this routine there are the anomalies; the unexplained. The stories of people they have scene, events that took place, or of times before the order of the land are now all a part of the lore of Burning Man, and in this contemporary context, these stories have become what we can consider urban legends.

Urban Legends at Burning Man have a common thread of being completely crazy, zany and fun, but at the same time they are completely believable. For example, it is rumored that Perry Ferrell attends every year. That’s not too hard to believe, for where else could he go and travel in the open, but completely under the radar for a week? Another famous face that is rumored to have graced a few stages is Paul Oakenfold. Previous years Oakenfold has played a show at the event, but this year it was rumored the face did not match the name on the playbill for the scheduled evening. Both these artists are believable legends for the event with the advent of the enormous electronic music trend that graces the playa. Other rumored names that might be brought on like moths to a flame are DJ Spooky and Phish. Phish’s appearance is the most highly rumored on the playa, however, I asked many of the organizers about this and every single one laughs it off with a roll of the eyes.

Funnier experiences are such legends as Waldo. One person dresses up as Waldo every day, and if you see him, you see him. No big deal, but funny.

There are things on the playa, too. Rumors of a porta-potty fully equipped with curtains, newspapers, fresh scents and other amenities that would make it the most desirable one on the playa.

Disasters are rumored, as well. Airplane crashes, people dying from falling off an art car, money being stolen, or even muggings are rumored. It seems that every year there is a story of a large camp losing a lot of sound equipment, or having vandalizing occur while performance groups are off performing. These are aspects of an evolving city, which makes it a complete urban landscape.

One myth to dispel is that Larry Harvey doesn’t walk around and do stuff anymore. That is simply not true. Larry is the most laid back large event organizer I have ever met. My friend Jeff, a photo journalist, and myself went to a press conference to ask him some questions and we were totally blown away by his down to earth stature. So, if you see Larry say hi and thank him for giving you a chance to find yourself.

For the New York burners, there is the decompression coming up: Link: Astral Slide. Its December 5th, 2004, so get a ticket before its too late.

After this 2004 year, the Burning Man organizers are beginning to focus their attention on regional events much more than in the past. Information about year round playa details can be found here from the Burning Man website. Regional events are mini-Burning Man events located all over the country. Andie Grace oversees these events to make sure they follow the basic 10 commandments of Burning Man. Right now there are 85 people running 65 regional programs all over the world.

Regionals are important for Burning Man because the playa can probably only hold about 50,000 people, which would mean a new place would have to be sought. Finding another place more desolate than Black Rock Desert seems a stretch, so the regional events are hoping to compensate. Initial concerns from participants are this process is “dilutive”.

“More the merrier” is the general attitude countering the dilutive concern. Regionals are an attempt to introduce the social aspects Larry Harvey is trying to get across with the event to new groups of people that cannot make it to the playa or cannot handle the playa. “Fuck them!”, is the initial counter to branching the event out from the playa. The organizers feel, however, it is more important to have ideas like the gift economy and loving your neighbor rather than simply living on the playa.

Serious cynicism believes the new regional promotion is, “I think it is a marketing line…a play for money…franchise the whole fucking thing.”

Larry’s drive for the event is different than that. He feels like the yahoos that come to the event with beer hats looking at girls and to see things burn, who are really not understanding of the initial premise behind the event, if they can come to the event and learn about the sociological aspects of the camp, the community aspect of the camp, then he has done something right. They go home and they start talking about it, stop being a yahoo and that makes things better in the world. It might stop someone from buying an Escalade with two TV screens in the backseat.

Conversations immediately head back to the money aspect, which I address in “The Woes of Creating Burning Man”.

Beyond money, the regional events are a new evolution of thought on how to promote the ideas that Larry desires to have spread in the world. What strikes me is how this branch out is very American in it’s development. Looking at the regional map, the dots on the landscape remind me of the proliferation of Walmarts and Home Depots. Ironic since Burning Man is so strictly against the corporations. But, the organizers seem to be learning from the corporate examples and taking what they need. Corporations like WalMart and Home Deport, no matter how much you disagree with them, they have phenomenal business expansion examples. Copying their example through voluntary expansion does, in theory, take the event and its philosophies to an audience that might not be able to experience the playa because of intimidation, travel distance or simply not knowing about the event.

I recently received a notice for the San Francisco decompression F(a)ire in the Jack Rabbit Speaks. Andie Grace outlined many guidelines for the event including noise hours, street conduct and neighborhood consideration. I will not be able to attend this event, but I would have to guess that some of these rules might be a deterrent from the normal social environment at Burning Man on the playa. For those that have not participated at the playa, their initial experience for the few hours will be significantly different from the playa.

Other regional events take the better course of a week in some locations. These events seem to have a better chance of mimicking the playa and seclusion. If the areas are far enough from the nearest town and the participants are there to pack in, pack out and to participate in the gift economy, it might be a successful event. I hope some of them have inclement weather to parallel dust and windstorms of the playa, though.

I am partial to the playa, and a part of me shares the sentiment of the few people I interviewed regarding this. I made a trek to a foreign place to an environment that demanded I participate in a community. My first few hours at the playa I was not a happy camper. My initial sentiments were very different from my feelings at the end of the week, but only because I got beyond thinking about dirt and wind and began to have a seriously different lifestyle from the norm. The urban tapestry was amazing, too. I wonder if the regional events will even try to mimic the urbanism of the playa, or if it will be more resembling of the earlier chaotic events when there were only 300 people.

Regionals have a potential to reach out a positive message to a much larger group than keeping the event centralized to the playa. Although the associated events will have to overcome the preconceptions of the event, the groups that can be affected by the message will hopefully allow new people to alter their lifestyles as Larry would hope.

The Costs of the Contemporary Beast

Burning Man is now an event that most participants feel is a huge enterprise, easily filling the pockets of the creators allowing them luxury and ease of living. Unfortunately, this is not a reality for the creators of the event. Cynicism for the creators reared its head in a timid gesture this year with mock flyers in every single porta-potty telling of a fiesta BBQ dinner for all. Word got around fast, and the 2pm BBQ time was met with a dry erase board reading, “No BBQ today! The flyers are a hoax!”

Why would participants that thrive upon this week of unleashing want to hold contempt for the creators? It all comes back to money. Money is exchanged in order to enter Black Rock City. Larry Harvey considers it a “tax”. Participants consider it an expensive ticket. I bought early this year and my tax was a few dollars north of two hundred. Participants are not stupid people, and with a little math their algebra takes them to formulas such as this: Each participant pays around $200/person. There are 35,000 participants. Multiply $200 by 35,000 to see how much money is brought into the pockets of the creators. Answer: Roughly $7,000,000.

It is a safe bet to estimate that 85% or more of the population of Burning Man will not earn this amount of money in their lifetime. To them, this is a large chunk of change that can take them to places known as Tahiti or Morocco every day of the year for the rest of their lives.

Reality check: Burning Man is a business. Campmate Jeff from San Francisco assists small start up businesses as his living. My first night at camp I was expressing my cynicism for the tax, while Jeff was talking about the possibilities of growing the event for the sustainability of Burning Man. The growth of the event was “for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was they probably needed to make more money if they were going to live off of it, and I’m not talking about getting rich, I’m just talking about paying salaries.”

“Yeah, I’m sure it does at this point,” I interjected.

“No,” Jeff replied, “I don’t think it does.”

I protested that $200 a pop for 30,000 people would give you at least $6,000,000.

“$6,000,000, that’s your whole budget for the year. That’s peanuts…[start-up companies] burn a million dollars a month, easy,” Jeff said.

My thoughts at this point were how companies are entities that function at full throttle year round. Burning Man does not function at full throttle year round. At best it is only at its peak for three months of the year including set up and take down.

“[The companies I advise] are small… they have, like, 30 people, 40 people…they’re burning $2,000,000 a month. [Burning Man] has way more than 30 people… and when this thing is going they have hundreds of people.

“This year the DPW guys, the guys that do the heavy lifting…are working for food….Nobody is getting rich off [Burning Man].”

Not only are there 30 or more full time employees to pay, but a multitude of other expenses:

--A $1,000,000 land use fee imposed by the US Government for use of the barren land.
--Three divisions of law enforcement: State, Local and County
--Sanitation for the porta-potties
--Electricity at the site
--Water trucks to keep the dust down

Each of these listed could potentially cost $1,000,000 or more, and then you still have underlying costs.

Popular Consensus

Walking through the event and talking to people about general operation of the event and what they felt about it, the conversation always came back to the revenue. An unknown person on one of my tapes expressed, “I have a tough time knowing that this event pulls in somewhere between 6 and 8 million dollars of revenue and Larry having all these lofty moral goals, but at the same time the guy is obviously pocketing some fucking doe.” After explaining what I had heard regarding costs for the event, however, this individual and others felt a little more comfortable about it. My friend Jeff from camp (not Jeff with the business background, but Jeff from Huntington Beach) adds, “[Larry is] not cashing in off this; he’s having a good old time…he’s a good going guy…He’s looking at the benefits of…[the money] going towards everybody, not just himself.”

Larry does make a little money off the event, but he oversees the entire event. Jeff added, “He comes out a head, but he’s not sitting out there milking it; he’s not doing that MTV shit…he’s a good guy.”

Larry is also very aware of the ramifications of having a corporate sponsor for the event. Corporations are not well loved at Burning Man, for many people go to the event to get away from them. I met a whole camp of computer engineers that work for Google who come every year to just relax and not be a part of that doldrum. The temptations for having corporate sponsors for the event, if you need money, are huge, however. If Budweiser were to sponsor the event, the organizers would most assuredly have enough revenue to cover all the operation costs at their current rate. Larry is constantly asked to consider sponsorship and he always adamantly says no. “I think [not having corporate sponsors is why] people don’t really have a problem paying $200 a ticket,” another unidentified participant interjected, “because, I mean, you know there is no corporate sponsor out there.” Introducing the corporate sponsorship would bring in a new crowd, but also significantly change the dynamic of the event. Jeff finished the thought by saying, “[Larry is] basically doing this [event] so that we all have a good time. That’s what it comes down to. Make sure we’re all fucking cool. Make sure everything is clean and we’re having a good old time.”

Liabilities

Liabilities are an issue for the organizers of the event. A few thought Burning Man could be held responsible for heinous acts or events in the court of law, even though the event says it is free of all liability. Last year (2003), a girl fell off an art car and was crushed by it. In the same year, a pilot forgot to put down his landing gear and crashed his airplane at the Black Rock Airport and another plane that just outright tumbled on the landing strip. Disasters like this at the event are serious concerns for the organizers and they have to be taken into account when putting everything together. Because of the general atmosphere, however, the blaming for accidents seems to be kept in check. The attitude of my interviews prevailed through out the week of saying that if you come out to the desert and you are stupid, its your own damn fault, and everyone is going to hold you responsible for what happened to you. But when accidents become disasters, “understood” rules can give way to the written documents that hold the event down and people responsible. A sad evolution of a large beast.

There are Girls Gone Wild aspects that the organizers have to contend with, too. Nudity is accepted and, for the most part, the norm of Burning Man. When you video tape girls dancing around and then broadcast it on your website, the context changes. Three years ago all video cameras (and digital still cameras that have video capability) began to have to be registered at Media Mecca. The intent is to know exactly who has the capability and if something pops up online or worse, on DVD, the organizers can search through the registrations of equipment and hold the responsible party liable.

How that exactly works, is up for speculation. The registration process basically says that you have to tell the event organizers what you do with your published work. Whatever is gained in commission for publication, 10% is to go back to Burning Man. Because the event has a year-round full-time staff, it is possible for them to check the internet for publications of Burning Man related articles, pictures and video. If you have not told them about what you have done or made from your work, they can come after you, which is totally not worth it for the author of the articles. It makes much more sense to pay $100 than $1000 in fines or hassle charges from the event.

Problems with Individual Costs

Still, there are many costs that are incurred to each participant. Myself, I had food and water costs, camping equipment and liquor expenses that I would not have normally encountered. Those that put on elaborate theme camps or even organized camps the costs must be huge. Other aspects, such as the gift economy, cannot function beyond the week of the event.

It is tragic that participants of this event feel so much initial animosity because of the initial money exchanged. Ideally, no one would be charged, but this is an event that takes place on government land and therefore has to abide by the measures imposed. It is also an event with a large population that needs certain comforts, such as porta potties. And, now that the event is a true slice of life, law enforcement needs to be in attendance because of the small percentage of criminals that appear.

Nothing Else Like It

Burning Man is the evolution of the beast. This event evolves with time. It has evolved into being a city that understands it’s business agenda, but also understands how it was founded and it tries to accept both. There is only so much the event organizers can do when they invite anyone and everyone to come out to the desert to do what ever they want. However, the predominant attitude at Burning Man is that you can walk down a street at any time in any section and feel safe, so don’t let my “criminal statistics” make you think otherwise. Crime that occurs is innocent, consisting mainly of people too “confused” about which bike is which and wander off with the wrong one.

Larry Harvey started this event because they wanted to find a time and place to do what ever they wanted to do. The week was for doing drugs or shooting a gun because they never did those things in normal society. Now there are no guns or dogs, but it is still a place where any one and everyone can come to be naked or dress however they want to and not be judged from it. In fact, you have a better chance not being judged if you do have a costume.

The money issues will continue to be an issue as long as the event grows. It seems people always need something to complain about, but its good to know Larry Harvey and the other organizers are not about to budge with corporate sponsors or other means of selling out. The amount of chaos the organizers have to contend with is enormous so to have an event happen every year of this scale that basically goes off without a hitch is amazing. Whenever you think curating a show is tough, think about this and you might feel a little better.

I saw a Reno 911 episode today where the guys try to make it to Burning Man to bust some "LSD-heads". They get lost outside of Gerlach and never make it. But, damn they had some good participation costumes.

I'm working on a few articles at the same time. I'm going over all my notes and making sure I am quoting correctly. Don't worry, more is coming soon.

“What is Burning Man?” Without time to answer the first, the second and third arrive. “What do you do there” “Who goes there?” Traveling back from Black Rock City and telling people of my travels, I am barraged by these same questions. Honestly, there is no easy answer. In fact, the answer is as complex and hazy as the true origins of the event.

In 1986, Larry Harvey and 11 friends needed to get away from the everyday life of San Francisco. These individuals were not social outcasts or people even on the fringe of society. According to a camp-mate of mine named Jeff from San Francisco, the collective group were known as “intellectuals”. These intellectuals gathered on a beach in San Francisco to get a few things off their chests, namely Larry’s former relationship. Over the course of three days they forgot about the outside world and let their inner selves out. In the end, they gathered some driftwood and sculpted it as a figure, which they promptly burned. It was not a specific effigy to anything or anyone, as far as the tale goes, but an effigy of events and times of which they wanted to leave behind.

The 12 friends became 30, or more. The following year it is rumored to be 300. It was not because the event was a party beyond parties, or an orgy on the beach. The appeal was (and remains at the core) a time for the demons inside to be let out and then burned at the end, so as to have a clean slate for the following year. The expression of these demons has become to be known as “participating”. The cleansing has become the burning of the ever more elaborate figure known as “the Man”, the Temple, and now a Pagoda.

The evolution of the event to 35,000 or so for 2004 means a lot of souls are asking to be cleansed. The manifestation of this comes in every single shape and form. I can describe it like this: Think of something you would NEVER EVER do in your normal life. This includes your after hours. Think of the things that you only ever do in your dreams. Burning Man is the place where those dreams are realized and not criticized (except for a few yahoos on Saturday). Have you ever been naked for seven straight days?

Back in the day, the idea of doing something you would never normally do made the selection of the site ideal. Participants could walk out onto the edge of the playa and shoot a gun (because they had never had or wanted a gun (and this is now not allowed because you cannot have guns on the playa)) or jump out of a friend’s airplane without the fear of hitting something on the ground. The playa caused a default thought of “pack in, pack out” mentality that is strongly encouraged to this day. But it wasn’t because they had no services, but because the area was so beautiful that it was ridiculous to think of littering this place. Nowadays, it is a rule and demand by all to keep the streets clean. Rules are delivered in any and every form so every citizen of Black Rock City knows to “pack in and pack out”. The playa is still a beautiful place, but the collective social dynamic within the city no longer is able to retain a default attitude for cleanliness.

Burning Man can be anything you want it to be. If you want to sit and read a book for a week, you can. If you want to rave 24 hours a day, you can. The major underlying premise of the event, though, is how people appreciate what is said or done in the streets of the city. Congratulations are delivered to people for taking a voice, even if people do not agree with what is being said. This is not a normal city. As Larry Harvey proudly states, “People still look you in the eye here.” This acceptance stems from one of the most well know laws of the city: “There are no spectators at Burning Man.” (And as the tour guide for the Artery Bus emphasized, “Get you ass off the bus!”) As long as people are participating in the events, or creating their own, it is appreciated. Burning Man is a place that is temporarily created for us to cleans our demons and have a chance at starting over for the year with a clean slate. It’s also a chance for the other side of everyone to be the front side, even if it is only for a week. My best answer to all those questions is, “You’ll just have to go and experience it for yourself.”

More to come…

"Documenting this event is like describing a kaleidoscope to a blind person."
--Carol, aka "Big Momma", Burning Man 2004

Nothing could be truer. Never have I experienced a city, place or environment like I experienced in the past 7 days. The people I met spanned the globe, yet we were all bonded by an event meant to be for the cleansing of demons inside us.

I have hours of tape to sort out and 300+ pictures to deal with. I spend every day on the playa riding my bike all day to see everything I could, and I barely even scratched the surface. My mind was overwhelmed with the variety in expression and celebration. The next month I will decompress what I found out about the event, the participants and myself in the Featured Projects section of Glowlab.

Before I go any further I want to thank everyone I met and talked to at Burning Man for spending a few minutes with me for this project. Hopefully I will run into you all again.

August 27, 2004

Burning Man Preparation

As I am preparing for the BM event, I am noticing and thinking about all of the waste that is being created by myself for this event. The amount of resources used for this event for one person for one week is phenomenal. 30 gallons of water, 30 pounds of food (non-perishable, which is not exactly the usual athletic nutrition I consume), camping supplies and materials that take up half the prep table I set up… all of these things for one person. This one person is someone that has been involved in conservation and reuse for respect of the environment, and I still am able to create a pile of cardboard and cellophane waste in my kitchen even before I depart. The myth of garbage disposal our society believes is becoming all too transparent as I prepare for this trip. I might be over packing a little, since I have had a bought of dehydration in the desert before and I do not want to have the same experience, but I am interested to see how the waste and cleanliness will be handled this week. I think the people I am staying with will be able to keep everything in check, but what about me… a first timer?

The community being established at BM is unique, for the community has a definition that is usually taken for granted in larger social contexts. The community that is about to descend upon the Black Rock Desert has a collective understanding of how to make this community run. It also knows how to make the community continue further, if it so chooses. These aspects are by no means an accident, but from rigorous, comprehensive informations given by the BM organizers. The necessity for listening to the desires of the organizer by 25,000 is through the harsh beauty of the desert. If people do not listen to how you are supposed to live, there is a very good chance you will not make it to the 7th day. The urgency does not exist in the regular domain of popular culture and society, allowing for anarchy and independent habits of living to survive. It also allows for habits of living that are not in the best interest of the popular masses to thrive and, as we see today in politics, dominate.

As I finish packing up my pickup with what the lists have told me to bring, I am anxious to see how others have adapted to these lists. But more so, I am interested to see how the adaptations promote or hinder livelihood in the desert. What we are all packing into this place for 7 days (or more) will be packed out as we have been told. The phenomenal amount of resources used for the event will be consumed, putting perspective upon how we live as a culture. Days will melt to hours, minutes and seconds, and this one person will have changed a little because of being put into a community that demands friendship, trust and common views just to survive.

Glowlab friend and collaborator J Gabriel Lloyd is off to Burning Man. He will be covering the festival for us and posting here on his experiences. Stay tuned...

The Glowlab Featured Projects blog is on vacation! Check back here in September for new projects. Now go outside and enjoy your summer...

Looped : A D?©rive in the Paris M?©tro
It's the end of term and d?©rives are being reported far and wide! Here's an audio-visual d?©rive in the m?©tro. We looped around Ch?¢telet station in the heart of town. An orchestra, a view of the Seine, corridors, neons, escalators and a balloon floating up to the ceiling.

"When nothing stops our gaze, our gaze carries very far. But if it doesn’t meet anything, it doesn’t see anything; it only sees what it meets: space is what stops the gaze, it’s what sight bumps into: the obstacle: some bricks, an angle, a vanishing point: space is when that makes an angle, when that stops, when we must turn for it to start again." [Georges Perec, "Species of Spaces"]

"Before, there was nothing, or almost nothing; afterwards, there isn't much, a few signs, but which are enough for there to be a top and a bottom, a beginning and an end, a right and a left, a recto and a verso." Georges Perec, "Species of Spaces"

Ping! in Fontenay-aux-Roses Tomorrow my students and I will be doing a paper version of Kate Armstrong's "Ping!". Kate describes Ping!, which premiered at last year's Psy-Geo-Conflux, as "an experiential wireless project that uses a telephone menu system to distribute active commands to users who call in using a cell phone. The choices made by the caller when navigating the telephone system produce directions for physical movement through the city." At my request, Kate sent us the schematic drawing and the menus she had drawn up when programming the piece. We had planned to experiment with the idea of using it without the phone system (which we couldn't afford). It's a fascinating look at her project behind-the-scenes, sort of like reading a play – or the score for a piano concerto. But I was having a hard time imagining us out in the streets navigating from schematic to menus and back again, unless the map itself was to become the territory (in which case there no longer would be any need for the streets !). Kate offered us a few suggestions by e-mail, the class studied the plans and decided to note path indications from the schematic on the menu texts. We will be Ping!ing Fontenay-aux-Roses tomorrow afternoon. Check back in a few days for more news of the project on our class blog.

Let me make a pitch for a symposium I hope to write more about later. Here's an excerpt from the symposium press release:

"ART ORIENTED PROGRAMMING" DECODING AND CRITICISM
"Does the programmer interpret the work according to the artist's desire? Does he partially create it? What are the artistic practices brought about by programming? Should the programme be taken into account for an aesthetic judgement of computer artwork? It is necessary to tackle the question of what is aesthetically at stake in the essential role played by programming in the creation of computer artworks. This symposium will be an occasion to make every effort to propose new critical approaches. During two days, theoreticians, programmers and artists shall present their own approach. Lectures will alternate with work presentations. Invited artists will present creations in which programming is ground for specific research. They will explain some aspects of their work on programming. Each presentation will be followed by a public debate. Two round table talks to deal with "hacktivism" and with "programming aesthetics" will also complement the symposium." The symposium was organised by the CRECA: Centre de Recherches d'Esth?©tique du Cin?©ma et des Arts Audiovisuel, Universit?© Paris 1, Panth?©on-Sorbonne, Amphith?©?¢tre Richelieu, 17 rue de la Sorbonne, 75005 Paris, March 19, 2 pm - 9:30 pm and March 20, 9:30 am - 9:30 pm. (text by David-Olivier Lartigaud)

Among the examples of software art from the Transmediale festival Andreas Broeckmann showed at the Sorbonne this afternoon was Wilfried Hou Je Bek's .Walk.

Has psychogeography become museum-friendly? Ailleurs, ici ("Elsewhere, here" : still another elsewhere‚Ķ) at the Couvent des Cordeliers is as good a place as any to begin. The Mus?©e d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris has been relocated temporarily to the former convent while their building is being remodelled. A plasma screen in the (rather cold) lobby shows a 14-minute video of Francis Al?øs's performance, "Leak" which took place last October. In it Al?øs pierces a can of blue paint with a knife, then proceeds to drip his way from the MAMVP's location on the avenue du Pr?©sident Wilson to its temporary headquarters on the rue de l'Ecole-de-M?©decine. Two cameras follow the sneaker-clad artist, a travel bag casually slung over one shoulder, the dribbling paint can in the other hand, as he descends staircases, crosses bridges, jaywalks blithely through the late afternoon traffic, stopping only once to add a little water to the can before arriving at his destination, where he fixes it to the wall: splat. Evoking Olympic ritual (the passing of the flame), paying homage to Pollock, but also recalling more prosaically the daily trail left through my building by an incontinent dog, Al?øs offers the viewer a tour of the streets at ground level. At one point we see the artist deftly skirting patches of dog do, at another he is trampling on fallen leaves, several times he glides out of the camera frame as we move on, swinging our weight from one leg to the other on the cold pavement. (N.B. the original "Leak" was created for the XXIV S?£o Paulo Biennial in 1995: photo: Kurt Hollander).

Bursting forward like singing waiters, the dancing museum guards caught me off-guard as they surrounded me, intoning "This is so contemporary, contemporary, contemporary" in thick French accents (Tino Sehgal). The humor is more caustic than the gallery notes would suggest. At the back of the space two screening rooms showed videos by Nick Relph and Oliver Payne. One was abstract and enigmatic, "Gentlemen"(2003), the other, "Driftwood" (1999), appeared to be both guide and "d?©rive" undertaken by a skateboarder in the city of London; though the camera was stable, framing grainy and washed out colors, and the voice-over narration a bit hard to follow due to the narrator's accent (working class London?). I looked around for the translation but the museum had run out of photocopies. The city was portrayed as both gentrified and ungainly in a rather bleak travelogue, accompanied by an impassioned and scathing critique of city planning. From the background of repetitive music (reminiscent of Philip Glass), I could make out phrases here and there "Actors are non stop prostitutes", "security guards watch 'im get smacked in th' fuckin' mouth". Regent Street was, the voice tells us, "designed by John Nash in the early 19th century as a "'cordon sanitaire' between the scruffs of Soho and the toffs of Mayfair." The film brought to mind the fixed camera and the semi-documentary style of Patrick Keiller (whose films "London", 1993, and "Robinson in Space", 1997, were shown in Parisian cinemas for the first time last summer), as well as the verbal extravagance of Iain Sinclair (mentioned in the credits).

Next Thursday afternoon my students and I will be drifting in the m?©tro. Using the itinerary calculator provided by the Paris Transport Authority (RATP), we have prepared a daisy-shaped itinerary consisting of 10 loops which all start and end at the station "Ch?¢telet-Les Halles". Setting out from this central point in groups of two or three, we will draw the flower in real time as we psycho-geographically explore this urban space. Glowlabbers who plan to be in Paris next week are invited to join our group. Meeting Point : Ch?¢telet-Les Halles RER line B (destination Mitry-A?©roport CDG), February 26, 2004 at one o'clock p.m. at the head of the train. For more information about the loops, see the protocol description drawn up by Amandine Dessolier.

Last Sunday a joyful visit D'ailleurs --"From Elsewhere"-- : children chasing each other over the vast wooden floors of Le Carrosse --"The Coach" (the horse-drawn variety)--, an artist's "squat" in Paris's multicultural 20th district, adults milling, drinking beer, strolling, chatting, climbing stairs, viewing videos, contemplating computer screens (the show was sponsored by la Ga?Æt?© Lyrique, the future Parisian electronic arts center). The atmosphere was user-friendly although very few of the works had the usual trappings of interactivity. No sensors tracking visitors' movements, no joysticks, no keyboards. Reynald Drouhin presented archived sequences from interactive online works ("Frags"). Gregory Chatonsky's installation "La r?©volution a eu lieu ?† New York" --The revolution took place in New York-- automatically generated narratives using the real time flux of the net. No need to "participate", one could just sit (well, stand, the armchair draped in black facing the screen wasn't very inviting; to get to it, one had to step over a ring of "fire") and let oneself be consumed by the images and overlaid texts that appear, one by one, on the screen. The pace is regular, like that of a slide-projector, the message insistent. Visitors could contemplate their own images in shadow next to the mirrored "Ladies" in the slide show presented by artist and curator, KRN. The photographer catches her subjects unawares, as they observe themselves in public mirrors.

Most of the works in the show feature photos, sounds and/or videos of distant places: India, Siberia, Africa, New York… Many are variations on the travelogue, either positioning themselves as artless "Postcards home" or standing closer to the road movie end of the spectrum, with its dark undertones. In the database work, "Tracking Transience", Hasan Elahi records his travels for posterity (and would-be G-men). After he was the object of FBI scrutiny in June 2002, another suspect in the war on terrorism, he began systematically leaving an electronic "paper-trail", fixing the ephemera of his successive journeys like a hapless Peter Pan trying to trap his shadow. By systematically using his credit card, snapping his surroundings as others might punch a time-clock, he has built an archive of images attesting to his every move : sequences of interchangeable airport waiting zones, people-movers and gates with overlaid titles : EWR, DTW, AMS, the cryptic airport codenames sometimes provoking puns: SIN (Singapore). This project of electronically capturing an individual's every gesture is also stigmatised by this year's "Big Brother Awards" awarded annually to individuals, government entities and companies that violate people's privacy.

Indeed light and shadow may be one of the tropes of Elsewhere. In an otherworldly trip in the m?©tro "Vies suspendues" ("Suspended Lives"), three cameras track shifting silhouettes, sometimes their zones of surveillance overlap, staggered, sometimes they take in opposite sides of the tracks. The three streams are mixed in real time, creating illusory presences (Marika Dermineur, Julie-Christine Fortier, Ileana Gonzalez Ortiz and Julie Morel).

Instead of ads for porn sites, "Pop-up Window" (Julie Morel) consisted of five white popup books inspired by a Shinto temple in Kyoto, displayed against a light box which accentuated their silhouetted architectures. As one opens and closes them, watching one then another spring out like a jack-in-a-box, one is reminded of phantathe animated silhouette films of Lotte Reininger, "Prince Achmed" (1926) or the "Caliph Stork"(1954), phantasms of that other exotic Orient.

We emigrate from the affluent West in search of some elusive authenticity we hope to encounter elsewhere. They emigrate to our cities in search of an equally elusive better life. What we actually gain, if we are lucky, is a sense of time, and a bit of humility. In the region of Darjeeling, the jeep-taxi doesn't leave until there are at least 17 paid passengers aboard: the driver leans head and shoulders out of the window to manoeuvre the steering wheel, the overweight traveller next to us pays double fare for the extra space he occupies. Returning home from Le Carrosse, watching Louis Malle's Calcutta (1968) on the VCR, glimpses of India, sounds make me nostalgic for its smells. Maybe one day we'll be able to accurately convey, along with the hum and chatter of the street("KRNINDIA"), that particular mixture of cow dung and sweat, diesel fuel and incense, bananas and ghee. It is too powerful an experience to fit into any window no matter how sophisticated the electronics. When Big Brother has taken over Europe, we may invest our last glimmer of hope in Conestoga wagons heading East. However many IT multinationals re-locate to Bangalore, there will always be at least one natural resource they can't take away from us. And somehow it smells better There than Here.

Wilfried Hou Je Bek's latest incarnation of Psychogeographic Markup Language "PML for a room" calls to mind Xavier de Ma?Æstre's tongue-in-cheek "Voyage autour de ma chambre" (Journey around my room), 1794. In the mode of the romantic travel literature so popular in the late eighteenth century, he gives details in abundance of his domestic travels. Whole chapters are devoted to descriptions of the walls and each of the prints and paintings hanging there, his faithful canine companion, Rosine, his desk, his travel clothes. The narrative has its dramatic moments : one time he almost lost his life when pouring (himself?) into his chair. He suddenly found himself sprawled on the floor with the chair tipped over on top of him (it was missing the brick that usually kept it balanced; his servant accidentally flipped it around, startled as she was by the dog barking and a beggar at the door). Contrary to Wilfried's room, it would be, I guess, more "stim" than "dross".

This month the Glowlab projects page will be coming to you from Karen O'Rourke's work space (I hesitate to call it a studio). Following up on Sal Randolph's musings on the Internet as a public space, I'd like to toy with the idea of negotiated spaces, both online and off.

By way of introduction, let me take you on a tour (this is becoming a tradition). If you just come in this door (no more than two at a time, please, we'll be a bit cramped as it is). As you can see, it's a somewhat oblong, pentangular cubicle just big enough for a desk, a chair and little else. Crowded, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves cover the two far walls and part of a third. Right behind you is a clothes closet : if you move the chair too far back, you'll bump into it. To your left is a window which looks out onto the courtyard: it's useful for checking the weather outside.

According to the Webster's, the verb negotiate comes from the Latin "negotiatus" the past participle of "negotiari", "to carry on business" Its first meaning is to confer, to bargain or discuss with a view to reaching agreement. Its second is to succeed in crossing, surmounting, moving through [to negotiate a river]. Negotiated spaces partake of both definitions.

The first example that comes to mind is a sound I grew accustomed to in the late 80s when I first got into telecommunications art: the eerie mating calls of two modems negotiating a connection. I kind of miss them now that I have a sleek, streamlined ADSL "manta-ray" model which makes no noise at all. After dialling the number my old modem would sing its refrain at regular intervals until it received an answering wail. Sometimes the negotiations would be short and sweet and I knew I could log in at a fairly decent speed, sometimes they'd be long and bitter and my 56k modem would finally, grudgingly, agree to 1200 bits per second (usually the times when I needed to transfer a large file…). The negotiations would continue during my entire connection even though I didn't hear them anymore. I was only made aware when they failed and my modem would abruptly admit defeat and cut off (usually in the middle of that crucial upload…).

Online databases are another example of this phenomenon. The Google user enters a search string, then, after receiving an unsatisfactory response, modifies her query in the same way one might adjust one's offer when bargaining for mangoes or wicker baskets at an open-air market.

A most striking example is the negotiation of urban space undertaken by a group of students at the University of Paris 1, guided by Lee Walton's City System (translated and adapted by Claire Raffaelli). They were continually navigating between Scylla and Charybdis, managing to strike a delicate balance between the demands made on them by their surroundings and those of Lee's text urging them to disrupt the smooth flow of city life. They (actually I should say "we" as I, too, experimented "City System Paris" with my daughter Clara) dealt with problems as they arose. How to toss a coin while holding an unwieldy umbrella? How to inspect a bicycle seat without giving passers-by the impression you are getting ready to steal it? Parisians can be rather suspicious of any behavior they deem to be odd. What does one say to the delivery man arriving at his van just as one is leaning across the hood to photograph the note fixed under the windshield wipers? How to catch up with the person in red shoes after losing her in the crowd as we look for page 108 in Lee's survival guide? As Rita Margono put it, "Lee Walton placed us in a situation of uncertainty". For those who'd like to read their accounts of this experience see the site "Dérives".

Big thanks again to Sal Randolph, who led us on a twisted and delightful journey through the internet as public space. Next up is Karen O'Rourke, Parisian psychogeographer extraordinaire who joined us for last year's psy.geo.conflux and who we hope to see again this year. Karen will spend the next month giving us an update on her many projects...

-- Christina Ray

I've been traveling for most of December, away from my studio, visiting family, and even though much of that time has been spent in various public spaces (airports, roadways, the sidewalks of various cities and towns) it has felt like the the internet is what connected me to "the world." If public space is where we go to be more intimate with people we don't know, then it's clear that the internet has become a crucial kind of public space for me, and maybe for many of us.

Perhaps it takes a special kind of effort for the internet to satisfy our need to be among strangers, to connect with what is strange to us. And I don't think it can ever replace the full-sensory drama of cities. The idea of the d?©rive, of drifting without our usual purpose, is one way to find ourselves in the more unfamiliar neighborhoods of the web. We invite ourselves outward, into the world.

The inverse of the d?©rive might be something like the blog, where we make public the private, where we publish ourselves. With the blog, the online diary, the public studio, the indoor webcam, we invite the outer world into our once-solitary space, and by so doing we keep our door wedged open.

Something in between might be the internet agora, marketplaces of goods and ideas where we make ourselves visible to each other as individuals but in an ever-shifting sea. I'm thinking here of the group news filters like slashdot and metafilter, and also ebay with its reputation systems -- even amazon with its user reviews and list sharing. These kinds of communities are as old as the internet's newsgroups, and are continuing to spread, through P2P networks, listservs, forums, and increasingly interactive blogging (check out the number of comments on Howard Dean's official blog).

Albert-L?°szl?? Barab?°si in his recent book Linked: The New Science of Networks says: "Far from being a homogenous sea of nodes and links, the Web is fragmented into four continents, each of which hosts many villages and cities that appear as overlapping communities. Any of us willing to take up a virtual presence belongs to one or several of them."

The four continents that Barab?°si identifies are: the central core, the IN continent, the OUT continent, and a fourth continent made of tendrils and islands. Even a brief foray into internet difting will begin to reveal this architecture -- neighborhoods or communities (like the ukulele gang or the US government websites) mainly linked to each other, zones like amazon and other commercial sites which have endless numbers of doors into them, but almost none leading outward, or the inverse, link-heavy portals which send you onward to all corners but to whom you can rarely return just by clicking links, and highly connected zones like the blogiverse where you can eddy and circle about almost endlessly.

As my physical travels are ending, I find myself happily back in the studio again. There's always so much work to be done, and a new year suggests a renewed energy to push ahead. Opsound will be focused on releasing physical records in the upcoming months, and expect Weapons of Mass Destruction to do some live performing in the city. Free Words will continue to collect new words and infiltrate books. Intheconversation will hit the lauchpad quite soon. You can always keep up with the goings-on at the studio on my highlala site.

Thanks to all of you who have spent a little time musing on private and public spaces with me. I'd like to invite anyone who has audio recordings of either to enter them into the Opsound open pool -- I have a special interest in collecting psychogeographic explorations of all kinds. Or sign up to distribute Free Words wherever you live. And I hope you'll also join me in trying to think about what art can be like outside of the gallery's white cube (email me anytime at sal AT highlala DOT com).

Happy New Year, one and all.

Guy Debord, describing the situationist practice of the d?©rive (‚Äúdrifting‚Äù), calls it "a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances."

He goes on to say "D?©rives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll. In a d?©rive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there."

Ordinarily one requires a city for a good d?©rive, but thinking of the internet as public space has made me wonder about the web's psychogeographical possibilities. The trick with a d?©rive is to find some way to take you outside of your normal and habitual ways of moving. Randomness and simple drifting are certainly a possibility, but often a set of rules, like an algorithm or a game (for instance traversing one city using the map of another) can help you find a deeper kind of randomness. Internet surfing can feel like drifting or strolling around a city, but as with physical d?©rives, a true internet d?©rive needs to take us into neighborhoods where we wouldn't usually find ourselves, following paths that make us aware of the specific character and mood of the spaces we pass through.

Here is a proposed method, which I've tried out a few times.

Begin by putting 2 or 3 disjunctive words into google (or your search engine of choice). It's surprisingly hard to think of genuinely unrelated words, so I've been working from the a page of randomly gathered words from the Free Words website. I pick the first link on the google page which isn't the Free Words page I just came from. From there, I use a simple set of guidelines to keep me moving as disjunctively as possible. I search each page for a link which is off-site -- I either choose the first such link, or if there are many, the one which seems farthest away in content or spirit. If there's no link off-site, I move around the site, hunting for one, often using the site's links page if there is one. If you come to a genuine dead-end, you can choose to either back up or end the d?©rive.

So far I've been able to go on this way almost indefinitely. Several times I have thought I've come to a dead end (shopping sites are the most dangerous, backwater eddies with very few outlinks indeed), but so far only one has been a genuine impasse.

Here's a d?©rive I did this morning:

I began at the new free words page and picked the pair of words "ukulele twiddle" which I googled. Following the first new link I found the lyrics of a song: "I Always Get to Bed by Half Past Nine"

Early to bed, I've always said, keeps us young men fit!
One evening while in gay Paree, a nice young lady said "wee wee"
I said such things aren't good for me
I always get to bed by half past nine.

These turned out to be the words of George Formby, a British player of something called the banjo ukulele who died in 1961 leaving behind what is clearly a passionate group of fans. I skipped to the home page of his fan club, looked around a bit, and then hunted for an exit on the links page, slipping onwards to the first link, the ukulele man, a rather charmingly low-tech website which offered the following advice:

*** For those of you who are new to the Internet: ***
On this web-site (as with most others)‘clicking’ on any BLUE TEXT takes you to a different page on this website, ‘links’ to other websites, or allows you to send emails directly.

After reading a bit about the site's founder, I moved on through its links page to the first outside link, another stop in the ukulele world, Catfish Carl's Closet. Scrolling down the page, I headed outward through an ad for Flea Market Music, admired some more ukes in various shapes and sizes, and then roamed onward through their links to hawaiiana dealers to Stamp Yourself Silly.

Not wanting to linger among the rubber stamps of Hawaiian images, I went right for their outbound page straight an though an ad for nerdworld. Nerdworld was a brief and refreshing dip into the parts of the web I'm more at home in, but I pressed forward, through their bizarre site of the week to a page of weather sites, the first of which was a page on hurricane Isabel.

Now I felt like strange juxtapositions were forming in my mind, and I was in parts of the internet I would never ordinarily encounter. After looking at some impressive storm pictures and wind diagrams, I went on to the Naval Research Laboratory home page and from there to the US Navy's "welcome aboard" page. Hurrying onward, from navy online to a list of naval related websites where I spied the intriguing Naval Ice Center. I saw some pictures of an iceberg calving in the Ross Sea, and went on to the Polar Science Team where I looked over the extent of the ice caps.

When I had seen enough ice, I followed a sidebar link out to NASA which had a surprisingly snazzy flash intro in which a large picture of Mars slowly comes into view. Curious, I went on into their "Flash Feature" and watched a few movie-style "previews" of the upcoming US Mars mission (what the NASA site calls "M2K4") scheduled to arrive Mars beginning January 4, 2004, before visiting the Mars project's regular site. Somehow, on Mars, I feel like I've arrived at a proper destination (it's right at the junction between science and science fiction, and outer space is arguably the geekiest version of public space). I bookmark the site for further reading, wanting to go and see whether the British Beagle lander has called home yet.

Before leaving the d?©rive for my more usual style of internet drifting, I assure myself there are some paths onward -- either through the JPL on to Cal Tech or through a "FirstGov" link at the bottom of every page on to a huge array of goverment agencies and information pages from census data on american housing to a list of the most popular baby names. If you want to keep going and see where they lead, by all means please do.

(For some further reading on internet d?©rives, check out the recent "Situationist Roaming Online" by Maren Hartmann, or either "Passage of the Fl?¢neur" by Gaylene Barnes or "A Virtual D?©rive" by Kristina Gregers Andersen, both from the early days of the web.)

Why do we go into public space? Why leave our houses and apartments? Often we go for commerce, to make money and spend money; we go to work, we go to shop and eat and play. Public space lies between us and where we want to be -- it's a transitional zone, a transit zone, where we walk and drive and ride subways and wait for airplanes. We go for information, to libraries, we go for entertainment and art, to museums and theaters, We go to be outside, to parks and playgrounds and even just sidewalks. We go for exercise and air, and a sense of space, something larger than our own rooms.

And we go to see other people, to be seen by them, to be in public. Some places exist almost purely as gathering points - cafes, bars and clubs. You're in them as much for the other people as for any other reason -- it's easier and cheaper to drink coffee or beer at home. Public space is space we have in common, space we use to commune with one another.

Howard Besser (in an interesting paper on the shrinking of truly public space online and in the real world) says: "Historically, the public spaces of cities have been centers of diversity. Even when housing was segregated along class or ethnic lines, public spaces were where people from all kinds of different backgrounds were exposed to each other. City streets, parks, and public transportation were melting pots of cultural differences, places where one would encounter people who dressed and spoke differently, hear people expressing opinions that one would never hear amongst their "peers", see people engaged in activities one had never seen before....Public spaces are important for diversity and free speech, as well as for the exchange of ideas. The exposure to differences that takes place there helps new ideas germinate. Public spaces are important to the creative process."

Working on the Free Biennial and Free Manifesta, two projects which were intended to take place in public space, I defined "public space" very broadly -- as "anywhere a stranger can enter." This included commercial spaces, even though they are of course more restricted than municipal spaces (many of our most important experiences of being in public happen in places that are owned by somebody). And it also included communication networks like the telephone, broadcast airwaves, and the internet.

As a public space, the internet has interesting strengths and weaknesses. Certainly the sheer power of its interconnections is amazing. You, the stranger, can enter almost any space, virtually as soon as you know it exists. You are completely unconstrained by geography, and have no fear of getting funny looks when you walk in wearing the wrong clothes. As soon as a site is put on the internet it becomes public unless it is walled off deliberately. Because of this there is an unprecedented proliferation of public spaces, a boomtown getting bigger every hour.

But when you step outside your door on the internet, you are largely unseen. Yes, you accept cookies, you show in statistics, you leave traces, but for the most part you pass through the public spaces online as a ghost, an almost invisible spectator. Despite the cheerful "Hi Sal!" and "Welcome Back!" of sites where you are a regular customer, the illusion that you are known in any personal way is thin: when you are "recognized" it is by an algorithm, at most, by an organization, almost never by a person. This, I think, is one reason the experience of being online feels so much more abstract than the experience of walking through a city.

When I think of walking in a city, what comes to mind is one of my most familiar paths, from my doorstep up Mulberry street across Houston and up Lafayette. There's something about this walk that never fails to engage me, to make me feel the cityness of the city. The light falls in changing patterns on the buildings, and sometimes everything feels superlit with an intense clarity, edged with a not quite visible glow. There are always strange (often unpleasant) smells behind the Puck building where the caterers slosh some of the leftovers of each night's party food in puddles of peculiar colors sometimes crowned with mounds of shining ice cubes. There is the suddenness of the traffic jockying aggressively along Houston street, and the sheer scale of the billboards that rise above it. Then somehow another quiet block of Mulberry is tucked in, ending in a funny triangular building with a narrow point that once housed t-shirts and used blue jeans and now holds a tiny cafe whose only seats are benches around trees on the sidewalk. From there, Lafayette is an ever changing display of half-illegal street posters, a wide street that is often empty of cars so you can stroll across it whenever you like. There's a tiny store, a jumble of amateur art and old guitars and amps, which unfolds itself into the sidewalk by day (the owner and a few guys hanging out talking and smoking and fooling around with the guitars all afternoon and into dusk) and then at night folds itself inwards like a sea creature, impossibly jammed into a room so packed there's not an inch of space for a person to walk in. Then the hopeful grandeur of the public theater and mystery of the colonnade across from it, and you find yourself in Astor place with its busy confluence of social types criss crossing from Broadway into the East Village.

Can we think of the internet as a kind of city? There are certain things we can expect of a physical city when we're walking in it. A city is always rich in surprises and juxtapositions, it is always changing. Our experience of it is social -- we're looking at other people and we're being looked at, hair, clothes, interactions, the looks on faces. Smell, sound, touch, kinesthetic scale and motion are as much apart of our walk as seeing is.

The internet has some of these qualities -- the sense of surprise and juxtaposition in particular is not all that hard to come by. The quality of being an individual among other individuals is growing, in particular through the explosion of blogs with their technologies for comments and trackbacks. But the real feeling of cruising around on the internet is much more abstract than walking the streets of the city. Its psychogeography seems thin and constrained, more like Debord's spectacle than his situation.

Greg Van Alstyn comments in his essay "Cyberspace and the Lonely Crowd" "Cyberspace is supposed to be about interactivity, connectivity and community. Yet... it is not about connection at all -- paradoxically, it is about separation" He goes on to explain, "When we are enthralled in any immersive virtual environment, the body seems to become mere baggage (or "meat"). Any synthetic illusion which is sufficiently well resolved to convince or even confuse the senses can capture our undivided attention. So why should we not try to pack up and move in? If perception is constructed, then there is no reason to privilege the "real" -- there is no "real" at all."

But for those of us who do remain interested in realness, what are the, then, any possibilities for a "real" experience of cyberspace, of the internet? To become a pyschogeographer of the internet is to seek out those aspects of it which are most surprising and alive -- to practice the internet d?©rive, to open yourself to strange encounters with individuals, to throw off your anonymity and wander the communities where someone can see you or know you, to participate in the great agoras of ebay, slashdot, and the blogiverse.

Next week, stay tuned as we experiment with an internet d?©rive.

public address system, public charity, public convenience, public debate, public debt, Public defender, public discussion, public domain, public domain software, public easement, public executioner, public exposure, public eye, public figure, public health, Public Health Service Act, public house, Public Key Infrastructure, public knowledge, public lavatory, Public law, public lecture, public library, public mover, public nudity, public nuisance, public opinion, public opinion poll, public presentation, public press, public property, public prosecutor, public relations, public relations man, public school, public security, public servant, public service, Public Service Commission, public speaker, public speaking, public square, Public Switched Telephone Network, public toilet, public transit, public transport, public treasury, public trust, public utility, public violence, public works, publically, Publican, publication, Public-hearted, publicise, publicised, publiciser, publicist, publicity, publicity man, Publicity pamphlet, publicize, publicized, publicizer, publicizing, public-key cryptography, Public-Key Cryptography Standards, public-key encryption, publicly, Public-minded, Publicness, public-relations campaign, public-service corporation, Public-spirited, publish, publishable, published,publisher, publishing, publishing company, publishing conglomerate, publishing empire, publishing firm, publishing house, Publishment, Publius, Publius Aelius Hadrianus, Publius Cornelius Scipio, Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Major, Publius Ovidius Naso, Publius Terentius Afer, Publius Vergilius Maro

Definition:
 
[n]  a body of people sharing some common interest; "the reading public"

[n]  people in general considered as a whole; "he is a hero in the eyes of the public"

[adj]  affecting the people or community as a whole; "community leaders"; "community interests"; "the public welfare"

[adj]  not private; open to or concerning the people as a whole; "the public good"; "public libraries"; "public funds"; "public parks"; "a public scandal"; "public gardens"; "performers and members of royal families are public figures"

Synonyms:
 
common, community(a), in the public eye(p), national, open, populace, semipublic, state, state-supported, unexclusive, unrestricted, world

See Also:
 
admass, audience, body, exoteric, overt, people

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The lists & definitions above and below are from entries in the HyperDictionary for "public" and "private." One of the striking things in these lists is how much morally better "public" is considered to be than "private". Almost all the meanings associated with "public" have an upright feel to them (the darkest is "pub" as in a "public house for drinking"), whereas the meanings of "private" include low rank, secrecy, sex, privation, theft, selfishness, and snobbishness. It is almost as if the mere activity of closing a door is suspect. If you close a door, the question arises right away: what's behind it? why can't I go in?

The Dutch, by custom, cover their front windows with lace rather than heavy curtains -- in the evenings, when the windows are lit, you can walk down the streets and see families moving about, eating, reading, talking, watching television. The implication of the custom is that the family does nothing in private that can't be seen publicly. It's a kind of proof of morality and good behavior.

When we go out into public space, we carry our private selves. It's almost like our bodies are ambulatory homes. Appearance may be public, thoughts are private. When we publish something, we bring our private thoughts into a collective conversation.

One of the works in the free biennial, Aram Saroyan's "though," has survived on my street for almost two years so far. I love to walk by and look at it, whenever it's not covered by layered flyers. It's clearly a public work, but the thoughts it embodies seem almost stubbornly private. Its mystery creates a little eddy in the flow of advertising, fashion, commerce, and transportation. A little "who?" a little "what?" a little "why?". Yet, at the same time, its language is so transparent, so simple, that even asking what it means seems peculiar. It's a kind of koan, a door that is open and closed at the same time.

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PRIVATE
 
Privatdocent, Private Automatic Branch eXchange, Private Branch Exchange, private corporation, private detective, private eye, private foundation, private instructor, private investigator, Private law, private line, Private Manual Branch eXchange, private nuisance, private parts, private property, private road, private school, private security force, private treaty, private-enterprise(a), Privateer, Privateering, Privateersman, privately, privately held corporation, privateness, privates, privation, privatise, Privative, Privatively, Privativeness, privatize

Definition:
 
[n]  an enlisted man of the lowest rank; "our prisoner was just a private and knew nothing of value"

[adj]  not expressed; "secret (or private) thoughts"

[adj]  concerning one person exclusively; "we all have individual cars"; "each room has a private bath"

[adj]  concerning things deeply private and personal; "private correspondence"; "private family matters"

[adj]  confined to particular persons or groups or providing privacy; "a private place"; "private discussions"; "private lessons"; "a private club"; "a private secretary"; "private property"; "the former President is now a private citizen"; "public figures struggle to maintain a private life"
 
Synonyms:
 
backstage, buck private, clannish, cliquish, cloistered, close, closed-door, closet(a), clubby, common soldier, confidential, individual(a), insular, inward, nonpublic, offstage, one-on-one, personal, privy, reclusive, secluded, secret, sequestered, snobbish, snobby, tete-a-tete, toffee-nosed

See Also:
 
enlisted man, esoteric

Backstage pass, part two: A photographic tour of the studio.

I was standing in St. Mark's Books yesterday, flipping through the pages of a glossy book on artists studios in the remainder bin. Looking at all the jars crusted with paint and the scatterings of sculpture across wide loft floors I was reminded that my studio has grown a bit peculiar as my work has grown away from making physical objects (sculpture and installation) and towards making things which are essentially invisible (social architectures).

A few days ago I woke from a dream about my studio, but in the dream the space looked very much like the first studio I ever had. It was on the edge of Boston's Chinatown, in an open corner in a loft space used by the Mobius performance group (of which I was a member then). With its blond wooden floor and unencumbered space, the whole thing had the feel of a dance studio. I made big color field paintings there.

In the years since then I've had studios in attics and apartment rooms, one in a former NOAA office on a floor of the town post office building which hadn't been used by anyone in years. That space felt like a school building, and while I was there I obsessively took pictures, and then pictures of pictures.

For six months during 1995 I had a studio in an empty gallery space. It had just been renovated, but they couldn't find a tenant during Provincetown's off-season, and I talked the landlord into letting me have it cheap for the winter months. I was completely in love with its white floor and the big windows which looked out onto the street (really, a passageway). I laid out instructional installations, changing them as often as I could, leaving the lights on all night so that people on their way to the town's only winter dance club, the A-house, could peer in.

This piece was "Dry 15 of Something Firm." I combined a randomly selected material (something firm), process (dry), and structure (the number 15) from stacks of cards I had made, a couple of hundred possibilities for each category. Then I carried out those instruction as best I could: "Bought 15 large butternut squash and a box of kosher salt. Split the squash in half, lengthwise, and scored each half deeply, then salted. Dried in the oven on trays at 200 degrees, repeatedly salting & draining. With the oven on 24 hours a day, each squash took three to four days to dry. The whole process took something over a week of continuous drying, swapping smaller pieces out as they dried, and newer pieces in. The house redolent with squash smell. Installed, they looked something like pairs of old shoes with curled up toes, leathery and golden, or pairs of chromosomes."

The last two big projects I've done have been artworks which are social architectures. What that has meant, in an exhibition context, is setting up an office/studio in the public spaces of the gallery. The idea was to present the projects not through documentation, but by creating a use-space in the exhibition context, a genuine outpost of the social artwork. During Free Manifesta in the summer of 2002, the office/headquarters was located in the Frankfurter Kunstverein, a museum-like space. The difficulty was to keep from feeling like objects on display, and the remedy I discovered as I was there week after week was to invite more people to use the space as a public studio.

Last summer, during Launch Option: Berlin, I set up an Opsound office in the B?ºroFriedrich Gallery. I had expected it have something like the feeling of Free Manifesta -- trying to do my office work while talking with people as they stopped by, making the participating artists feel welcome, etc. Instead, the five days of Launch Option were more like a music festival. We had some quiet afternoons like this one, where Opsound artist nim worked on new pieces of music, and I worked on the website, but the rest of the time, it was a series of parties and performances, causing me to expand my ideas about how studios can go public.

Which brings us back to this "public" studio. If every studio has a dream, my current studio's fantasy is to play at being the offices of some imaginary design company. The inspiration was taken, in part, from the offices of the interactive design group Meso, where I spent a few weeks in residency last spring as part of the Free Work project. The shelves of equipment and tangles of cords made it feel more like a real playground to me than any studio I had been in lately.

The idea of the current studio was also to make it possible, at least in theory, for other people to join me in working there. I love the privacy of studios, and the mixture of messiness and control which that privacy allows, but as my work gets more social, and as the projects get larger, it has seemed essential to begin to break some of that solitude down. My friend Dana comes to the studio two afternoons a week, mainly to work on the Free Words and Opsound projects. And the office has held meetings recently with nonprofits, software developers, moguls, and artists. It feels like just the beginning of something, a place where I'm pushing at my internal definitions of what art is, a struggle between the idea of the singular artist and the collective creations of culture and society, a little skirmish on the border zone private and public.

One of my favorite pieces in the Free Biennial was Circorama de la Nostalgia Op?©ristica's "Intimate Moments at the Guggenheim," a one-on-one tour of the non-public spaces of the museum.

It began at the gigantic loading dock where artworks were taken into the museum and, as my guide pointed out, the museum's trash was taken out. Orifice. We went on through the bowels of the museum, viewing the woodshops, exactly like theater shops -- here was where all those pedestals and displays were fabricated. We passed through office spaces, mundane with kitschy mugs and family snapshots (the most coveted offices at the Guggenheim include sections of the curved Frank Lloyd Wright wall), we examined a bit of correspondence in the enormous collection of files, went on through the guard's locker room, peered into the closet which contained the last remaining preserved section of the original Frank Lloyd Wright carpeting, and stood together on the rooftop, surely one of the most beautiful and least seen places in the city, looking out over the arc of the rim.

At some point near the beginning of the tour, we emerged from the back rooms and crossed the plaza of public space at the foot of the building's spiral. The Brazil show was in its final days, the rotunda darkened, the gigantic cathedral altarpiece dramatically lit, the murmer of the crowds and the slap of their feet on the terrazzo echoing around us, and suddenly the theater of the museum was revealed by the contrast of these two modes of work space and display space, backstage and onstage.

It's easy to forget how theatrical all exhibition is -- how people are scurrying to clean up before the public steps in the door. The artifice of it, the dream of it. Websites employ some of that same theater. They (often) create an illusion of completeness, even as we know they are protean and ephemeral. Because they typically erase their own history as they are revised and re-presented, websites seem to exist in a continuous present.

If the backstage of the museum is office cubicles and woodshops, what's the backstage of the website? There's the physical world of course, the room that the designer's computer sits in. For the most part we never even glimpse those spaces, although I do remember in the early web-design days, peering through a webcam lens into the offices of Auriea Harvey at entropy 8.

Her webcam isn't up any more, but in that spirit, here are a couple of web design studio cams: Typneun, Triple D Design, and North Studio, plus an engineering studio, and a radio studio.

There's also the backstage of revision and incompleteness. Websites are frequently redesigned and tweaked, but unless we follow them very closely we just flow along with the changes. Websites are now the most ephemeral form of publishing (of making public) - even xeroxed zines can have a much longer lifespan. In the heyday of the dotcom boom it wasn't uncommon for designers to work for 6 months on sites that only existed for a few weeks before they were redesigned or simply taken offline forever.

One of the only ways to look back at old versions of websites and get a feel for this state of constant revision is the internet archive's wayback machine. The wayback machine is an attempt at creating an accessible archive of the entire internet, added to in archeological layers. The resulting pages are given permanently linkable urls. Of course it doesn't contain everything, but it's reach is surprisingly broad. (Note: the huge size of the wayback machine does mean it can be very slow, and also, links between pages of the websites may not work when you click on them, even if the relevant pages have been archived, although it is often possible to reconstruct the correct links by hand.)

We can see what glowlab.com was like before Christina ray founded the glowlab we know and love. We can see the glowlab front page from May 2002, just after glowlab started, or a year ago, last november. You can even see my now deleted glowlab project page.

There are earlier versions of my highlala site, which has become more precisely a portfolio site in the last year. The earliest highlala, which I think of myself as "red highlala" and was something like a zine, wasn't spidered by the internet archive and so no online record exists. I thought I had a copy archived on some hard drive, when I looked recently I coudn't find any trace, so now it's just a memory shared by very few indeed.

All this by way of inviting you to the backstage, pre-revised site of a new project I'm working on, called intheconversation. If you have the inclination you can watch it evolve between now and it's official launch in a couple of weeks. Peer into the empty rooms and the provisional links menus. Look at the fresh paint on the walls. See the texts and design elements appear, disappear, tweak and morph. I'll be running around, trying to get everything clean and well lit before the public comes through the door.

I had wanted to give you all a photo-tour of the studio today, but rainy weather means low light in the studio, not great for picture-taking. Instead, a little window onto the day:

The morning began with a friend fixing a part of my computer which has been broken for 6 months -- a bit of a 1/8th inch plug broken off deep inside my headphone output port. All audio has gone out of the computer via usb since then, and with a recent upgrade, suddenly that has started to cause serious problems. Now, (thank you Seth!) sound, real sound. A happy day. And I'm feeling inspired by a concert I saw last night at the Knitting Factory with Morr Music artists B. Fleischmann and Ms. John Soda. So, first thing in the studio I set up some files from recent rehearsals of my band, Weapons of Mass Destruction (glowlab regular Sharilyn Neidhardt on guitar, me on laptop) and fool around with music for a while. A few hours go by.

Suddenly I remember that I actually need to get a couple of things done. A curator from Slovenia, Natasa Petresin, is including the Opsound project in a show she's putting together in Ljubljana called "Open Beats" (various global works relating to open source music, coinciding with the Slovenian language release of Linux). Friday I sent her a set of Opsound CDs, stickers, and cards, and she emailed me asking for a picture of the discs so she could plan the presentation. (I sent her something a bit more formal -- the picture here is from me making the disks under flourescent lights late Thursday night)

Also, my friend Saul Judd, a curator working in Frankfurt and Berlin, emailed me on Friday "an invitation to be happy about failure", asking if I wanted to be part of a project he's working on -- due date: today (!). The assignment: a still image or short video, "a piece that would represent themselves as young talented artist that failed (i want to see if artists are capable to face this situation, hypothetically). it can be a self portrait for example. as we can say that there is a great beauty in failure and i perceive failure also as a very determinant factor in the humane existence."

I love the idea of this: to, for a moment at least, be happy about failure. So I take a picture of a cardboard box full of all my old poetry manuscripts.

About 10 years ago, I did indeed feel like I had failed. I had been writing poetry seriously for more than a decade, and while I had some publications in good journals and the like, I couldn't find a publisher for my manuscript. I had sent it out, in endlessly varying versions, year after year after year. Now I look back on that with some quizzical feelings. It was the feeling of failure that pushed me towards visual art (and the current non-visual artwork that I do). If my manuscript had easily found a home, I would likely never have discovered the work that feels so important to me now.

There's something too about cardboard boxes. They are where we store the stuff we carry from apartment to apartment. They're both forlorn and hopeful -- we're keeping what's in them, but not keeping it in use. Everything stored has some kind of potential, but as often as not, once something is in a box, we never look inside. It can stay there, in the dark, year after year. In this way, it is a bit like a seed. Some seeds become trees, but most never find the right mix of soil, water, sun, and space to become anything at all.

(Saul Judd's project is streaming from November 20-23 at at alphakanal as part of the Festival Junger Talente)

A couple of weeks ago I was walking down the street with Glowlab founder Christina Ray. We had just left a presentation at the new museum by several students in the new media programs at NYU and SVA, and we were meditating on how different working on websites was from the more familiar qualities of the traditional artist's studio.

Usually the studio is a private space for play and exploration, for eating, reading, napping, making messes, cleaning up, reordering, making things and looking at things. It's a radically free space, and that freedom is in part created by the feeling of being alone there.

I think I ended up as a visual artist in part because I was so in love with studios. The first ones I ever saw, when I was in college and briefly dating an architecture student, were the little half-private cubicles full of models, drawings, and drafting tools, laid out in a giant stair-stepped room with a skylit ceiling (Gund Hall at the Harvard School of Design). He showed me how architects learned to write in careful capitals made from angular strokes, and my own writing has never quite been the same since.

While we were walking along, Christina suggested that running a website is a little like putting your studio on public display -- revisions happen right in front of everyone and if your attention goes elsewhere for awhile, the website languishes. But even so, a great deal remains hidden behind the scaffolding. Web spaces are made in physical spaces which are almost never shown -- they project a kind of fantasy of completeness, even if they sometimes fail that fantasy.

So for a month or so, this blog will be a look into my studio, the physical studio and the backstage of various web projects, some ongoing, some under revision, one just launching. Along the way it will meditate on the questions of public and private work, on the internet as public space, and websites as theaters.

Big thanks to Sharilyn Neidhardt for sharing her adventures in Human Chess -- from a crazy, costumed game in San Francisco to being featured on Canadian television, with a little last-minute passport drama thrown in for good measure.
...and now, we're happy to announce Sal Randolph's arrival in the 'lab. For the next several weeks, Sal will be opening her studio to the public via the Glowlab projects blog, displaying the backstage workings of several web-based projects, and meditating on the internet as a public space.

Sal Randolph lives in New York and produces independent art projects involving gift economies and social architectures, including Free Words, the Free Biennial and Free Manifesta. She has recently been developing new work in the areas of open source/copyleft music distribution (Opsound) and political organization (Opcopy).

i'm about to turn over this column to my close friend sal randolph. i'm very excited to read what she will blog about, she is a huge inspiration to me and one of the smartest people i've ever met. her excursions into deconstructionist music, social architecture, and opensource publishing continue to break new ground every day.

the human-scale chess project will continue. i'm a little tired of organising the chess game for the moment, so i'm tabling it until next calendar year. we'll definitely stage another one for the next psygeoconflux in new york, and there may be another game in the interim in los angeles. jen shahade was at my home for a small party last night, and she is anxious to continue collaborating with me on this project. her luminosity as a star in the chess world really attracts attention and participation to the project, and i am always grateful for her enthusiasm. she's currently working on a book about women in chess tentatively titled 'chess bitch'.

in the meantime, i am joining many other amateur novelists in National Novel Writing Month. thousands of writers are attempting to complete a 50,000 word novel by november 30 at midnight. i've just completed my first thousand words and i can say without modesty that it is truly awful so far. i will be blogging about my efforts as a first-time novelist at my regular blog: http://johnnieutah.diaryland.com . for more about the National Novel Writing Month project, see their excellent site at http://www.nanowrimo.org .

keep your eyes on the human chess project site for future developments!
http://www.bassjunky.com/humanchess

i'm finally back in brooklyn. being away from home for so long really affected me strongly. for one thing, i think its the first time i've thought of new york city as 'home' rather than california. i spent all of tuesday travelling from vancouver to brooklyn, almost twenty-four hours of planes and trains with a little bit of last-minute shopping and dining in san francisco squeezed in. it was worth it, because i was able to see peter for a few hours before he took off for 10 days in baltimore.

the vancouver game went really well. we never did get a chess master to play the master game. i drafted a couple presenting at pre/amble to play the game, but they ditched me at the last minute to go sightseeing. at 2:15p (the game was to begin at 2:30p), mike and nick volunteered to play the master game. their collective knowledge of chess was not impressive. during the game, mike asked me if queens could move diagonally (they can), and if his king could capture the enemy queen who was three squares away (the king only moves one square at a time). mike still won with a stunning checkmate in 25 moves. they were both great sports despite the fact that i was heckling them for erratic moves during the entire game.

the folks in vancouver were really nice, incredibly enthusiastic and warm. many pieces didn't get to move or were captured before they could move, and everyone seemed pretty okay with that. some of the costumes were outstanding, especially the white queen and her court (she dressed like queen amidala of the star wars series), the black queen and her court, and rob the black queenside bishop, who repurposed a church sale evening gown into one of the most fashionable costumes. one white pawn even fashioned her hair into a knob-like shape so that she evoked a pawn in profile.

i was lucky enough to have colleen coplick volunteer to do a lot of PR for the vancouver game, and she was able to get a TV station to do a short spot on the chess game. gretchen and i saw the spot from our hotel room, a few minutes at the end of the local evening news. i must admit it was thrilling to see myself on television. the cameraman also followed the black queen on some of her rounds capturing pieces and talking to me on her cellphone. i was pleased that the spot seemed to capture the flavor of the game.

i'm crashing at the circle-r ranch in san francisco. i'm not the only one, either. everyone here is pulling together for a big halloween party this evening. but i'm planning a chess game.

this morning i'm waiting for fedex to come with my birth certificate. i almost completely freaked out yesterday when the consulate told me my temporary passport from berlin wasn't proof of citizenship, and that i would need to find my birth certificate or an old passport before i could get a new one. i need a new passport to get into canada for my chess game on sunday. meaning that as of 2pm yesterday, i had about 26 hours to try to get proof of citizenship overnighted to me here in san francisco. fortunately, after many frantic cellphone calls, my mom agreed to overnight my birth certificate to the circle-r this morning. if she hadn't been organised enough to keep it in a safe place, i wouldn't be going to canada tomorrow.

planning for vancouver is going pretty well. the canadians are really enthusiastic, and i even have a friend from san francisco who now lives in seattle playing the role of a black bishop. i lost my chess master, tal shaked, to a scheduling conflict, so gretchen and i will have to pull something out of our hats as far as the chess game itself. i'm heading to vancouver a day before the game so maybe i'll have time to run into some chess players. but overall, after a few dropouts and such, we have almost all roles filled.

i was able to get in a long soak at the japanese bathhouse yesterday, which calmed my nerves considerably. after, gretchen and i were invited to dinner last night by fellow f'logger courtney utt. i was bowled over by her hospitality, charming home, and sheer unavoidable photographic talent. looking at stacks and stacks of her prints and lab proofs, it made me for the first time more curious about film photography. her work coaxes angst, exhiliration, resignation, and joy out of empty hotel rooms and reflections in store windows.

happy new year!

while whiling away my days in northern california, playing chess and catching up on partisan politics, i decided i had enough time and extra money to pop down to southern california and see my family. still a week out from the vancouver game, which is mostly planned, i thought it would also be a good idea to get out of my exceptionally generous northern californian hosts' hair for a day or two. this was days before most of southern california became blanketed in smoke.

my seatmate on the plane was flying back to san diego county to reinforce a home in imminent danger. as our airplane descended to 9,000 feet above long beach (one of the few airports with good visibility today), i heard her sharp intake of breath. we were descending through not a smog layer but a smoke layer. the sea beneath us as we banked winked in and out of existence in the thick brown haze. long beach is a good 50 miles from any of the many fires blazing out of control even as i write this.

my hometown has always had an apocalyptic feeling for me. i used to think everyone felt that way about the place they grew up. but later i realised that for most people earthquakes, droughts, riots, freeway shootings, and christian fundamentalism are not a normal part of growing up. late tonight, as the last-quarter moon glows red in the smoke and 80-foot walls of flame dominate the evening news, its easy to feel i could reach out and touch the end of the world.

human chess fotolog

the san francisco game took place on saturday. it was incredibly fun. i was amazed at the the ability of charles gelman and liina vark to play such an interesting game of chess in a circus-like atmosphere. they are true professionals! they played for more than three hours, with constant interruptions and awkward pauses for frisbee-chasing dogs, odd phone calls, frequent beer tosses, and many unruly fans.

a group called 'academic chess' showed up with a canopy, several motor scooters, a bottle of estonian vodka, and two tons of fun. they were incredibly helpful and made the experience really fun for me. one of their instructors started making the notations of the moves for me, and gradually became the color commentary. he was like a stand-up comedian of chess! maurice ashley should watch his back.

it's mellow and unseasonably warm in san francisco today. i'm seated in the back of my favorite coffee shop in the outer mission, the atlas cafe at 21st and bryant. like most cafes in williamsburg, they offer a free wireless connection to the internet. i've set up a little desk for myself near the window, complete with laptop, iced tea, allergy medicine, cellphone, digicam. i hardly noticed the last 3 hours melt away.

the generous ms. courtney utt dropped by my atlas 'office' just now to pick up the iron-ons for the san francisco t-shirts. i'm truly amazed at how helpful she has been. she's a fellow fotologger who i contacted about documenting the san francisco game for me. she immediately offered me a place to stay (which i politely declined as i am staying with gretchen). when i sent out to the sf list that i was trying to coordinate t-shirts, she offered to do it for me through a friend of hers. all i really had to do was email her how many shirts i needed and print out the iron-ons, and she is handling the rest. i have been remarkably lucky to get in touch with ms. utt, and with many other people as well here on the west coast, who have shown genuine enthusiasm for my project.

the human-scale chess project wouldn't be at all possible without the internet. cellphones also a big part of the project, but i can't think of a more efficient way to reach enough interested people to participate in the game without the internet. the game was mentioned in the san francisco SFWeekly, and i've relied on a few friends to help draft people and get the word out, but 90% of the participants have been culled from posts on craig's list and a few other mailing lists and events boards in san francisco. almost everyone who has emailed me so far has been incredibly supportive, helpful, and enthusiastic. i donate $5 per month to keep fotolog running, but other than that the organising of the chess project has also been free.

i worked on the internet in the earler days (circa 1995) and after the commercial flood (and subsequent drought) of the late 20th century i became quite cynical about the potential of the internet to bring people together and be genuinely useful. it seemed as though everyone was cashing in on empty promises in one irrationally exuberent ponzi scheme. more recently though, participating in fotolog and organising this project has restored my faith in the internet. i feel great about it again, nearly as excited as i was when i posted my first webpage. the internet once again seems like a fun party filled with interesting people i want to meet.

hello!

my mind is crazed with activity today. i'm trying to get everything nailed down before i have to leave town for san francisco. i have to mail out a lot of paint to people before i take off! i was also trying to finish a painting before i have to be out of my studio for 3 weeks, but i don't think its going to happen. i leave new york wednesday morning. i'm trying to squeeze in one more band practice, and one more coffee with ms. ray before i leave. you'd think i was leaving for a year!

but tonight, relaxing with the regulars at the williamsburg chess and go club for wayward men and ladies. the other group that shares the luckycat cafe with us on monday nights show movies, and this month they are featuring horror films in honor of halloween. last week, they showed 'the exorcist' and all the chess players (myself included) slowly finished their games and drifted in to watch the movie. damn its scary! especially when that poor little girl walks down the stairs bent backwards and vomits blood!

new! check out our group fotolog at http://www.fotolog.net/humanchess . there's not much on it right now but soon it will be filled with photos of the event.

planning the human-scale chess project

i'm about a week away from the second human-scale chess game in san francisco, and three weeks away from the third one in vancouver. the san francisco game is pretty locked down. we still need a few pawns here and there, and i think we still need a white queenside knight, but all in all we've acquired quite a few volunteers. there is a blurb going into the SF weekly hitting the streets on october 15 so i'm hoping that will drive the last ten or so volunteers to the game. i am guessing a lot of people will just wander by with their cellphones on saturday anyway, and i need to make sure we're ready to accomodate that.

jennifer shahade, who played the master game during the first human-scale chess game, and who is one of the top women players in the country, has been remarkably supportive of this project. she was kind enough to put me in touch with a young national master in northern california, charles gelman, who is going to play against estonian chess sensation and recent emigre liina vark. i guess i'm a little surprised that the young chess stars are excited about this project, i keep expecting them to blow me off as a flaky artist. but they've been enthusiastic and excited and supportive. i'd like to think this project is raising the profile of chess in some small way. DJs in san francisco used to sloganeer: 'keep techno sexy'; if i can make chess a little sexier for people i will consider the project a success.

i've been so focused on the san francisco game that the vancouver game is lagging a bit. but i'll have lots of leisure time in san francisco after that game has been completed to sign up camadian volunteers. what are the odds i can pull in some seattle people as well? the top junior player in the country is in seattle, tal shaked, and mr. gelman says he just might be up for helping me.

today i am making the iron-ons for the t-shirts the players will wear in san francisco. later, i will call liina vark and see if she can meet with me and charles sometime wednesday night so i can brief them on the setup of the game, see if they have any special requirements.

The human scale chess project, developed by Brooklyn-based artist Sharilyn Neidhardt, was originally conceived for the first annual Psy-Geo-Conflux in New York in May, 2003. The mechanics of the project are simple: each participant plays the role of a human chess piece on a board covering eight square blocks of a city. Somewhere in the middle of the board, two expert players engage in a game of chess. After each move, the appropriate piece is called via cellphone and given instructions on how to move.

Chess players often struggle to maintain a mental image of the entire board and to view the pieces as a system, rather than as independent actors. The human scale chess project offers an opportunity to see the game from the unique perspective of a single piece.

Sharilyn is now preparing for games in San Francisco and Vancouver; we've invited her to blog it here so you can follow the project's every move. Stay tuned....

by Christina Ray

Jake Barton is a New York-based exhibition designer who joined us in May for Psy-Geo-Conflux, where he presented his New York Observers project. Shown on a video viewmaster, a headset with immersive sound, the project engages viewers in a documentary about New York’s living landmarks – including street vendors, building superintendents and police officers – who share observations of their surroundings over time.

Jake’s fascination with maps, coupled with his interest in narrative structures, forms the basis of his "creative cartography" projects. He explains that these projects "exploit the difference between the seemingly objective form of 'map-ness' and the inherent messy subjectivity of human experience." City of Memory is an ongoing project featuring an interesting approach to collaborative mapping. Jake has established a navigational scheme in which the user begins with a large map of the New York metro area and quickly zooms in and around the five boroughs to encounter stories placed on the map by other users. The Flash-based design offers a friendly interface well-suited to a variety of users. According to Jake, "City of Memory allows visitors to create a collective memory by submitting stories to a dynamic map of New York City. Visitors link stories together by theme, creating new 'neighborhoods' of narrative that can be walked by others. Stories can be recommended, giving new visitors a sense of the narrative created by the populace." There are both text and audio stories on the site, ranging from a description of heartbreak in Battery Park to a knife attack in Flatbush.

Some of Jake's projects have been shown in museum contexts. Memory Maps, a project for the Smithsonian Folklife festival in 2001 and the precursor to City of Memory, involved the creation of an oversized street map installation which was tagged with stories by visitors. City of Memory has just received an NEA Technology Grant with CityLore, and will be a permanent exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York opening in 2005.

In additional to his professional design work for which he has received numerous awards, Jake's design firm Local Projects is currently designing interactives for the Museum of the City of New York, Grand Central Station, and the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum.

launch City of Memory >>

New media artists Cynthia Lawson and Eric Forman are putting electronics into the hands of artists with their latest project, a crash-course on interactive technology. The 5-hour intensive course is "geared toward people interested in exploring new possibilities for screen-based and installation art, robotics and 'smart' architecture." Glowlab members Sharilyn Neidhardt and Christina Ray attended their recent workshop at Brooklyn's OfficeOps. With over 30 people in attendance (and more who missed it due to the L train being down all weekend), Lawson and Forman carefully demonstrated how to turn a thin sliver of green plastic into a powerful processor that can trigger anything from screen effects and video clips to motors and lighting.

Lawson and Forman took turns explaining basic electronics, BX-24 micro-controllers, input, serial communication, and output.

With both Mac and PC laptops, they showed us how to send instructions to the BX-24 and use Macromedia Director to design the output.

This "bread-board" connected a BX-24, power, ground, resistor and a switch to create a closed circuit that turned on the LED.

The multimeter was used to measure voltage, current, resistance and continuity.

Attendees included artists, teachers, theater designers, programmers and some who came just because they were curious. A question-and-answer period at the end allowed people to ask about designing and troubleshooting their own projects.

Lawson and Forman held a similar version of this workshop at the recent Siggraph Conference in San Diego. For information about future workshops, contact Cynthia Lawson or Eric Forman.

Cynthia Lawson biography:

B.S., Universidad de los Andes; M.P.S., New York. Cynthia Lawson is a new media technologist, artist and educator. Her interest in new technologies started with her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Los Andes in her native Bogota, Colombia. Her thesis, “A Physical Model of a Musical Instrument: The Flute" culminated in a concert for virtual flute performed in Bogota with electronic musician Ricardo Escallon (1999). Cynthia has taught various technology and art courses at Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), City College of New York, University of los Andes and Siggraph. Her work has been seen at the Modern Museum of Art (Bogota), UCLA Hammer Museum, Macy Gallery, NY Arts Space, CalArts, RISD, and various online journals and publications.

Cynthia lives in New York City and currently works at Columbia University’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning.

Eric Forman biography:

Eric Forman is an artist working with innovative interactive and robotic technology. He received his Masters from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at the Tisch School of the Arts in New York in 2002. He has been working with computers and new technology since 1986, and has over 7 years of professional experience with new media, including 3D animation, web design, programming, and video production. He received his B.A. from Vassar College in 1995 where he developed his own interdisciplinary program called The Philosophical Ramifications of Computer Technology. His thesis work there brought traditional philosophy, film/media theory, and art history to bear on Virtual Reality. He has taught classes in all aspects of digital media from Interactive Animation for Artists to Advanced Actionscripting to PIC Microcontrollers. He also designs and builds furniture to make sure his life is not spent in front of computer screens. His current work focuses on interactive installations and autonomous robotic sculpture.

Kevin Bray's recent project "experiences the edges of the PCS system in the US." As he explains, "The rules of the test were that I call my psychoanalyst in New York at the regular, appointed times, while I ride my motorcycle cross-country. I carried with me printed out maps of nationwide PCS (Sprint) coverage. After each 45 minute conversation, I took photos of the place and myself. The results are an emotional photographic map, in which few of the remote parts of the country are represented."

Launch project >>

We have new projects to show you that will be here soon, and we'll archive a few featured projects from the past on this page as we re-build Glowlab in the new Typepad format we're beta-testing....stay tuned.

From D. Jean Hester on her recent Notice installation:
"The photo is frame grab from a video which was one of the channels for my installation "Notice". The video was shot while waiting on the Queens MOMA shuttle, just around the corner from the entrance to the museum. It was raining, and I noticed how the rain outside combined with rain streaming on the windshield of the bus, with multiple reflective surfaces... it's a trippy/beautiful piece of video! I also shot video inside the diner that is in the picture, and that ended up being a channel in the installation as well. A very fruitful day in Queens! Of the 14 videos that were part of that show, 7 were shot in New York."