projection on any handy blank surface

I was sent this link by an architect. Aside from getting the perspective just right (and it would only look perfect from one small vantage point), this is not all that hard to do.This particular instance is very well done.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/27/video-life-altering-3d-projection-splashed-on-german-building/#continued

Cris

IMPACT Jumping Together at the Pizza Party

More than 70 articipants came together at NYU in Pless Hall Lounge to meet each other and the IMPACT staff on Monday, July 20. Many had just arrived from other countries such as Korean, Denmark, and Taiwan. This is a lively group of people, creative, spirited and enthusiastic, bringing diverse backgrounds to a program that explores diversity, the arts, and technology. In the next three weeks these participants will learn a lot about the collaborative process and the use of technology to extend the expressive range of creating art.

Revised Visual Arts Workshop

A search for visual understanding

Through the process of collaboration students will explore the visual image in relation to sound, our own imaginations, and technology. By using our own imaginations and memories students will recall memories of sounds in nature or musical numbers that evokes a strong visual connection. Students will appropriate these memories and collaborate to create news works of art that evoke the spirit of these memories. 

By first using traditional means of painting students will work together to create large murals that are representative of the diverse imaginations and memories of students. Students will be asked to develop a theme around each of their pieces. 

Upon completion students will have the chance to appropriate these finished pieces using digital video technology. With this portion of the workshop students will collaborate to create a video piece that is an extension of the 2d piece, while still creating a new work of art with the video technology. 

By the end of the workshop students will: 

*Have experienced art making through means of collaboration

*Gain a stronger understanding of the visual image in relation to other forms of art and life

*Used the visual arts as a means of communicating ideas 

*Used technological means to create new works of art 

*Created art through means of dialogue with fellow students 

In addition a possible collaboration can be arranged between the music students and visual art students. Myself and Leo have discussed having the music students arrange a piece of music that will given to the visual art students to appropriate. The visual art students will create a visual image based off of this musical piece. The same can be done for the music students where the visual art students create an image and the music students appropriate this image. 

Consilience

Consilience means everything "jumping together" (all boundaries are blurred) There is a fine entry about consilience at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consilience

"Consilience, or the unity of knowledge (literally a "jumping together" of knowledge), has its roots in the ancient Greek concept of an intrinsic orderliness that governs our cosmos, inherently comprehensible by logical process, a vision at odds with mystical views in many cultures that surrounded the Hellenes. The rational view was recovered during the high Middle Ages, separated from theology during the Renaissance and found its apogee in the Age of Enlightenment. Then, with the rise of the modern sciences, the sense of unity gradually was lost in the increasing fragmentation and specialization of knowledge in the last two centuries." (Consilience)

In reading some of the participant responses to our survey some wrote about being All One, or Coming Together... the idea of consilience emerged as I read through their responses.

Edward O. Wilson's 1998 book Consilience is one of the great achievements in western literature for cultural and scientific criticism and analysis. It is an extraordinary book, especially for clarifying how the blurring of boundaries among disciplines has come about and placing it in a historical and cultural context. He argues that for the 21st century there are two ways of knowing the world (i.e., producing new knowledge) Science and the Arts.

Wilson is persuasive in showing how the arts produce knowledge and the significance of that knowledge for our continued growth and development.

If we are to make this a theme for the final production, we need to appropriate it in ways that show how technology has brought about arts collaboration and the creation of new work through the interpenetration of individual arts, and the cohesion of arts and sciences.

I CHING (The Book of Changes)

I CHING, the book of changes, postulates that "Change is Inevitable." I Ching observes that the only constant in the universe is change. I Ching helps anticipate change and provides a window into future actions. Its basis for discussion is the casting of sticks or coins that result in hexagrams that are beautifully descriptive of human conditions and states of being.

There are some thoughtful iterations of I Ching on the Internet such as I Ching Online. This is a wonderfully concise site that provides an excellent intoduction to I Ching:

I Ching Basics Fu Hsi (pronounced foo shee), the great Chinese sage to whom the I Ching system is attributed, constructed his answers in the form of sixty-four figures, the six linear lines stacked one above the other, either undivided, or divided, called kua. The top three lines and the bottom three lines of each of the kua are called trigrams. Following the law of eternal change, the lines are always in motion, always moving upward. As a new line enters from the bottom, it pushes the five lines above it upward, thereby displacing the line at the top. The movement is always in time to the rhythm of the universal heartbeat, always mirroring the universe itself. Taken together, the kua and their lines represent every conceivable condition in heaven and on earth with all their states of change. Each of the sixty-four kua, with their combined total of 384 lines, represents a situation or condition. Each situation or condition contains the six stages of its own evolution: About to come into being Beginning Expanding Approaching maximum potential Peaking Passing its peak and turning toward its opposite condition. The kua, therefore, not only represent every conceivable situation and condition possible, but also include all their states of change.( I Ching Online)

I Ching is extremely elegant in design and concept, but might be very difficult to truly implement as a theme, unless one simply applied the hexagrams almost as a score, the way John Cage did for a number of his works inspired by I Ching.

Thoughts on the Theatre workshop

Hello, all!

Here are a few ideas on the direction in which I think I'll take the Theatre Workshop. Feedback would be most welcome!

Theatre artist Robert Alexander, of Living Stage in Washington DC once stated that "Every human being is an artist and in the moment of creation, we are at our most sane, most healthy and most fulfilled. When we share a piece of our vision of the world with others, we are better able to see ourselves, to interact with others, and to make our own choices."

As a theatre artist, I am most interested in the ways in which Theatre intersects with our daily lives in both formal and informal ways, and am inspired by the endless potential narratives that come out of the interactions that we have, both small and large, significant or mundane. At every point in our day, we may choose to be participants or observers in an ever changing and growing improvisation. While it is entirely possible to passively participate within our everyday surroundings, we can also use these random interactions to create connections with our surroundings and the individuals with whom we share that space.

The IMPACT Theatre Workshop will encourage participants to find meaningful ways of interacting with both their environment and each other. Using the workshop model developed by Michael Rohd of the Hope Is Vital Theatre Company, participants will develop both personal and collaborative narrative threads that explore the now. Through exploration of the voice, body and imagination, Theatre Workshop participants will

*create safe spaces in which all artists can work
*engage in meaningful dialogue
*explore choice and consequence of action
*take risks
*take action to be the protagonist in one's own life
*utilize the multiple perspectives that different individuals bring to the collaborative work

At the end of the workshop, participants will have begun the development of an original piece that incorporates the work and perspectives gained from across the various IMPACT workshops.

IMPACT Extends a Digital Tradition

In 1996, NYU participated in one of the earliest collaborative exchanges on the Internet, connecting via the older modem connections three sites: a group of actors from NYU, a group of dancers at Fraser University in Vancouver, and a group of musicians at a loft in Greenwich Village. The major sponsors of the event were the composer Dr. Dinu Ghezzo, composer Dr. John Gilbert, theatre dramaturg, Dr. Alistair Martin-Smith, choreographer dancer Lisa Naugle who has since completed her doctorate and is now Chair of the Dance Department at UCI, and Pierre DeKarangal, web artist and theorist, who also has since completed his doctoral study.

The groups improvised materials for each other to respond to based on the figure Cassandra, which we treated as the precursor of women in our contemporary culture. This issue continues to be urgent and perhaps even more relevant today with the oppression of women in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world and the violent suppression of freedom taking place in Iran.

We posted brief 30 -45 second improvisations which each group reacted to and posted their own responses. The collaboration was asynchronous, but encapsulated within a two hour period, so each response was posted as soon as improvised, and over the period we built up a wealth of materials. These materials (music, acting, and dancing) formed the basis of a live multimedia performance in Loewe Theatre, Spring, 1997.

Cassandra continued to be the inspiration for many of our productions over the years. What emerged from these productions was the spirit of improvisation, spontaneity, and the creation of new work through collaboration of new work using technology and the arts in a multimedia environment.

Three years ago, IMPACT emerged as an extension of this work, aimed primarily at international students during the summer and now opening to include students at college level who are ready to explore technology and how it can serve to extend and amplify their artistic expressive range.

I started playing with the design of a website that would bring together more than a decade of work in multimedia creative collaborative productions. One problem with art on the Internet and as digital material is that it can be somewhat ephemeral and elusive. The objects of the productions are subject to be relegated to anonymous archives that either no one knows about or remembers to visit. That is often because the artists move on to new creative challenges that continue to extend the techniques of collaborative interaction and invention. When one is always in the moment, history somehow seems...well you know...dated....archaic.

Here is what I have so far: IMPACT: Breaking Boundaries