E89 New Media Arts in the 20th and 21th Century, a class taught by Hillary Mushkin, had its annual student showcase. The course goes over major art movements and pieces stemming from around WWI such as Dada-ism, surveillance art and mediated realities. Each lecture is an exploration and discussion of various pieces, and the course culminates in a student-designed art piece that relates to the themes coveredover the term.
A crawl-in experience, this enclosure has mirrored walls that reflect the various strands of LEDs, making it seem as if the viewer is surrounded by infinite lights. Music plays as a wearable device on the viewer's wrist translates his or her heart beats into pulses of light. In a way, this extends the viewer's body into a large, expansive space.
The 1960's Fluxus Performance Notebook is a collection of instructions, proposals and propositions for readers to perform their own "happenings". Viewers at this exhibit are invited to perform in a more modern rendition.
Viewers step in front of a camera and are turned into mini-virtual characters on the screen. As the exhibit went on, the virtual world became more and more populated with small moving avatars.
To help users embody a web crawler, ads from a live web crawl pop up and overlay over a video of someone taking a walk. Users can control how quickly the web crawler (and correspondingly, the video of the nature walk) navigates the web by pulling on a joy stick.
The shopping cart is fitted with a monitor that shows lots of added features, such as GPS for navigation through a grocery store. Users can shoot at it using a wave gun to make the cart roll by itself. This absurd piece is meant to highlight how many consumer products are overwhelmed by superfluous extra features.
When packing for college, the first thing on your mind is likely not about celebrating your birthday. However, months later, as the inevitable birthday approaches, you may actually start to wonder what a birthday looks like without the friends and family you’ve likely spent every year with. Thankfully, at Caltech, there are many opportunities to make sure that a birthday away is just as good, if not better, than the one at home. One example is the Venerable house birthday tradition.
Studying at Caltech is a lot like crewing a spaceship. You get to work alongside some of the most talented people on Earth, you’re constantly doing science in order to survive, and the environment tends to keep you under a lot of pressure. It’s an incredible experience, and also a very challenging one, to be sure. Sometimes you’re left feeling like an impostor among your crewmates, having failed to complete every task you think is expected of you. But fear not! These feelings are not based in reality; they are merely symptoms of a benign condition known as impostor syndrome. Think you might be affected? This post is for you.
Always not quite organized, my desk is a constant, yet subtle reminder of why I ultimately chose Caltech: the people. (sigh… I bet you haven’t heard that one before!). It’s no secret that Caltech has a small undergraduate population but, in my experience, that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to find your people, it means you’ll be able to find them faster!
With the third term fast approaching and the status of COVID on campus pushing all major events to the spring quarter, students of the houses of Caltech were excited. The reason? Interhouse season had arrived. Interhouses, a longstanding tradition of the California Institute of Technology, are summarized as parties hosted by each respective house, usually with a theme, in which the entire undergraduate population is invited to attend. As every undergraduate house of Caltech has its own personality and characteristics, these interhouses too have their own flair depending on the house who hosts them.
