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.
Depending on the house and style of room that you choose, rooms can look pretty different at Caltech. Generally, the south houses (Blacker, Dabney, Fleming, Ricketts) have similar options, and the north houses (Lloyd, Page, Venerable) are similar in their room styles as well. Rooms in Bechtel and Avery tend to look different from the north and south house rooms as well. In this blog post, I’ll be sharing an example of what a Fleming (south house) single generally looks like, and how I’ve chosen to decorate mine.
Now, based on the title you may be wondering what kind of story this will be. As you will soon find out, it’s a story of adventure born out of the pure, dark chaos that fills the minds of sleep deprived Caltech undergrads.
I’m starting a new miniseries on the blog – Film Club! Each episode, I’ll share a short clip from a popular piece of media, and then completely dissect and overanalyze it, because let’s face it, I’m doing it in my head already anyway. You say “buzzkill.” I say “science.” We’ll kick things off with a clip from Gravity Falls I discussed a bit in my previous post: Season 2 Episode 12, A Tale of Two Stans. If somehow you haven’t watched this show yet (?!)… spoilers incoming!
