Previously, I constructed a giant hamster wheel in some bizarre ritual to help me come to terms with my life as an academic failure (for further coming to terms, please see my forthcoming novel on life-hacks).

I then rolled it several miles up a giant hill, left it in a friend’s garage over and avoided making eye contact with it for the rest of the summer.

Later, I destroyed it with a hacksaw and left it for dead on the side of the road. R.I.P., giant hamster wheel.

Anyways, it was determined that a giant hamster wheel constructed out of fear and shame was probably a poor choice in final project. This is so true, I totally do not recommend a giant hamster wheel built out of shame to anyone. So instead, I’m going to blog about my first semi-serious foray into Event Planning.

I co-organized SNAPHACK, a social media hackathon, with Miles Peyton (I know you’re all shocked and surprised @ my choice in partner). It was held on September 20th in the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry. It was an all-day event that started at 10am and went until midnight.

Some highlighted projects (aka ones I could snag documentation for) include:

• Rachel Binx’s Wifi Diary, which was “a tool for chronicling one’s movements and travels, through the lens of different wifi networks”. It’s a background script that takes a picture every time you’re in a new location, which is determined by the change in your SSID. I get a surge of nostalgia every time I have to look through my list of previously connected wifi networks, not because I actually have a fondness for “ATT_WIRELESS_798” or whatever but because I associate them with the places I travelled to, like my home in Ohio or my trip to Italy.

• Me and Lauren McCarthy’s sadAR: Augmented Reality for Bad Days, which was a joke-y augmented reality app that let you change the way you saw things with Instagram-y filters based on your mood.

• Owen Khan’s ObitCoin, a cryptocurrency where you basically just create a death pool and generate currency based on how accurate your predictions are. This is neat-o, but Owen’s worried about like, death, and won’t release the code. )-: I feel ya Owen!
• More documentation on the official website

If anything, I learned how insanely difficult it is to organize basically anything, especially a thing where people hang out irl for a day. I think I definitely wouldn’t have ordered as much food, nor ordered super carb-y food and tried to get healthy food, like lettuce and sandwiches. Too much pizza just makes me groggy, and same w/ everyone else.

I also would’ve like to have final presentations at the end. It was a really chill event which was great, because it was low-stress and friendly, but there was also no real conclusion.  \-: I would’ve also tried to be more authoritarian/make loud announcements instead of awkwardly motioning people towards food whenever it arrived, but that’s generally a social anxiety issue and probably a more long-term life goal than anything.

Overall though I felt it was a fun experience. It was nerve-wracking and awful to plan, and in some ways to execute, but I feel like I have maybe more of a handle on how to plan things now. I went on to plan the B☆A Presentations, a night of short undergraduate artist talks, with Caroline Record, and I thought that was pretty successful too. Maybe I will continue to plan things in the future! Who knows! It gets slightly less painful each time, which is nice.

But regardless, I’m turning this in like two days before the end of classes so this probably isn’t going to be graded, and I’m going to retroactively fail this course. I don’t really care at this point, I learned a lot in this class and will almost inevitably use my newfound projection/CNC routing skills in the future(/already have), which is maybe all that matters. lol! 😉

Presentation

drive.google.com/file/d/0B5qOcdpUS3ERcHdlN0NnSldKdlk/edit?usp=sharing

blind stitches from Raquel Caticha on Vimeo.

For this piece I am focusing on the woman’s role in society by looking at traditionally feminine practices. Somehow, practices such as knitting and sewing are seen as incredibly domestic and can make a woman appear weak even though it is actually the traditional way in which women would provide for society. By knitting myself a blindfold, I am showing how society ignores female abilities. I chose to perform this piece in front of a church because of the continued patriarchal tendencies religion still has. In addition, this specific church has a large mural of religious figures. Upon further study, I noticed that not one woman is among the people.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/130800898″ params=”color=ff6600&auto_play=false&show_artwork=true” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Here are some ideas and questions that summarize my interest in stock photos:

– Stock photos represent ideal worlds in which bliss, love and stability
are normal.

– How can we reconcile the perfect/false worlds of stock photos?

– Do stock photos point to prevailing notions of normativity?

– A game-ritual grants us temporary access to the hyperreality of stock photos.

I staged the intervention in the Stever House television room. While not exactly a public place, it is a room where students gather to relax and socialize. I was wary of carrying out the performance in a space that would interfere with people’s work or daily consumption patterns. Perhaps my hesitation to bring the project to the public in earnest reflects an underlying insecurity regarding its premise – or my own communicative abilities. I don’t yet feel confident framing a personal obsession as something that has intrinsic value for others. Still, I feel that stock photos embody important cultural ideals that I have yet to fully articulate.

I announced the performance in a public Facebook event as follows:

“Some friends of mine need help. They say they have no thoughts left. They just stand around holding empty banners.

All I know is that there’s not much time to act.”

The event itself was an interactive game show, in which I was the host and organizer. Participants took turns standing in front of a whiteboard, providing stock photo people with new thoughts. I used an openFrameworks projection mapping library in order to calibrate the projection to the whiteboard surface. I also placed portions of the image around the perimeter of the whiteboard in warped perspective. This reinforced the sense I was trying to communicate – that this whiteboard was an unstable portal to another world (the world of stock photos).

Concretely, the participants used dry-erase markers to write words on the blank banners that the fourteen photos featured. While participants stood in front of the board, generic call waiting “muzak” was played from a hidden speaker, along with a synthetic voice counting down from 30 to 1. The audio was meant to convey a sense of urgency. I recall timed fitness evaluations in High School gym class that relied on similar tactics. A quivering instruction box read “Help! We have no thoughts. Give us some thoughts while there is still time.” Graphically, this instruction box took cues from Soviet era graphic design.

Technically, the project worked well – the audio provided a crucial sense of limited time, and therefore unease. The projection itself was clear and visible on the whiteboard.

Regarding the failures of the project, there is one that is particularly glaring. I found it difficult to establish a coherent tone for the project: it wavered uncomfortably between a sincere attempt to help virtual people in “crisis”, and an organized mockery of those very people. The project relied on the idea that stock photos depict perfect people and scenarios onto which we are obliged project our own ideas – but I never verified this premise independent of my own feel for it. Basically, I found it difficult to communicate what this activity was, and what ends it was meant to serve. I was curious what words people would use to contextualize generic imagery, but I must consider the likelihood that this curiosity didn’t extend beyond myself.

It seemed like the participants (the six that showed up) generally enjoyed the performance, judging from the video of it in which shows a friendly climate with an undercurrent of humor.

A future iteration of this performance might employ high resolution images. The ones I used were low quality, since it would have cost >$100 to purchase the photos in full resolution.

Software Tools used:

openFrameworks 0.8 with ofxMtlMapping2D
Photoshop CS5
Adobe Audition CS5

The twin artists Mike and Doug Starn created a monumental bamboo structure on the terrace of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a perpetual work-in-progress that evolved over a six-month period. For more information go here.

For more information go here.