rose marshack : whyamistillawake.com

I have interviewed and interviewed and am in the waiting stage now. Over the past two days I have been in Bloomington, IL, at ISU where I met some incredibly wonderful people and their incredibly wonderful students. It is very neat to go give a talk at another school to people who don’t know you, and doubly neat to be able to give one about music.

I realize that music has been missing in my life for the past 3 years. In fact not missing, but popping up all over the place because I’ve been supressing it.

In fact someone sent me something rather beautiful: http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~tas3/wtc/i04.html. I’ve made a little bit of musical algorithm / translation art in my day, and actually I remember a couple of people in school enjoying it. I could go off, crazy, in a direction of music and algorithm, I could dive into that pond and swim away and never come back.

But for now I’m in single-digits (tourspeak) before leaving for Florida! Yay!

I got a little miffed at the woman who needlepointed the soundwaves of war speeches (http://www.louisabufardeci.net/) just for a short time, because I didn’t understand what needlepoint had to do with war and soundwaves (and also because I was jealous) but now I understand that needlepoint is a very quiet and contemplative and repetitive thing whereas war isn’t. Well, it’s a bit repetitive.

I wonder how to put Make blog into an art exhibition. And I wonder if I’ll get to.

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This is my response to someone who has emailed me asking me for suggestions about creating a mobile recording studio housed in an airstream, like the StoryCorps project. I almost ought to write a paper on this…. (http://www.roadsideconversations.org)

Dear Juliette,

How exciting for you - it sounds like a most wonderful project. The biggest thing I can remember (and is still a problem) is that we spent a lot of money on a carpenter who made the most beautiful wordworking for inside the airstream - and built cabinets to hold computers - and the computers either almost didn’t fit, or fit “perfectly” which meant that if you wanted to pull something out or re-plug something back in, it was almost impossible. We would have to tear the cabinets out or saw holes in them. So make sure you have your carpenters talk to your computer engineers and work directly with them, because you can have the most beautiful cabinetry and then it’s all done, and then your computer engineers need to get in and fit stuff in and take stuff out constantly. Things constantly break and need to be replaced.

Also, in the summer, with lots of computers going, the airstream would get intensely hot, and the air conditioner didn’t quite cool it down enough.

Additionally, it was very important to remember to take down all the monitors and secure them before travelling with the airstream (one member of the team forgot this during a travel session.)

We had a wooden panel with foam on it to partition off the recording studio, but it was still open on the sides for traffic to flow through - but as a result, if anyone was in the other part of the airstream talking, it would affect the recording.

And lastly, it was actually quite hard to compel people to tell their stories, and also hard to get people to come into the airstream, if they just ‘happened’ across it at an outdoor event. I thought that was very interesting. Most people would sort of peek in and run away quickly; they thought it was maybe for workers or something… so make sure you have enough signage around the outside of the trailer, and I would recommend free-standing signs near the entrances.

I think that’s it - feel free to ask any questions!

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I think I might be working on a proof that all art can fit into the category of Data Visualization. So from now on, after I complete the proof, I can start calling Art “Data Visualization” instead of Art. Or art. Yay!

I had an interview for a job. You can tell I’m a pretty good fit, except it was pretty obvious to me what parts of the job I would have to do some learning in. It’s wonderful, though, to have a job where you have to learn, where you don’t know everything. Of course, if you’re smart enough, all the jobs are like that; you learn from everything.

I think the museum is going to have a Howard Finster retrospective, which is cool, because I really like Howard Finster’s stuff. It made me drag out my little Finsters and the book I had and google myself up to find that tour report where I’m sitting and arguing with Finster. The Paradise Garden book - and looking at the shots I took with that old Apple Quicktake camera - reminded me that there is a LOT we could do with our backyard… hee hee hee…

And. It’s time to get to work.

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Here’s a great quote on Second Life by Howard Rheingold:

“In this regard, we’re still in the early days of the medium, similar to cinema in the days when filmmakers nailed a camera tripod to a stage and filmed a play; SL needs D.W. Griffiths to come along and invent the equivalent of close-ups, montage, etc.” (http://tinyurl.com/2vyavt)

This is very useful for my project, “A History of New” - as we all know, Second Life is a 3D environment and I like to hear others say that we are still in the beginning phases of it; and especially when people liken the work that is being done in 3D environs now to past explorations of new inventions. That’s what A History of New (http://www.kam.uiuc.edu/projects/historyOfNew/) is all about.

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I found this great site called http://www.swivel.com. Here’s what I found on it:

I need to start blogging more. Right now it’s hard because if you can believe it, I’m still waiting for some job searches to come through. I have interviews scheduled. I have a couple of dream jobs (pending) and am hoping that something becomes a reality. So it’s hard to empty my heart out when my heart is pending.

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