just got back from my first College Art Association Conference held in Dallas Texas. As someone entering the field of academics and teaching, it was well worth the time, money and effort to attend. I managed to see several people I knew, both from UCSC and from my previous life as a multimedia developer at Macromedia. Like most conferences, it was a series of sessions with folks presenting on topics in which they had some considerable expertise.

One of my favorites was on Cognitive Science and Aesthetics – all about how our brains are wired for pleasure, particularly through sight. One of the most important events for me was meeting with and getting to know the members of the New Media Caucus. I've been a member on the periphery for a few years, but it was good to have the opportunity to get more involved. I've volunteered to take over the web site, newmediacaucus.org, and will be taking it to what we like to call “next level.”

There were many panels on new media, and I was pointed to a number of interesting sites and intrigued by several developments in the Virtual World – enough to start poking around in Second Life. Look for my avatar soon, known as Khazar Noyes.

Here are a few of the sites/things I was turned on to:

Dallas

The conference was in Dallas. What can I say about Dallas. While there is a vibrant art scene there (there was a great evening of wandering around to gallerys spread around town), the Adam's Mark Hotel, where the conference was located, was in the middle of downtown. I have never seen a modern city so bereft of people. Tall apparently empty office buildings dominated the view, and – to my complete astonishment – there wasn't a Starbucks to be found anywhere! Mind you, I'm no fan of the giant coffee corporation, but it's the first office district I've ever seen without one on every corner.

had the pleasure earlier this month (1/17/08) to present a 90-minute lecture on using sound in Flash at the invitation of my fellow UCSC MFA graduate, Synthia Payne. She’s teaching a class in music on the World Wide Web there (Music 80R). I had a great time – it’s good to be in front of a class again. Flash isn’t the most intuitive application for working with sound, certain quirks like setting linkages on imported sound before you can control them, and an ambiguous use of the word “Stream” can trip up beginners. Rules about preloading sounds can be confusing as well. If you don’t have a program­ming back­ground it’s tough to wrap one’s head around sound in Flash (or to take advantage of some of its more advanced capabilities). From reviewing the class blog after my lecture, it seems I man­ag­ed to be helpful (if anyone who was there feels differently, please let me know on the blog or by email).

I posted my examples and notes for the lecture here, and I’ll be back towards the end of the quarter to answer questions and help resolve issues. I’m looking forward to it.

t the end of last year I had the pleasure of seeing two fantastic, inspiring and – to me – perspective changing exhibits at the Modern Art and the Asian Art Museums here in San Francisco. It was really invigorating to see them both within a few days of each other.

At the Modern was Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination. Cornell is a huge influence on me, and I’ve always sought out his work wherever I’ve traveled and in any temporary exhibitions. He, of course, does boxes with glass fronts and little assemblages inside. Several of my pieces have been given a sort of aesthetic permission by his ground-breaking work. The idea that you can build a self-contained world that both invites the viewer in and also locks them out is a core aesthetic principle for me. His work was influenced by the Surrealists, and its oneiric qualities are highly compelling as a source of narrative to the pieces. I purchased a great little book at the museum bookstore that dream notes from his journals. He had 30,000 pages of journals, and around 500 pages contain dreams. This book has one hundred and fifty, ranging from brief shorthands like:

To longer expansive, detailed narratives. Length wasn’t particularly relevant to Cornell, a single image object could as significant as an entire narrative.  A favorite:

My dream notes tend to be more narrative, and are particularly detailed with how I got from one place to another and geographic details. I’m inspired by his use of limited imagery in this sense. It was a massive show, by the way – more than 200 works – with more boxes in one place than I have seen accumulatively in my life up until now. If you didn’t see it, it’s at the Smithsonian until February 19th, 2007.

At the Asian Art Museum was Hiroshi Sugimoto’s History of History. A self-curated one-person show which included several reliquaries – a particular interest of mine. Especially interesting were a series of four glass walled cubes about 12 inches on a side. Lit from an interior LCD panel in the roof of the cube and showing a series of small fossils, unfortunately not in the catalog.

I was not familiar with Mr. Sugimoto’s work before, but those cubes really took me by surprise, as I’m working on a series of reliquaries in glass walled cubes myself. It’s striking that sometimes you see an idea of your own carried out by another artist. What Jung would call Synchronistic – “temporary coincident occurrences of acausal events,” or the uncanny coincidence between your creative life and someone else’s. This show is gone from San Francisco too, but there’s a good interactive online catalog here.

o goes the way of all things multimedia. When building this site, I discovered, much to my distress but not to my surprise, that Adobe/Macromedia has not up­dat­ed the Shockwave Player for Intel-based macs. Once again, another era of my body of work in technology has been made obsolete so no one can experience it as it was originally designed. Makes it hard to put together a portfolio…