Thursday, September 2nd, 2010
with presentations by Chris Woebken, Simon Burton, Kunal Gupta & Syed Salahuddin. It was a really wonderful season opener, it was good to see Douglas and Levi and thanks as always to Location One for hosting the event.
see the full lineup and get more details here.
Chris presented “animal superpowers” which included this helmet & optic-glove system that allowed the wearer to see what an ant might see, as it magnified objects in front (right hand) and below (left hand) by 100x to a screen inside the helmet!
Simon presented telephone telepathy and some of the theory behind this controversial subject:
this last shot was pretty genius, it was Simon’s “2 second lecture” on quantum mechanics, or physics, or whatever he was talking about! loL!
Kunal and Syed are from Babycastles and build and demo indie games – they’re like the zines of big-label game companies, they only do “local” gaming:
including this body-armor-esque suit with an embedded screen and a keyboard that the wearer holds out for the gamer, in an attempt to run a track-and-field.
Monday, August 2nd, 2010
I didn’t go to “Maker City”, but the press and images have been flooding in and its pretty obvious that this was a HUGE success – so BIG UPS to Detroit for organizing the Midwest and hopefully catalyzing a generation of Makers on the rise!
Click any of the images to go to their respective press articles, or read these press releases:
Maker Faire Detroit: Try This at Home!
Maker Faire shows off wild creations
Hackerspaces at Maker Faire Show and Tell How to Build a Better Detroit
Maker Faire Taps Into Detroit’s Sense of Mission, History as City of Tinkerers and, Yes, Entrepreneurs
Maker Faire puts the spotlight on creativity
Make It Up!
and some images from the net:
search Flickr for more images of query “maker detroit”
Wednesday, July 28th, 2010
With glorious weather above and slightly breezy wind constantly testing my projection screen, for the final installment of Sci-Fi July we watched Serenity (aka Firefly). Around 20+ people showed up but unfortunately I didn’t snap off any crowd shots. I think it was a wonderful conclusion to a series, and I hope all 4 films together show how diverse, fun and eye-opening the sci-fi genre can be. My introductory text for Serenity is below, with some screencaps at the end – so if you’re piqued by my words and those visuals I really recommend giving the TV show and film a viewing. Thanks to everyone who came out, gave me their time, I hope you had a really wonderful sci-fi-time!
Welcome to the fourth and final installment of Sci-Fi July, a rooftop film series of the science-fiction genre.
The movie you’re about to watch tonight is the afterstory to one of the shortest lived television series of all time. A television series marred by extremely low ratings and botched maneuvers by the FOX corporation that led to its premature cancellation. A television series built around nine characters in space, a motley crew aboard a spaceship and their run-ins with the law, morality, political and ethical corruptness of their – our – universe. A television series that was a failure by certain specific measures, was resuscitated by fanatical reverence and given new life in 2005 with the release of Serentiy, the story of a Firefly-class spaceship.
Don’t get me wrong, this is a movie unto its own – it stands it’s ground independent of the television show, but I am an author and artist intrigued by history, so I want to tell you some. And what’s really beautiful about Serenity once you scratch below the surface is that this is not the history of some galaxy far, far away, but an intricately-woven history of America’s past projected into the future. Less a space opera and more a space western, Serenity is an allegory about America’s frontier, anti-government sentiments of the Old West, and a reflection on the Civil War and the proclamatory fight for freedom of the Reconstruction era.
As a line from the theme song goes, “Burn the land and boil the sea, you can’t take the sky from me.”
Of course there are some leaps of faith to understand the where and how of this story. Again I’ll reinforce that this story stands on its own, but I want to clarify some historical underpinnings. The opening scene of the film helps lay the foundation for a brief understanding of where this story takes place, and how we got there, but just to clarify:
The year is 2518. Over the first 450 years of the 21st millenium, the American and Chinese superpowers eventually grew to dominate the world’s political and cultural spheres. They would eventually merge, forming the Anglo-Sino Alliance. Thus throughout the film you will hear Mandarin phrases spoken, key expressions as the characters subtly acknowledge their Chinese “ancestry”. The dialogue will also reference America’s past, particularly names or events crucial to the outcome of the Civil War.
In this future, the Earth’s resources are spent. Human civilization has migrated to a new solar system made up of dozens of planets and hundreds of moons, leaving behind Earth-that-Was. New earths are terraformed and colonised – some are rich in resources and materials, while others are barren and lawless.
This “space frontier” is the setting for a future war between the Alliance and the outer planets – the Independents. After five years of war the Alliance emerges the victor and brings a system and code of law to all planets. With the defeat of the Independents whose soldiers are known as browncoats for their western-like trench coats, some decide to buck the norms and status quo of this new “civilization”, and attempt to make a living as space couriers of questionable cargo.
Meet Captain Malcolm “Mal” Reynolds, his ship and crew. Along the way they pick up two kids, Simon and River Tam – River is something of an Alliance government experiment gone good or bad, depending on whose side you’re on, and Simon is – was – an accomplished doctor who is now a fugitive after rescuing his sister, the love of his life.
Serenity is a “total narrative”, and if you’re at all intrigued by tonight’s film I totally recommend going back to watch the television series, which is an intricately woven history with deep character developments. Some of those developments were never expanded upon due to the television series getting cancelled, while others are “put to rest” too early in this film, which is disappointing, but such is the nature of fandom. I’m a BIG fan of Serenity. And I hope you will be too.
This film contains some of the most remarkable visual effects to date, includes a hacker known as Mr. Universe, cannibalistic space zombies known as Reavers, and with all good sci-fi there is some trivia! In contemporary techie culture the Google application known as Google Wave is named after the Firefly series, and referencing literary history is the planet Miranda, named after Shakespeare’s Miranda in The Tempest, who says in Act V, scene I: “O brave new world, / That has such people in’t!”
This is the story of those people.
And in conclusion, a small back-story.
Sci-Fi July emerged because during the winter when it was cold out and most of us were holed up and trying to stay warm, I started screening films informally. One night I screened one of the best sci-fi films of all time, Dark City, and to my amazement NO ONE else had seen it before. I was baffled, stunned. As I scrolled through the names of other films, it turned out there were numerous films that only one or two people had seen this film, but not that film, etc. Thus emerged Sci-Fi July, and my attempt to screen a film that while popular within sci-fi circles, might not be so acknowledged by a larger public. With each screening, only one or two people in the audience had seen the movie previously, so with 15-20 people showing up for each screening I consider that something of a success.
Other films that were considered but eventually passed up because I could only screen one film per week, included:
Cherry 2000
The Running Man
Dark City
Final Fantasy The Spirits Within
Black Hole
Tetsuo the Iron Man
Gattaca
Innerspace
Metropolis (1927)
Quartermass and the Pit
Westworld
the list goes on and on. And in my quest to compile my own lists I encountered Moria which is a wonderful database of sci-fi, fantasy and horror films. Enjoy!
Friday, July 23rd, 2010
there’s no stopping this train now!
let’s see, there’s still an Open Call for Makers to submit projects: go here
you can get one FREE adult day pass with a MAKE magazine subscription: click here
you can download the above image as a PDF, print it out and e-share it: download here
Friday, July 23rd, 2010
There’s a new and nifty and incredibly awesome resource in Long Island City these days: a LASER!
Designglut in association with Length Width Height (a fabrication lab in the “incubation” center at NY Designs), hosted a laser party last night and invited designers and artists to try it out with some free etching & burning time. Awesome!
All projects were cut on a Trotec laser with double gull-wing doors – made it look like a DeLorean when both the doors were up! This thing is proper, and capable of some really remarkable and remarkably precise cuts. Some people cut out little keychain shapes; a piece of fabric with a lattice-like design; or some flexible wood made into bracelets. Like I said, AWESOME!
Big ups to Ben W-R from LxWxH for organizing the event – there were some great people there, and I definitely need to organize some shop time myself and get involved.
super-duper punters:
the exhaust vent needed to keep the laser cooooooool:
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010
Once again big ups to Astrid’s Buznik blog for the remarkable shots. For the third installment of Sci-Fi July, we watched The Brother from Another Planet, which only one other person in the audience had seen before, but it was pretty unanimous at the end that this was a big hit. Especially for its visuals and street scenes of NYC from the early 80s, but also just because it’s a very fun film, with natural dialog and almost hilarious human elements throughout. My introductory text is below.
Welcome to the third installment of Sci-Fi July, a rooftop film series of the science fiction genre.
So far we’ve seen a mid-90s film pretending to take place in the 21st century; we’ve seen an early 70s film that was no doubt about it set during the early 70s! In the 90s we were led to believe that a pair of VR gloves and wrap-around shades were all that was needed to “place a long-distance phone call” and enter the computer; in the 70s our spaceship designs were wholly believeable but everything else that we understood about space was a flop – this is understandable given that film was released 6 years prior to the launching of the Voyager I and II space probes.
But what about the 80s?
Although it was not my original plan to choose a film from each of the past 4 decades, it became a natural logical extension to focus on the 80s after reflecting on the impact of the previous two films in this series. The 80s were something of a high-tide for science fiction, immediately after the rise and popularity of space opera. It’s hard to deny the originality and influence of the 80s – movies which Hollywood is now attempting to remake as it runs out of ideas. Ideas like Predator from 1987 whose franchise was attempted to be revived just a couple weeks back, or Tron from 1982 whose game will be updated at the end of this year.
While by no means comprehensive, other notable 80s sci-fi films include:
Blade Runner
Aliens
the Ghostbusters films
Highlander
The Running Man
Brazil
The Abyss
Howard the Duck
Mad Max II
Weird Science
Dune
Gojira
Terminator
Back to the Future parts I and II
RoboCop
E.T.
Maximum Overdrive
and 4 of the original Star Trek films and 3 of the original Superman films
Other cult, anime or fantasy crossover films included:
The Dark Crystal, Repo Man, Cherry 2000, Akira, Flash Gordon, Flight of the Navigator, Tetsuo, Transformers the Movie and Spaceballs – whose tongue-in-cheek style summed up the parody-genre that was also pervasive during the 80s.
The 80s were marked by other extremes, milestones and conditions that the world hadn’t experienced before or since. Without going into details:
Reagan was elected; the first Space Shuttle Columbia lifts off; the Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrates 73 seconds after launch, killing 7 crew; Margaret Thatcher, the first female elected leader of a western country, ruled for the whole decade, and a year before and after; the IBM PC was released and the Commodore 64 became one of history’s best-selling computers; Solidarnosc is founded in Poland; the Berlin Wall fell, or was sledged apart rather; MTV launches; Michael Jackson introduced the Moonwalk; the Simpsons debut; the Nintendo Entertainment System launches in 1983 in Japan and then in 1985 in the US; John Lennon was assassinated; Chernobyl melted; the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska and the accompanying television images and magazine photos brought to popular attention our attachment to the sludge; military dictatorships fell throughout much of South America while they were consolidated in regions of southeast Asia like Burma which became Myanmar under the State Law and Order Restoration Council; and of course the recognition of a new disease, and the ensuing AIDS pandemic.
In short, the 80s were definitely an era that you either experienced or you didn’t, and I’m personally thankful for my time and place in it.
Now of course it’s hard to screen a film on a rooftop in New York City without thinking about New York City. The water towers in the distance, the subways – aboveground – rolling along nearby 31st Street, the honks horns and hollers of this city’s inhabitants. Now these words might immediately evoke images of Escape From New York – whose many scenes were shot throughout East St. Louis and St. Louis where I grew up. But I’m not interested in perceptions of future New York environments, I’m intrigued by real-world street scenes.
And while science fiction is often not employed as a genre to critique or understand the social milieu, what better way to understand the above-mentioned extremes, conditions, perceptions, realities, problems, dilemmas, and blessings of the 80s than via a mute alien who has escaped his captors, crashes in NY harbor, and eventually gets dumped in Harlem where he befriends the patrons of a local bar, thanks to his ability to fix electronics by simply touching them!
Joe Morton plays “The Brother”, who remarkably manages and makes believeable his ability to go for 108 minutes without saying a single word! It is those around him who speak for him, or rather about him and get us to first pity, then embrace the alien inside. A movie whose characters go largely un-named, some are simply social archetypes: Hispanic Man, Islamic Man, Haitian man, Korean shopkeeper, etc.
Interesting moments include two “Men in Black” who perceive NO stereotypes when entering an African-American bar in Harlem, perhaps because as aliens they don’t comprehend such base racisms; an eyeball used as a recording device; some extreme frame-rate arcade game-playing; those steam-pipes in the streets of New York City haven’t changed in over 25 years; encounters with graffiti; intravenous drugs and the Wall Street brokers that sell them; and a remarkable subway card game!
as the tagline of the movie goes:
Welcome to a world of crude beauty… of danger and excitement… of wonders, legend, and imagination… Welcome to Harlem
