How Very Pinteresting...

By the way, friends, I’ve just started a board on Pinterest to collect images and video that are inspiring to me, dancingly. I find it useful to share with collaborators those things/ideas that I find interesting. It’s called “Bust a Move,” and I’d love for you to pop on over…

Here: http://pinterest.com/ericafrankel/bust-a-move/

Send me stuff, if you think I'd like it.

Last Week at This Time

Dear collaborators, friends, and browsers, allow me to take you on a photo journey of last week's class.

I arrived feeling fairly nervous, having missed the second class of the semester the week before to dance for a week on a farm in Pennsylvania with SINecdoche Dance. I'm not a tech-savvy person, and I knew that I'd missed some crucial instruction on how to wrap cables, set up tripods, and other tasks central to our work.

Little did I know that we'd be asked to rig up 6 cameras on tripods connected to two video mixers connected to two computers connected to two projectors....and have these two computers speak to each other while projecting on multiple walls in the room. Our professor looked to us expectantly, provided only the necessary instructions, and left us to our own devices to figure out the mechanics.

Being rather inexperienced (and totally overwhelmed by the request), I stuck myself to a couple of poor, unsuspecting Music Tech students who slung phrases like "pass me the BNC cable" and "I'll grab the S-video" with ease. The best part of the experience, hands down, came when I was escorted up to the 8th floor of the building, where important-looking connector cables live neatly in an impressive closet of totally intimidating techno-scramble.

At the end of the day, it looked something like this:

Although there is no way I could re-create (or help re-create) this setup at this point in my understanding, I did learn about analogue and digital and how they speak to each other (or don't). By the end of class we had just enough time to witness the delay between the video and sound, and wonder aloud about possible solutions.

Check Out These Fine Future Collaborators

A post about my second (rather humbling) class this week coming soon, complete with photos. In short, I have much to learn about digital vs. analogue and the cables that connect and convert them.

In the meantime, a tasty tidbit: the website for the course inspiring this blog. Scoot around the page to peek at the blogs of my classmates (and future collaborators), see a rather unflattering photo on the homepage of yours truly, and listen to a fairly catchy tune coming at you from your laptop speakers.

You know that you want to click here:

Or, alternatively, here:

http://www.nyu.edu/classes/gilbert/collab2011f/

Demonstrate Something About the Process of Communication

Peeking at my scrawled notes and etchings from our first class, I am amused by some of the sound bytes I captured from Professors Thomas Beyer and John Gilbert.

"If you're stuck with it, feature it."
"Memory is no longer a problem - there's space to store it."

"Different time zones no longer necessitate latency."

And then, on the back of my paper, our first in-class collaborative assignment: Demonstrate something about the process of communication...without speaking.

I was paired with two musicians, and we quickly began discussing our task. What are some of the characteristics of communication?, we asked ourselves. Just some of our answers -

• an exchange
• can be written, spoken, physicalized
• can sometimes be inquisitive, sometimes directive

We decided, rather than scripting something, to improvise our presentation to the class, and we passed notes to each other to decide what, exactly, we would do moment to moment. My paper includes three different individuals' handwriting, and reads like a strange set of stage directions:

Me: "Stand up and salute. Then decide what to do next."

Classmate 1: "Play a scale on the piano."

Me: "How should we conclude?"

Classmate 2: "Bow?"

I'm looking forward to formally starting projects with my classmates and others.