<< ben fry media lab colloquium posters During the Fall of 1999, the Aesthetics and Computation Group invited Rachel Strickland, Durrell Bishop, Ellen Lupton, and Aaron Betsky to speak at the lab as part of the 1999-2000 Colloquium Series. Each of the posters here are about 5 inches tall and 17 inches wide (European A2 size, sliced down the middle). Click any of the images for a high-resolution version. The titles for the talks were the choice of the speaker, but the images are either from their work or my own.
	Rachel Strickland from Interval Research spoke about polylinear narratives in film, as something to be created by the user. The poster uses images from several of the narrative pieces in her "Portable Effects" project, in which Rachel has filmed several people talking about the objects they take with themselves every day, describing the contents of belongings such as wallets, purses and bags. Her talk outlined three environments or tools in which one might view related but discontinous pieces as bits of a narrative.
	Durrell Bishop, creator of the now-famous project that depicted an answering machine that used small marbles as pointers for a kind of tangible messages. He visited the lab and spoke about a number of his recent design experiments. The images here are Durrell's sketches for small 'tagged' objects used in his work to embody different kinds of information. His conceptual work is extremely interesting, made only more effective by his ability to build sketches (using a combination of hand-drawn images and Director) that describe the sometimes very abstract concepts that he's working on.
	Ellen Lupton has written several books and is curator of contemporary design at the Cooper-Hewitt. She spoke about typography and work appearing the the upcoming 2000 National Design Triennial. The image is a photograph I shot of coloring as it dispersed in water. I was after an old school engineering textbook feel.
	The final talk in the series was from Aaron Betsky, who curates Architecture, Design and Digital Projects at the SF MOMA. He came by the lab and gave a talk under the same name as his upcoming book. The image is a satellite photograph of Los Angeles redone as a flame after being crumpled and placed on a scanner. << ben fry | fall 1999, last updated november 2003