| My name is Jason Eppink and this is my blog. At some point in time I will write three succinct sentences that clearly express who I am and what I do. Alas, we have not arrived at that point in time yet. (More!) |
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Thanks to transubstantiation, the earth's biomass will be made entirely out of Jesus in approximately 4.91 billion years.
(via Kottke)
"[T]he only way to waste your vote is to vote!" sums it right up, I think.
I am really so sick of all of this theatre. It's nice to see everyone so optimistic, I guess, but I'm not as good at the self-deception, for better or for worse.
There are plenty of west coast adventures to share, hopefully before I head east.
Greetings from the Googleplex.Google Dance 2008 was fun! It was quite the elaborate production. The food and drink were plentiful and delicious, the dance floor lit up, there was a Rock Band stage, and there were 4 L.A.S.E.R. Tag systems (unfortunately, while James Powderly is still MIA in Beijing), and that's just scratching the surface. The guests consisted of more Search Engine Strategies conference attendees and fewer Googlers than I expected, but so it goes!
Anyway, who cares about all that stuff? The Über Lite-Brite was a smash hit! At any given moment, several revelers were realizing their unique peg-based creative visions.
Actually, most party-goers just spammed the hell out of the Lite-Brite. If the party had simply been a private Google affair, the tone would have been completely different, I think. But since a lot of companies were represented (most of them smaller than Google and concerned with getting their name out there) all four sides of the Lite-Brite were plastered with brand names. One group even checked in periodically to reassemble their name if it was modified to their disliking. Sometimes I wonder if I would like to work in the for-profit tech industry, then behaviors like this make me glad I do not.
If you want to see more, my photos and video from the evening are tagged Google Dance 2008. Woo!
Friends! Things have been so excellently busy.
Google invited me to bring my Über Lite-Brite to their annual Google Dance party next week (8/19). This year's theme is Glow in the Dark. Perfect!
After that, I stick around San Francisco for a few days (8/20 - 8/22) before the rest of Camp Monoplaya arrives (aka Debra, Jeff, and William). Then we head out to Burning Man, with the Über Lite-Brite in tow, of course (8/23 - 9/1).
Back in NYC, the museum launches a new website, and hopefully I get a chance to stop by the Conflux Festival (9/2 - 9/15).
Then I'm off to Amsterdam to see the 2008 ExperimentaDesign biennale, where Pixelator is being exhibited in Scott Burnham's "Urban Play" (9/16 - 9/19).
From there I head to Ekaterinburg, Russia (thanks to CEC Artslink) where I'll be giving a workshop in light-based public art. We're using old 35mm slide projectors, and maybe mirrors and colored plexiglass! (9/20 - 9/26)
Then I explore St. Petersburg for a few days (9/26-9/29).
Then I fly home and it's pretty much October.
Awesome achieved!
In other, decidedly less-exciting news, I claimed my name on Twitter because it is in such high demand. We don't want any impostors! There I record my 140-character epiphanies, like, most recently: "You know how home fries fall irretrievably into the ketchup when you try to dip them? Solution! Dip fork in ketchup, THEN stab home fries." Follow along if you can stand the once-a-month mind-blowing insight.
Oh my, the city is in full swing these days isn't it? Here's what I've been up to for the last couple months:
Improv Everywhere Camera Flash Experiment: In the cold rain, Gene, Debra, I, and 700 other agents lined up on the Brooklyn Bridge and set off the flashes on our cameras in a choreographed manner. The weather was miserable, but I snapped this awesome photo of Charlie and the final video turned out very nicely!
The Bridges of New York County walking tour: a 14-hour, 33-mile ambulatory journey around the edges of the boroughs and the magnificent steel, stone, and concrete constructions that connect them. Excellent people (Debra, Matt, Naomi) and wonderful sights: quite a treat, even if I couldn't walk the next day.
Toronto! I was commissioned by Kevin and Lori of Newmindspace to construct the Uber Lite-Brite in Toronto for their BRITE! fundraiser. Kevin and Lori also program Random Land at Circa so Steph, Gene, and I went and ended up dressing as Random Land characters and dancing in their weekly parade.
Come Out and Play Festival: Victor and Jenna were in town! We played (and won) lots of awesome games:-Comfort of Strangers: The mysterious soundscape created such an awesome mindspace. Victor and I won! (Jenna lost!)
-Re:Activism: A politically-oriented scavenger hunt that pushed all of us outside of our comfort zones. We won!
-Ravenchase: Jen, Hari, Debra, Victor, Jenna, Matt, and I dominated this riddle-ridden scavenger hunt and missed first place by mere seconds. If only we had run to the finish line!
-Human Blackjack: We dressed up as cards. Simple, quick, goofy fun.
-Ministry of Silence: We only got to observe this subversive game taking place inside a Barnes and Noble, but it looked really neat.
Posterchild came for a visit! He brought some Stained Glass pixelators with him and Steve and I helped him put them up. Also we did an experiment with a projector in Union Square and met the Wooster Collective people.
Going Places (Doing Stuff) curated by the Flux Factory (Lost in History vol. 65: Staten Island Adventures led by Matt Levy). Debra and I (and Flux adventurers) visited the Our Lady of Mt. Carmel shrine, walked a a labyrinth at Castleton Hill Moravian Church, and checked out the Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art (founded by a crazy lady) before we had to split early.
MoMA/PS1 "Take Your Time" Olafur Eliasson show: I really wanted to like this because of his work with light and color, but found it pretty vapid. Beautiful, clever, witty, yes, but vapid.
Bonus Level+++: chiptune dance party geekgasm: Off the hook! Data Addiction, Bubblyfish, Glomag, Bit Shifter, Nullsleep, and The Rev rocked the house (and I mostly broke even). Chiptunes are a hard sell to the uninitiated, but everyone who came had a most excellent time.
Upgrade! @ Eyebeam: Andy of The Yes Men gave a short talk, and I got to operate Jeff Crouse's BoozBot. On the way home, Naomi and I found an empty speech bubble from Ji Lee's Bubble Project, so I filled it in!
Governor's Island art show extravaganza: Figment Fest and Emergence were disappointing, but the IN-SITE sculpture show was a wonderful surprise. I'd loved to have played the Figment mini golf course but was too impatient to deal with the long and mishandled line. Also: David Byrne's Playing the Building is executed nicely! Bonus: seeing all four of the Eliasson's Waterfalls on the ferry to Governor's Island. They are actually quite nice!
Going Places (Doing Stuff) curated by the Flux Factory (Pennsyltucky Expedition led by Douglas Paulson). This time we stopped at an old swimming hole with an awesome 35-foot cliff, visited Centralia, underneath which a mine fire has been burning for more than four decades, and ate a 50lb cheeseburger.
I have much to report, dear reader, but until then, look what I found last night!It was a blank speech bubble from Ji Lee's Bubble Project when I found it. Now it is a Ji Lee/Jason Eppink collaboration (with thanks to Naomi)!
My, do I love this city.
I'm throwing an enormous party next Saturday 6/21! It is pretty much going to be the definition of "Off the Hook"; ergo, you should attend.
On June 21st, navigate the Mermaid Parade, find glory at the Bubble Battle, earn your Bonus Level.
Tunes to whet your appetite: Bit Shifter | Bubblyfish | Glomag | Nullsleep | The Rev
Oh man you guys, the giant Lite-Brite turned out so awesome! Thanks to Kevin, Lori, Steph, and The Rev for all their generosity, hospitality, and down right hard work. The Lite-Brite ended up being 4-sided with a surface area of 96 ft2 and more than 13,500 peg holes! Plus the pegs were all UV reactive so we used black lights!
I am trying to come up with a better name for this than just "Giant Lite-Brite", which is efficient, but I think leaves out some details. Maybe you have some ideas?
Full project webpage coming soon! In the meantime, here are the rest of my photos of the night.
Following up on the Biggest Tag in the World, Erik Nordenankar claims to have made the Biggest Drawing in the World using a GPS device that he sent via DHL to a series of locations around the world. No marks were left on the earth; instead, the "drawing" was performative, existing only by visualizing the path the GPS device took.
Unfortunately, the project was only theoretical! (Many are calling it a "hoax", but I propose that the final execution, in this case, is much less important than the idea. In fact, the documentation surrounding the work is very nicely executed.)
I love (hate) that it was a self-portrait. How egoistic!
Hurray! Nevin's first album Rambler is now available online at the Internet Archive under a generous Creative Commons license! (I used the album's title track for my Twenty-First Century Campfire video.)Rambler is a gorgeous, meditative 45 minutes of ambient soundscapes. Just really fantastic stuff. I begged Nevin to put it all online so I could share it with you, and he did! Now go check it out!
Hey! I'll be in Toronto May 30th - June 1st, mostly building a giant Lite Brite for Newsoundspace's big shindig. My instructions were "make some light art or something, maybe a giant Lite Brite?" I was tempted to come up with my own project so I could claim more authorship, but man, that is such a perfect party interactive! It's cheap, incredibly visual, has a low barrier of entry, accommodates several people at once, and is virtually asshole-proof. No-brainer!
As usual, I went searching for prior art to see what others had done with the idea. This guy took it literally, using over 62,000 original pegs! Expensive! Kinda cheesy! Not very interactive!
Lite Brite Camp, from Burning Man 2001 and 2002, constructed theirs of pegboard. I had hit upon this idea mere hours before finding their site! I was concerned about how to make the peg holes reusable. (In the original version, you would punch out a piece of paper, so if you removed the peg, you were met with a point of white light.) Lite Brite Camp solved this problem by using black lights and reactive pegs, so the light bleed from unused holes is minimal. Excellent idea!So yeah, this is gonna be sweet, and hopefully we can bring the Giant Lite Brite back to Burning Man this August! Maybe I will see you in Toronto? Maybe you would like to help out a little?
A heads up! If you like some of the stuff I post here, keep your eyes on my del.icio.us account over the next week. I'm catching up on a backlog of A YEAR'S WORTH OF LINKS! It's going to be EPIC.
I can't get the fantastic new UK coinage out of my head. Not only is each denomination a beautiful, asymmetrically framed piece of the Royal Arms shield, but the lowest six denominations can be pieced together - like a jigsaw puzzle - to produce an image of the entire shield!Suddenly the whole coinage has a cohesive, unifying theme! What a wonderful, conceptual thing to do to such a utilitarian collection of objects.
Check out the interview with the 26-year-old (!) who designed them (via Kottke). And hey, USA, get your act together and stop cranking out this crap.
The Twenty-First Century Campfire website is live! I hope you like it!The music I used in the video is from my new favorite album: Rambler by Nevin. I'm helping him put the whole album online so I will link to that when it is finished. It is quite fantastic.
New York Magazine recently published an awesomely validating article entitled "You Walk Wrong" about all the ways shoes mess up your body. Seriously people, shoes are bad for you!
For the two years I lived in Malibu, I rarely wore shoes, and I even wrote a pretty big paper on the barefoot lifestyle. (Incredibly, I still recognize a lot of the medial studies the author cites.) I sure do miss those barefoot days, but the unshod life is so impractical in the city. I'd love to grab a pair of Vivo Barefoots, but they don't seem to have anything big enough for me? :(
My new art piece, Twenty-First Century Campfire, will be debuting this Friday at Live/Work. Here is a portrait of me by Justin Tellian that will also be at the show. PERFECT FOR A NEW FACEBOOK PROFILE PHOTO DON'T YOU THINK?In the portrait, I am lording over my TV wall. Did you know I have a TV wall? Now you do!
ANYWAY you should come to the show! It has to do with live/work spaces and artists being priced out by developers and sociopolitical stuff like that. Also: art. Address info here. It is being thrown by those Fame Game guys, if you hadn't figured it out yet. Oh, those guys!
For those not in NYC (and for those who would rather sit at their computer) I'm working on the Twenty-First Century Campfire website this week and aim to launch it by Friday. Party time!
Slashdot* links to another article on how social networks are changing search. Actually, the author prefers the term "killing" to "changing", and his premise is that "the people in your online social network should know you better than a mathematical equation".
I mean, that's true, but look: if I'm using a search engine, it's precisely because my friends, whether in conversation or online, couldn't point me to what I was looking for in the first place.
I benefit from the anonymity of Google searches. I benefit from Google being a predictable, neutral tool. Once my search engine tries to predict me, won't we be second-guessing each other? Further, if I'm searching, it most likely means I'm looking for new information, so why would I want to limit myself to data I'm already marginally familiar with? That's just a way to create a giant feedback loop.
This is just to say: I'm sick of the social network search hype. Sure it can be useful for, I don't know, recommending movies, but isn't that what we do in real life anyway?
* Yes, I still read Slashdot. I used to read it for the funny tags. Now I guess it's just habit?
So, I dropped my tax paperwork in the mail last night.
Most of my peers get excited about their tax refund, but I get pissed. Why has my employer been giving so much of my scant, hard-earned money to these bloated, lazy, murderous behemoths of institutions that they have to give some back?
It's bad enough that I'm being robbed. (And I do mean that literally. Taxation meets the definition of theft: forcible removal of property.) But to add insult to injury, the tax code is so labyrinthian that I have to pay someone else (either an accountant or a software company) to make sense of how much of my property is being taken from me? Are you SERIOUS?
I have a hard time grasping the legality of this. I really do. If the IRS isn't going to be abolished (I'm not holding my breath), the least they could do is develop software free of charge, make it available online, install it in public libraries, and provide training.
As a casual fan of statistics, the Monty Hall Problem (and how its recent invocation has invalidated a lot of Cognitive Dissonance research) is really fascinating because it's so counter-intuitive!First play the game. There are three doors: one door has a new car behind it; the other two have goats. You select a door, the game show host opens one of the other two doors to show you a goat, then you have the chance to switch your choice. Here's where it's counter-intuitive: you should switch doors! There is only a 1/3 chance that your original door contains the new car, NOT a 1/2 chance!
Anyway, hopefully you're intrigued and will read the rest of the article! Statistics is such a powerful way to model and understand much of the world. Did I mention I <3 statistics?
A few months ago, Ryan pointed me to Passage, an art game about our finite existence and how we chose to spend it. In the game, all of life has been condensed into five minutes.Jason recently released his follow-up, Gravitation, "a video game about mania, melancholia, and the creative process". It's all sorts of fantastic and I really can't recommend it highly enough.
I still encounter people - especially in my line of work - who scoff at the idea that a video game can be Art. And now I think I've found my poster child.
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 Twenty-First Century Campfire  Gmail: A Behind the Scenes Video  A Group Of Images And One That Does Not Belong: Episode 4 |