The catalog of the Overheard Installation is complete and available for purchase.  It is a great feeling to have an artifact of an experience to hold in your hand– something that is a tangible reminder of hard work and good results.

The team at Calit2 did a lovely job in producing it.

Our load-in went smoothly and by the end of the day, we had all of the technical elements in place: conversations loaded on 20 LCD panels, custom software driving a continuous images spanning across 3 projectors, 2 rope&pulley units installed, and custom software driving 6 channels of simultaneous audio.

Tomorrow we will begin by taking the time to observe the combination of the technical elements with the content in the gallery space and from there, decide how to shape those elements.

I’m feeling good.  Wendy is feeling good.  Many thanks to fine staff at the gallery for all of their assistance in getting us up and running.

Most of the prototyping work I do is “non-precious,” and for some time I felt like the rope&pulley assemblies belonged in this category.  Once we started sorting out the details of how to get our equipment to the gallery for installation, I realized that these pieces I have fabricated, while still prototypes in many ways, no longer qualify as “non-precious.”  Now that they will take part in a public art installation, I must treat them as valuable.  They have to arrive at the gallery site in January in working order and need to return to me in March in the same condition, so I’m packing accordingly.

I’ve built LCDs and computers into rugged equipment cases for clients in the past, but this is the first time I’m preparing to ship something I made across the country.

On Saturday, October 24, Wendy and I demonstrated some of the elements of the “Overheard” installation to a small group in order to articulate our current ideas and obtain feedback.

We demonstrated typographic projections, sound elements (recorded conversations), and physical interaction with typography using the rope&pulley.

We are reflecting on the observations we made during demonstration and are incorporating them into the next phase of development.

The Digital Performance Institute lent us two video projectors for the demonstration.

Joy’s friend April came over to record sample snippets of my overheard cell phone conversations. She created beautiful characters; here is one. I remember this conversation well- I overheard it at the Starbucks near St Luke’s hospital.  It had  long pauses and the “speaker” was very quiet. Michael and I will use these elements to experiment. What is the effect of hearing one single voice, and then another added on top, and then another, and so on? We’ll see.