2nd entry

I'm running a little behind on my blog entries, so I'm going to get a lot into this one. The first thing I'd like to comment on is our experiment with Cisco a couple of weeks ago. I think that the communication system is great for the purpose it it was invented for. I can see that it can be very useful for board meetings and things of that nature. The latency isn't very bad when you compare it to things like skype or ichat, however we were only about 2 blocks away from eachother during this experiment. I don't know what the latency would be like across the country or throughout the world. The downside to the Cisco communication system is that it is extremely costly to set up and use. There is a great deal of equipment that is needed that a small business or school, as portrayed in the tv commercial, would not be able to afford. For our purposes, if we had a system set up in the blackbox theatre it could be a good system of communication. It would be even better, if we could set up multiple cameras for use with the Cisco system. I realize that this is new, and just as all technology, it will take a while to come out with something less expensive, and more accessable to the public. If Cisco, or another company could come up with the same technology that is less expensive or maybe even portable, like an upgraded version of skype, I think it would do very well.

Now for my second point,

I visited the Guggenheim last week and saw the exhibit that Prof. Gilbert had mentioned, Memory by Anish Kapoor.  The exhibit was amazing. It consisted of a giant, almost egg-shaped, steel structure.  There were three possible viewing points to see the structure, however the entirety of the structure could not be viewed from any such point.  This forces the viewer to put the entire structure together in their mind, not the way that it actually looks, but obviously, the way that they remember it.  

Another interesting piece I saw at the Guggenheim, is a sort of human-interaction piece by Tino Sehgal entitled "This Progress".  When I entered the building with friends and walked toward the rotunda ramp, We waere greeted by a young girl who asked us to define progress.  We walked up the spiraling while I was searching for a definition, then she disappeared and I was greeted by a girl who was about 20.  She lead us to refine our definition as we walked on until we met a man who I presume was in his 30's and the girl disappeared.  He asked us if we felt that we were getting more boring as we grew older.  He too disappeared and a woman in her 50's walked with us to the top of the ramp and told us a story of a man who planted vegetables in the planters of an office building.  He harvested the vegetables and gave them to homeless people that he found on the street.  The strangest fact of all of this, was that no one in the building had noticed.  The woman then told us the title of the piece, This Progress. 

This lead me to think about "progress" in terms of technology.  The first instinct that we had when we first asked "What is progress?" was to think in terms of inventions or to things moving linearly, generally in a positive direction.  By the end, the term became more ambiguous.  

I thought about our class.  Although, the framework of the course is to learn technology, the purpose of the technology is to interact on a very human level.  We are attempting to communicate and to collaborate using specific technology (something new) to perform in the arts (something old).