Nuclear Free World?

In telling a story on the state of nuclear proliferation, I wanted to approach the subject from several different angles. First, I wanted to address the international rhetoric supporting arms control and nuclear weapons abolition. This was well suited to a map projection, which provides snapshot of how many regions, countries, and leaders are involved in the issue and how global the verbal consensus is on the issue.

Taking these quotes, I wanted to juxtapose them against both contemporary briefs of how different nations’ policies are being enacted and how this is indicative either potential hope or status quo in actually approaching a world without WMD. In researching the background of the major nations involved in international diplomacy around the issue (DPRK, India, and Pakistan are not signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty) it was clear that the rhetoric could not match actual spending and weapons deployments.

Lastly, the timeline is an amazingly effective storying telling toll because it so easily allows you to present multidimensional to the user through a intuitive interface. The timeline tells the story of the major arms treaties since 1945 and juxtaposes them with weapons levels of the USSR and US. From watching the animation, the user will find that clearly some treaties were effective and delivered quickly and some were ineffective to say the least.

The overall picture I hope to provide is one that examines the state of our nuclear-armed world in an engaging way that inspires the user to dig into the contemporary politics, historical questions, or strategic questions around the issue.

The Uptake: Inception, Breakthroughs, and Uncertainty

The news industry is suffering one of its worst years in modern history, including a splintering audience, plummeting revenue and the inevitable layoffs that follow. But even in this in environment some have found ways to find success in the fault lines of the media landscape.

The Uptake, a left-leaning Minneapolis-based journalism group has been working to not just survive but thrive under the current conditions by harnessing citizen journalists and live internet streaming.

I spoke with Chris Dykstra, Chairman of the board for The UpTake, asking him first about the news industry as it is today.

Full story

Happening: A Video Convention

In the Spring of 2006 I co-developed a happening funded by the Art & Art History Department of Carleton College along with the Carleton Administration. Combining inexpensive and readily available building materials with live video and lighting, we created an indoor video landscape for an estimated 500 participants.

Encouraged to adopt the guise of a fictional character, live wireless video feeds were transmitted within the space, an inflated poly dome roughly 100′ x 200′, and projected out onto the walls, creating space within space and video echo for the guests and amplifying their assumed characters. The project became, through the participants, a living video amoeba and a great success (outside shot seen above).

Radio Best Practices Project

In the Fall of 2005 the staff at KRLX-FM in Northfield, Minnesota began an overhaul of the then skimpy training materials used to educate upcoming on-air staff. Previously training had been primarily ad-hoc and informal, relyintg mostly on the immediate memory of staff at hand.

We decided to change this by writing a comprehensive training reference to be entitled the “KRLX Operator Handbook,” referring to the generic “operator” as opposed to DJ, newscaster, board operator, etc. Covering the basics of audio through the delicate process of selecting music for a themed program, it tackles in a thorough and sometimes entertaining way the basics of working in a top-notch college radio environment.

My work comprising roughly two-thirds of the writing and approximately one quarter of the editing work in this document as well as the vast majority of design and formatting that went into the finished product. Completed in the Fall of 2006, it has since been transferred into Wiki format and will serve as the foundation for future generations of Carleton College radio students.

Operator Handbook in PDF Link.

Telepresence and VR Independent Study

In preparation for my senior thesis project entitled Illusion, Immersion and the Myth of Total Reality, partly based on the work of Oliver Grau in his book Virual Art (2003 MIT Press), I prepared several written and visual overviews on the history of digital and virtual art.

This project examined salient topics and themes through new and immersive media. It attempts to define work as Seeing Is, Believing Is, Feeling Is, or Knowing Is based on each piece’s relative distance from the physical.

Tyr Energy Corporate Website

During the summer of 2003 I worked as interim IT director and web and print producer for Tyr Energy, Inc, an upstart energy management firm in the suburbs of Kansas City. As a rapidly growing company with very large growth potential, it proved to be a challenging, fun, exciting and engaging position.

This site was produced in the first month of work at Tyr as their first Internet presence. It employs the assertiveness of the Tyr logo and is similarly minimalist in its design. As a consultanting firm for large energy corporations, its site was purely an extension of marketing materials and the content reflects this. Simple Flash animation is also utilized in content navigation to provide some movement in conjunction with the “onward, upward” arrow motif.

A mirror of the site as of April, 2004 is provided below. Please note that some pages are omitted due to copyright.

Tyr Energy, Inc. Link.

From the Ground Up: krlx.org

After assuming the position of Producer at KRLX-FM in Northfield, MN, I went straight to work building it’s web presence, then non-existent. By 2003 it was painfully clear that the station needed to incorporate digital content into its repertoire in order to remain relevant in a student sea of early adopters. Burgeoning digital music libraries and portable media were already beginning to threaten the very paradigm that college radio was founded upon and it was no time to be standing still.

It became clear to me that two essential components would work as an extension of both new media’s and radio’s inherent qualities:

1. Accessibility
2. Locality

The web could provide unprecedented access to media beyond simulcasts (audio streaming, in this case) including accompanying photographs, summaries, and packaged audio (later, podcasts). In addition, the strength of radio as a local resource, that is a unique and timely community-centric viewpoint, could give it a distinct advantage over static digital media and information services from other locales.

It occurred to me, from my own perspectives on media and from research into other methods that had been employed with community and public broadcasting, that two distinct interfaces could co-exist. The radio and telephone delivery and feedback mechanism worked but was in some ways outmoded, clumsy and sometimes overly personal. If content was to stream on the web there had to be a feedback mechanism that is entirely web-based, instant and comfortably removed yet able to communicate the essentials. Thus,

• Site-wide commenting at the program, episode and track level
• Instant, web-based feedback mechanism
• Easy access to playlists and logs
• Familiar blog-based program presentation
• RSS / Podcast delivery of programs
• Portal style presentation of program offerings (including iTunes)
• Searchable, dynamic achives

My role in the site was from conception through design, with a team of talented programmers working to build functionality through several different open source CMS platforms including NucleusCMS and Wordpress. These screen captures reflect the state of the website in its first inception in the winter of 2004. The current KRLX website can be found at krlx.org.

Homepage Link.
Playlists Link.
Production Link.
iTunes Portal Link.

Social Reform Photography Analysis

Art After New Media: Interfaces

For the Art After New Media course I spent much of our time examining the link between information and interface. My first project examined the map as an interface for the actions of our daily lives. I project my movements throughout the day in a breadcrumb fashion throughout the campus and also lay the communications infrastructure that enables my life to extend beyond physical limitations, hence data and phone networks. Mapped Interface Link.

Secondly we examined how interface, used in linear and nonlinear fashions, can change the meaning of information. This project uses flash to explore a record shop in a very casual way resulting in different outcomes depending on one’s browsing habits. Largely a conceptual piece, it presents the idea that interface can be used to tell a narrative in a dynamic way. Linear Interface as Narrative Link.