One of my favorite sites, Photojojo, has a roundup of a few different photobooths (they forgot us). The first is very similar to Party People Photos, in that it uses projection to display the shots immediately and has been installed in another museum.
The ability to print photos is a nice touch, since the only thing people like more than seeing themselves on the screen is getting some free personalized schwag to take with them. Of course, if someone really wanted to, they could visit our Flickr page to download and print a photo on their own. The photo’s from Mark’s setup at the Whitney also have a very nice lighting quality, much like ours, which makes all the difference in the world. Their photos are more true to form of the old style black and white photobooth, whereas ours are a more modern fashion-esque interpretation. It also looks like Mark’s setup was a more self contained, appliance-like box rather than the more ad-hoc approach we used. Perhaps we can use the instructions to make our own for the Kara Walker Preview Party. I hope to have automatic uploading to Flickr part of the installation at that point, too.
And, just to make a friendly jab at the Whitney, our installation was three days before theirs. Neener Neener. Sadly, I didn’t see any photos of Ivanka Trump at our party. In Minnesota, we’ve got Al Franken or Prince, neither of which showed up.
A little over a week ago Walker staff moved from the temporary offices at One Groveland. We’re now mostly settled into our new spaces above the galleries. I took a few quick, unofficial shots of the new space and created a new office photoset on the Walker’s Flickr page. You may note that just a few month’s ago this was Robin’s office, but it has been transformed.
My general read on the new offices are that people are very glad to work in the museum again, because we take great pride in working for a cultural institution. It is much easier to feel that pride if you’re actually in the building.
We in New Media are very happy to be in closer proximity to the Dialog Table and Hennepin Signage servers. The trip has been reduced from a walk down the block to a walk around the corner. The break room is also popular due to increased fridge size, large windows, and abundance of coffee.
A user group for Max/MSP has been formed in the Twin Cities. The first meeting was last month at Acadia Cafe and from what I hear, it was a resounding success. Topics included getting Max/MSP to talk to Quartz Composer, motion tracking with jitter, and how to safely generate and save files from within max. There are some demo files on the group’s wiki to corroborate.
The next meeting is tentatively scheduled for Tuesday the 12th of December, once again at Acadia Cafe. I’ll be demoing how to use Max/MSP to talk to the command line using the shell external. I’ll show some of the techniques I used for the capturing component of Party People Photos, and give a brief intro to the command line (on OS X) and some possible areas of expansion. If you plan on attending, visit the group’s wiki and edit the page with your name to let us know you’ll be there.
The meeting is followed by the Tuesday Night Music Series for Improvisers and Experimentation, which is always an interesting experience. I’m very pleased to be a small part of the group and hope that it can contribute to new media art in the Twin Cities. If you know of any other user groups or gatherings like this, please post them in the comments.
We have made some small, though useful, changes to the blogs in the past few weeks and we think they’re worth a small note.
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Brent added the blog title to the blog aggregator page. Now it is much easier to tell what content goes to what blog. Additionally, post titles link to the blog post and the blog name to the front page for that blog.
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We’ve added the ability to display info about our blog authors. Authors are now listed in the sidebar in each blog. When you click our name you’ll be able to see our email address, personal or departmental URL, and a bio, if the author has elected to post one. Not all of our authors have updated their profile yet, but eventually you should be able to learn more about just who we are. Some of our authors have also elected to post photos.
Eric posted about some of Jakob Nielsen’s weblog usabilty tips discussing author bios and photos. I agree with Eric that author photos are certainly not necessary, and we’re not requiring them for our authors. Those of us that are brave enough are breaking the ice and have posted photos. Please be kind. It just happened to work out that Party People Photos gives us some recent, high quality photography.
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Last week Paul posted the first in what we hope will be a more frequent audio blog series. We’re using the wordpress plugin WP-SingleMP3 to embed a nifty flash audio preview in the blog post, but also linking the mp3 audio so the category RSS feed can function as a working podcast.
We’re always looking for ways to improve the experience and information on the blog. If you have any ideas or constructive criticism you’d like to share, we’re listening.