the conclusion of several major undertakings

I think it is important to have diverse interests. I do a lot more than just taking pictures.

Over this past weekend, July 18-20, roughly 3,000 computer hackers converged on the Hotel Pennsylvania in Manhattan for The Last HOPE conference. The event happens once every two years and represents an unusual subculture's version of a family reunion.

When I say "hacker" I mean it in the way Stephen Levy meant it when he wrote "Hackers: Heroes of The Computer Revolution" in 1984. In the "2600" hacker community are some of the most talented, intelligent, and creative people I have ever met. I get fairly frustrated with the negative image of hackers perpetuated by the mainstream media.

I only attended four of the 100+ presentations at this conference because I was fairly busy being one of two projects coordinators working around the clock for four days. In fact, for three of the four talks I did get to attend, I was giving the presentation.

Most of my time was occupied by three specific projects: The Attendee Meta-Data Project, Radio Statler!, and something called The NOC NOC.

The Attendee Meta-Data Project, for which I served as Project Manager, has gotten quite a bit of press attention. Hack-A-Day, Boing Boing, CNET, and many other tech news outlets have taken notice. Using a web survey, my team collected information on many of the conference's participants, and we gave 1400 RFID tracking devices to attendees and recorded their movements in relation to the conference schedule. In the process, we collected a very interesting combined database which will be released in the near future for study and experimentation by the global hacker community. During the conference the attendees saw a bit of what we were doing displayed on plasma screens and on a special web site set up for the event. To the corporate technology world what we did will probably seem rather insignificant, but in reality there was a monumental task accomplished, and an invaluable resource for future research was created. I cannot express how much effort my team put into getting this project to function in the last four months from a weird little idea I'd had kicking around in my head since January of 2007. I wouldn't have considered myself an installation artist before this project.

Radio Statler! (the exclamation point is part of the name) was an Internet radio station set up specially for the conference. I served as the station/project manager and an occasional producer on the project, but mostly the station was run by the Chief Engineer, who goes by the hacker handle Nikgod, and our Programming Coordinator, journalism student Bill "Arca" Peters, who stepped in at the last minute when another team member got stuck working on another continent. These guys, along with a host of other contributors, did a truly fantastic job under conditions from which anyone in commercial radio would likely go insane. While Bill Peters did the good journalism on his "All Hacks Considered" format, I worked on a couple of more eccentric programs during the conference, including the as-far-from-NPR-as-you-can-get "Welding Hour" call-in show, which involved more than a handful of members of the infamous Phone Losers of America (PLA) group, including Murd0c, Enamon, Gonzo, and Johnny X(mas).

The NOC NOC, along with a diagram for a much larger normal NOC, was an idea born from the previous conference, HOPE Number Six. NOC is IT industry shorthand for Network Operations Center. At the sixth conference the NOC was incredibly cramped, and the network itself inaccessible to people who wanted to share their computer systems. I had the idea for the NOC NOC while trying to work on a security turret camera and noticing the difficulties faced by attendees who wanted to share videos from other conferences and a group with an Asterisk telecommunications system. NOC NOC means Not Our Concern Network Operations Center. It was a large steel equipment cage enclosing a network switch and power strips with a formidable padlock. The stainless steel German ABUS Diskus 20/70 padlock was graciously provided by Deviant, an expert lock picker from TOOOL, so the chance of someone picking the lock before being noticed by security was negligible. I and Nick Amento, a senior network engineer at Harvard University and member of the network team, had keys to unlock the cage to get servers in and out. Not as many people as I had hoped took advantage of the service at this conference, but now we have the cage and people know it will be available, so I think at The Next HOPE people will bring more servers to plug in.

HOPE was an incredible experience, yet again. Now, I get back to fashion photography for a while with not so many distractions.

Hackers to Track Visitors at Conference

I've been working as project manager with a group of crazy computer hackers to create an RFID-based interactive art game for a conference in New York coming up in July. We just got a press release out from the conference organizers.

click to read

Cucalorus 2007

13th Annual Cucalorus Film Festival
November 7-10, 2007
Historic Downtown Wilmington, NC

Call For Entries

The 13th Annual Cucalorus Film Festival seeks submissions from independent filmmakers, video artists, and the like. Cucalorus is a non-competitive showcase of features, shorts and documentaries from around the world. The festival is held in historic downtown Wilmington, North Carolina, one of the leading film production cities in the US. Formats: 35mm, 16mm, various video formats. Cucaloriland excepts films from all genres - you make it, we take it. All entries on DVD or VHS must include entry form, one lovely poem, and fee, $40 final(July 10)/ $55 extended(July 28). Please download an entry form from our website - www.cucalorus.org/ or call (910)-343-5995.

Send stuff to:
Cucalorus
815 Princess Street,
Wilmington, NC 28401

Questions, notions, and dreams should be emailed to: dan@cucalorus.org

gallery opening - "nudes" - photography by Mark Baptiste

I was at the opening of Mark Baptiste's new gallery show, "nudes," last night. All female nudes in soft light. He did some interesting things with focus and light filtered through glass. Essentially found settings, not particularly controlled environments. Lots of concrete and windows and hotel room sheets.

The party was packed with people. An ecclectic NYC mix. Fun miniature champagne bottles from Nicolas Feuillatte ran out all too soon with the hoarde, by my stylist friend Cameron has saved two of the lanyards which were attached to the bottles for use in a photoshoot at some point.

I was trying to figure out which person Mark Baptiste actually was, because I've heard of him but never met him. Alas, he was elusive, and I still don't know what he looks like.

There were a number of models in attendance, but I didn't know any of them except recognizing the striking face of Jade, a contestant from the America's Next Top Model television series, whose oversized portrait stood out among the collection of images near the bar.

The exhibit is open from May 28th to June 2nd, 10am-6pm, at Milk Gallery, 450 west 15th Street, between 9th and 10th Avenues.

Nice pictures. Worth a look.

Meatpacking District Design Week

I only made it to a few of the Saturday events for Meatpacking District Design Week, but there were a lot of interesting things to see.

I attended a seminar in Bumble and Bumble's education center at their downtown compound. Titled "Colliding Worlds of Design, Fashion, and Art," it was moderated by Barbara Bloemink (curator for the Museum of Art and Design) with panelists Mary Alice Stephenson (contributing editor for Harper's Bazaar), Shonquis Moreno (design editor for Surface), Catherine Malandrino (fashion designer), and Janet Ozzard (strategist editor for New York Magazine). I love these sorts of discussions about media crossover. Although I arrived on time, the event was standing room only when I got there, and it was difficult to hear most of the discourse. One of the panelists was apparently from Iceland (and had some interesting things to say), but I'm not sure which one she was or if she was a substitution panelist.

There was some mention of furniture versus fashion and the disposability of current clothing market leaders' products. This is the H&M wear-it-for-a-month trend compared to the implied (or assumed) permanence of a couch in the living room. I wish this had been discussed a bit more by the panel but only one panelist seemed really interested in it. I like thinking about furniture and objects and spatial relationships as fashion and parts of a story. Like Andre Austin was saying about creating a character from clothing, you can certainly do the same thing with props and furnishings. I would like to use my photography to expose more people to not just wearable art but environmental art. Environmental textures fascinate me almost as much as stories and light, and I really want to incorporate more physical things into my images, beyond just shooting the model and their clothing, make a whole world around them. Having been exposed to good design all my life, thanks to my mother's involvement in the industrial design world, these things speak to me in a way I think most other fashion photographers probably cannot experience. I have developed an innate connection to forms and surfaces over a long period of time, and want to explore that much further in my photography and filmmaking.

Barbara Bloemink made a comment about the difference between art and craft. I'm not sure if she was quoting someone else. She said that a crafts person is an extreme specialist and spends their entire career perfecting command of one simple material. This is opposed to the artists, whose career hops from one material to another, always exploring.

I suppose, you could say craft involves the microscopic examination of material properties and art is the macroscopic, or blue sky approach. This poses the question, can you be both a macroscopic and microscopic thinker. Probably the best artists and craftspeople are predisposed to hybridize. I think of myself as an artist, having leaped from animation to acrylics to dramatic film to fiction writing to video documentary and currently being into fashion photography, but also I recognize a long-term relationship with attention to light and sequence and time. Those ties pint more to craft than art. The disciplinary dividing line, as I described in my last entry referring to photography and acting, is hard to nail down and often when approached and considered seems almost non-existent.

When I was in grad school for film, I took a sculpture class with Mark Oxman, a really talented sculptor and educator. Working three times a week on the same sculpture for several months really taught me a lot about the shared properties of the multitude of fine arts disciplines. Although my command of sculpting technique was primitive at best, while working I could see threads connecting to story, awareness of light, form, and texture and that fashion essential mood/vibe. Am I a filmmaker or am I a photographer or am I a writer or am I a storyteller? If I'm all of those, am I a generalist and is that lack of focus detrimental to my command of craft in any one discipline? Is it therefore damaging to my ability to communicate clearly? I think the answer is no, that all art is communication, all art is metaphor. In craft the one medium matters greatly, but in art the metaphor is medium-independent, and you can and should hop around a bit and see what works best for specific expressions.

So are a craftworker and an artist that different? Yes and no. It's all relative and there is a lot of crossover, but the artist moves. I think you don't have to be an artist to be a craftsperson, but to be an artist you need to have craft tendancies. Even if you don't always work with wood, you may always work with materials that have grain, or like me moving from medium to medium with relative frequency but still being tied to story and light and spatial relationships.

There was also a discussion of the misuse of the word Couture. I am guilty of that faux pas, though, much more when I first started than now. I think it's all Carson Kressley's fault. He really threw the term around a lot on Queer Eye for The Straight Guy. Is that show still on? The first two seasons it was so fresh and interesting. Don't get me started on reality TV, it goes bad faster than chinese food left in the sun. Ever see the Far Side cartoon where there is a picture of the planet Earth and then there is this line of clowns in orbit, and it says "The Bozone Layer: protecting the universe from Earth's harmful effects." I love that cartoon. Anyway, until a few months ago I just assumed anything that was created by a senior designer and really expensive was "couture." It's not. Haute Couture is a legal distinction, and true Couture is produced by a very specific group of accredited Parisian designers, essentially the French knights of clothing design. If you think a featured dress shown in Bryant Park is amazing, you would be truly astonished by the true Haute Couture outfits. They represent literally hundreds and hundreds of hours of precision crafts work and cost anywhere from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. I've only seen a few pieces of the real thing, but they were truly absolutely over the top of the breathtakingly gorgeous chart.

I also walked through the Valvomo-sponsored exhibit on new Finnish design at Down East Fish Locker on 13th St. The fashion on display from CTRL Clothing was interesting. They has some great jackets. I asked the rep if I could borrow a few of their pieces to put on a model I plan to shoot on Tuesday, but they're unfortunately leaving to go back to Finland that day.