Only the coolest faire ever!
I came out of Maker Faire wired with excitement, inspired to the gills, and ready to make – make – make! I felt at home, I thought I was born in just the right time to experience the fruition of this culture. The culture of the makers and the breakers, where art and science are one, where a science museum shows off the vitality that it attempts to explain. The museum oozed with imagination, everyone was happy to be there together, participating in a huge show and tell. I was inspired to culminating some ideas that have been brewing in my brain for a while, like the sound sculpture albums, and the rain room, and the photo-sound performance wall. In a way I wished I had my own project there, but I am glad I had free reign to explore and find all the knickkancks, experiments, and projects. I loved so much of it, it was hard to pick just 3 to talk about. So to do the rest of the projects justice, I will post pictures of the rest.
Interfaces:
The most amazing, beautiful, poetic piece in Maker Faire NY 2011. This swing set had a curtain of rain that would switch off as the swing would pass directly under the curtain. This work reminds me of a piece I’ve been wanting to make for a while now, a rain room that partitions the rain as you walk through. As far as interfaces, this is the most successful blissful work. Though I dared not to try it, since I saw a few girls get wet. I think the switches were not always working properly. Regardless of the switches, if it wasn’t for the cold or the line, I would have loved to swing by.
This piece created by Luis Violante is also endearing to me, since I have an utter fascination with microscopes. I’ve had one since I was a kid. In the Imagine Scope, Violante used a mini projector to play movies through the microscope viewfinders. The slides each had a magnetic chip that one could scan by placing it under the lens. Then depending on the slide you picked a movie would play. This interface is successful in many ways. Conceptually, it is taking the situation of watching films and redirecting it to a different point of view, perspective. It invites us to analyze these short films as carefully as biological specimens in a petri dish. Also I find the use of the mini projector a very clever way of displaying affection to the miniature world. This piece is just fantastic, the video selection was wonderful. I had the delight to see a compilation of images collected from one of the earliest space explorers.
3) BBQ Shopping Cart
Although this piece was merely on the outskirts of the faire, I find it delightfully crafty and well loaded with meaning. Shopping cart art is so boring, but this woman has unwittingly created the best piece I have yet seen. The mobility and resourcing used to create this food cart amazed me. Optimization of space and efficiency, this is engineering. This crafty artist has the most visibility (being right at the entrance of the faire), offers the product with the most demand (food), has to pay no royalties to the marketers of the faire (she is at the entrance, again) she is clearly the most resourceful engineer here! I’m not being sarcastic, I am glad to point out this project because I honestly feel that it represents the core of this movement. Electronic fads come and go with the times, when we are finally astute to ask ourselves ‘Well how does this thing I use every day work?’ I think this movement is about learning how to deconstruct the world we live in, to reuse in parts what we have created. It’s about salvaging the useful pieces and conforming them to a new idea. The crafty and the makers, these are the resourceful people, that out of an undying exploratory venture create new solutions one way or another. Those who keep asking How? and Why? reinvent our humanity.
1 comments
So clever of you to notice the cart!!