Last night I checked out my friend Chris’s art installation Synopsis at the Leo Kuelbs Collection in DUMBO. Gorgeous work, elegantly executed. Here are my pics (click for the Flickr set).

Happy New Year! Glomag and I have been invited to do a couple songs on the Engadget Show again this Saturday. If you would enjoy (or at least not utterly detest) the discussion of gadgets, gaming and technology by wisecracking bloggers, do come. It’s free (but you have to queue for tickets), their guest is Google’s senior product manager for Android, Erick Tseng, and they’ll be raffling off CES swag, too. Details below but please be sure to check the Engadget post for updates.

The Show is sponsored by Sprint, and will take place at the Times Center, part of The New York Times Building in the heart of New York City at 41st St. between 7th and 8th Avenues (Google map). Tickets are — as always — free to anyone who would like to attend, but seating is limited, and tickets will be first come, first served… so get there early! Here’s all the info you need:

• There is no admission fee — tickets are completely free
• The event is all ages
• Ticketing will begin at the Times Center at 2PM on Saturday, doors will open for seating at 4:30PM, and the show begins at 5PM
• You cannot collect tickets for friends or family — anyone who would like to come must be present to get a ticket
• Seating capacity in the Times Center is about 340, and once we’re full, we’re full
• The venue is located at 41st St. between 7th and 8th Avenues in New York City (map after the break)
• The show length is around an hour

Miss our first performance? Head to Engadget.com to watch Show 003. Go down to the video player and skip to 69 minutes in if you only want to see glomag and me play.

Update

Took me long enough…here’s the video.

Update:

Video’s up! Head to Engadget.com to watch Show 003. Skip to 69:35 if you just want to see Glomag and me play.

This Sunday glomag (excellent chipmusician, friend and producer/director of This Spartan Life) and I will be playing two songs at a live taping of the third episode of The Engadget Show. Tickets are free but you have to pick them up at the box office before the show (see details below). Hope you can come!

Description: The Engadget Show, next Sunday, November 22nd, with Drew Bamford, director of HTC’s Innovation Center; Joystiq’s Editor-in-chief Chris Grant for a special roundtable discussion focused on gaming.

Live music by glomag and live visuals by Dan Winckler.

Filmed live in front of an audience at the Tishman Auditorium at Parsons The New School for Design, at 66 West 12th Street between 5th and 6th Avenue. Seating is limited and tickets will be handed out on a first-come, first-served basis — arrive early and be prepared for a little wait.

• The show is graciously sponsored by Nokia, and hosted by Parsons The New School for Design
• The total show length will be around an hour
• There is no admission fee — tickets are completely free
• The event is all ages
• The venue seats just over 450 people
• Parsons students are welcomed, and we encourage them to come!
• Tickets will be available for pickup at the Tishman Auditorium at 2PM on the 22nd, and we’re strongly encouraging people to get their tickets and not stand in line — if you have a ticket, you’ll have a seat!
• You’ll need to hold onto your ticket stub to be eligible for the giveaways
• You cannot pick up tickets for other people — if you want your friend to get a ticket, bring your friend!
• The show begins at 5PM, and doors will open at 4:30PM

More info (and the first two shows): http://www.engadget.com/tag/TheEngadgetShow/

Facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=180756203617&ref=mf

This Saturday at The Tank, we’ll be doing a live This Spartan Life show, hosting Pulsewave, the monthly chiptunes event. Is machinima. Is funny. Has live music. Hope see you there.

Info:

This Spartan Life Hosts Pulsewave at The Tank July 26 with 3 live chiptune acts!

Please note new address for The Tank, below

Damian Lacedaemion will be joined by AeroMC, Fyb3roptik, Dan O’Conduit, Amber of the Solid Gold Elite Dancers and 8 Bit Collective forum members, live on screen via XBox Live!

In gamespace, no one can see you sweat.

Pulsewave is the monthly live chiptune music event in NYC. This Spartan Life is the award winning “talk show in gamespace.”

Your host, Damian Lacedaemion enters the unpredictable multiplayer universe to interview various guests and luminaries all within the 3D gamespace of Halo 3 on Xbox Live.

This time, Damian and the crew from This Spartan Life will be on screen live to host a special Pulsewave with musical guests from the upper reaches of chiptune Valhalla:

8GB
Unicorn Dream Attack
Neil Voss

Visuals by the incomparable No Carrier!
Special machinima videos!
Live interaction between avatars and audience!
The bizarre and frightening world of the ub3r 1337 on graphic display!

All with a heavy dose of CHIPTUNES and EXPLOSIONS!

Don’t miss it!

Saturday, July 26, 2008 at The Tank
@ DCTV
87 Lafayette St @ White St
New York, NY, 10013
Cost : $10
Doors open at 9PM

I forgot to mention that I’m doing visuals with Lance Blisters tonight at the after-party for the 1st annual Anarchist Book Fair.

LANCE BLISTERS: LIVE Jungle, Breakcore, Punk, and Noise performed with MIDI Guitar and Microphone, using custom software to create cutup political anthems. LIVE synchronized visual transcriptions of the songs’ subjects. LANCE BLISTERS was initiated in 2003 to SMASH THE STATE with a show which will ROCK YOUR FACE OFF! LANCE BLISTERS is a live multimedia band currently comprising Lance Blisters (music) and Ilan Katin (visuals), with special guest visual performer Dan Winckler for this show.

This Saturday, 14 April 07, LANCE BLISTERS will perform at the Anarchist Bookfair Afterparty with bands VIC THRILL and SATURN MISSILE, MOURNING GLORIES, ZEMI 17, and DJ’s CX KIDTRONIK, PETER GUNN, SHAKEY, AMOK, EMMIT BROWN, JASON BK playing a mixed bag of breaks, hip hop, d and b, techno, rare grooves, dubstep, breakcore, and…

Expect LANCE to play at 10:30pm

9pm-4am, Saturday, 14 Apr 2007
The Creek in The Cave, 10-93 Jackson Ave. (Long Island City, QueenS)
7 to Vernon/Jackson -or- G to 21 St/Van Alst.
$3-6 w/ ID
Google subway map from onnyturf.com

“Terrorists can be defeated simply by not becoming terrorized — that is, anything that enhances fear effectively gives in to them.”*

This moment in history will be remembered as a high-water mark of fear and hysteria, a time when small groups of men successfully bred fear around the world, a fear which politicians encouraged and manipulated to secure their control over government. Today I called my Congressman and Senators’ offices to ask them to speak out against this “no liquids” policy on airplanes and the manipulation of this foiled act of terrorism by the party in power to make people more fearful, and thus, more easy to control. The response by our government to acts of terrorism is turning our country into a fearful, reactionary monster. I hope you’ll call or write your representatives, too.

http://house.gov
http://senate.gov

* From “A False Sense of Insecurity?” (alternate link), an essay by John Mueller from the Cato Institute’s Regulation magazine.

Wow, done.

Eight 13 – 15 year old New York City students + five 19 – 21 year old Amsterdam students + 1 co-director + four assistant teachers (later, two and a half) + nine guest teachers + two Amsterdam teachers X (five weeks here | eight days there) + three-ish administrators + a whole lot of help from other people, especially Andres , == quite a lot of work. Kids Connect workshops concluded on Friday. I’m stunned and delighted at the relatively huge quantity of free time I have now. Back to three squares + eight hours sleep + a social life (! surprise) + a whole lot of thesis writing to do, not to mention the proposals for the next Kids Connect workshop ~= relatively not as busy but quite busy and it’s a good thing I like being busy. I gave Carl and IDMI a little posable man as a token of our thanks (I find it amusing that his IKEA name is “Gestalta”). Carl got quite a giggle out of it. I’ve got three minutes left on the remorseless Pester before it’s back to writing thesis stuff…what to say. Hmm. My friend Adam Kendall gave me a DVD of some of his work the other night at the Speigel Tent EyeWash show. I have yet to watch it but it’s a beautifully crafted CD and jewel case so it allures me. Perhaps in 10 minutes or so Pester will give me a break to check it out….au’voir.

How can you argue with this video? These kids are cool.

Kids Connect is going very well. Our students are learning a lot, they like us, we like them, it’s an avalanche of busy and all good. Tomorrow we’ll open a window (read: video conference) with our counterparts in Amsterdam; we put the above video together in VJ-U today with Benton Bainbridge, who thought it’d make a great welcome when they join us on the Kids Connect island. More later, stories and pictures now:

Things are going very well.

We students and teachers are making lots of stuff for the island.

I made something today that gives me great pleasure. I took a photo of one of the Lawrence Weiner manhole covers and made it a 3D texture in Second Life. Click the pic for full effect.

Last week, Josephine and I attended the Games 4 Change conference, put on by the Serious Games Initiative (among many) and hosted at Parsons. It was an energizing experience that gave a definite boost to Kids Connect. We met other educators (many from Second Life), program directors, game developers, and one futurist; saw several really good panels on serious games, funding of, grassroots organization with, benefits of, big media interest in, building alternative spaces in, and reaching new audiences through; and — a subject I’m keenly interested in — the realization/evolution of the 3D Web through virtual worlds like Second Life. We met Barry Joseph et al from Global Kids (the first educational initiative in Teen Second Life) who not only gave two excellent presentations on panels but also gave generously of their time to share their learning experiences in Second Life with Josephine and me. A lot of this is covered in one their Holy Meatballs’ stories, which I’ll call What (Not) To Do When Starting an Educational Island in Teen Second Life (pdf) and it’s an essential read for anyone starting to teach in SL. We’re going to ask the Lindens to put our island next to theirs so our students can skip right over without a teleport. We may collaborate on some projects in the future, too.

Tomorrow is the first day of Kids Connect workshops in New York. It will be a somewhat messy start because of some typos in the mailing but no matter — most things start messy.

Today’s Second Life recommendation: check out Svarga (teleport link), an artificial ecosystem where all the plants, animals, rain, clouds, sun and terrain communicate with each other, grow and evolve procedurally a la The Game of Life. See Pathfinder Linden’s photoset of Svarga and the New World Notes post about it.