Today was the first day of the ITP Winter show, tomorrow it will be on from 5pm to 9pm. It brings me one step closer to actually getting some sleep, although not really that much closer to finishing work, that never happens. Despite some problems with dreamhost's completely unreliable servers, Nanna Halinen and my project Aura worked pretty well. Our speech recognition module appeared to have some difficulty understanding words when the noise level reached an extreme level, particularily from the kids crowded around Chris Paretti's SpeedDial. Absolutely ingenius project, my daughter loved it, but a little hard to compete with. Unfortunately, I didn't have much time to concentrate my efforts around my other project the Witness Human Rights Video Hub. But Yonatan seemed to have that pretty much under control. Other projects in the show I particularily liked (in the limited time I was able to walk around) were botanicalls by Robert Faludi, Kate Hartman, Kati London, Rebecca Bray, Imaginary Sketch Book by Jadie (Jung) Oh, the MegaPhone 3000 by Chris Kairalla and Jury Hahn, the Musical Fun Chair by Lara Muzicant, Myra Einstein, Lisa Kovener, Adina Schwartz, Solar Bikini by Andrew Schneider and Body Paintings by Jeffrey LeBlanc. I also have to give a shot out to Megan MacMurray and Angela Pablo and their project the Garden Electric and Alex Bisceglie and Jane Oh and their project MoPres. Although I didn't get to see either one working (or in the Garden Electric's case working perfectly) I thought they were two of the most interesting concepts in the show.

In all the craziness of trying to get your project to work, to actually be able to present it in a way that does it justice is almost as imprtant as the project actually working. One thing I did realize after reading a review of the show that mentions our Aura project, is that Nanna and I need to be a lot more specific in articulating the reasons behind why we created this in the way that we did, using mobile phones and VOIP. After hearing several thoughts on further directions that we should go with the project durring our final presentation in the Redial: Interactive Telephony class, it has become evident that many people seem to be interpreting it as being about certain things that we ourselves are not necessarily trying to represent. I think we need to be more clear that this project has everything to do with the mobile phone and voice. Emotion-based location landscapes have been created a thousand times before in many forms through many other interesting techniques, such as the We Feel Fine project, which I was alerted to tonight. This and this happen to be two of my favorite projects in that realm. However, I think with Aura, Nanna and I were interested in four things; that it be mobile and accessible anywhere (we are currently developing a mobile phone application to make the receiving of photos and the sending of your location even easier), that it be easy for anyone with a mobile phone to use (send a text message, make a phone call...not needing any additional input), that it would allow people to communicate through interactive storytelling in a form that is being somewhat overlooked online and that we are somewhat avoiding in our daily lives because of email, text messaging, social networking sites etc. (voice) and that it attempt to represent the specific 'aura' of a particular address in the city and present people with an easy way to access and contribute to that location's story so that the aggregation of information would be less about the individual person and more about that specific space and the collection of memories left there.

Hopefully tomorrow will go over just as well as today...with a little more consistent functionality from our dreamhost server (yes I sent them an email).