Interactive Art
so I became temporarily obsessed with finding out who had done the interactive art installation in the streets of Tokyo, it was SEMITRANSPARENT DESIGN (founded in 2003 by Ryoji Tanaka, Toshiyuki Sugai, Yusuke Shibata and Hiroshi Sato (who joined in a little later). Their main focus lies on exploring different types of networks and interactive projects as well as dealing with traditional media).
see article here: http://www.pingmag.jp/2006/02/20/semitransparent-design/

video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxrVwvFLokI

Here's an image of a project I did last semester.

another one:

I compiled some videos, short extracts from movies, grouped together by color, mood, pattern, etc...I made DVDs with one video as a background and created a menu at the bottom,

so the viewer would choose one video and this would start a progression of videos and eventually bring them back to the beginning...(and their choices were projected on different walls, one with each DVD) I didn't have all the technical expertise to make it really work, I still don't, but I hope in the future I'll have more time to investigate this, look for software that allows me to work like this, etc....
When Julie came to our class, she said that she could identify three elements that were present in my work: 1.they were inside, 2.it was a woman, 3.they were at night, like these three parameters the project seemed to her to revolve around, and that's sort of how I composed the strings of videos for the installation project...grouping images of things that went together, and then I set them along each other... so now I'm wondering how this idea of a new blog, one that's compiled from the blogs I've been reading can be like this...am I the only person interacting here, as an editor of the other writers? what parameters do I define for this editing process? is it open to other posters? but then how would it remain cohesive??? or maybe it has nothing to do with interactivity, it's just about a thing that generates, develops from multiple things that are similar...but then how does this blog relate to the images, does this new blog then generate new images, does it bring distortions to existing images? is it important that I continue to create images, or does it become about collecting, selecting others' images... if i'm creating a fictitious character, how do these start to speak of this person...
the blogs started reading as if they were from the same person, with slight differences, and the images I've made so far share these things in common, but do they necessarily have to have this relationship?

melodrama may be the least interesting aspect of set-up photography past and present

I just finished reading the article Mike posted a little while ago Wandering in a Forest of Poses...I kept thinking of parallels between my work this semester, and that which Smith wrote about.

Last critique I kept thinking about how uncomfortable I was getting with my being in those pictures, and how if I looked at them from the outside, if I hadn't produced them, I would think they had been made by some girl playing dress-up and not an artist doing serious work...I don't know that removing myself from the images will help much, or if its best that I rethink my entire approach...

At SPE I also questioned what importance the images I make can have when there are photographs out there that speak of real issues that do interest me, but that currently make no appearance in my work...

SPE...

Walking around the tables at the curator review, the work of the two following women artists caugh my eye:

Toni Pepe, an MFA student from Rochester Institue of Technology, and Jane Tam, a BFA student from Syracuse.

Pepe's work interested me because of her setups of space, using wallpaper and dramatic light...they do seem a little too much inclined towards fashion (I saw her Angle of Repose series), but I could use some help with the setup of the space in my own images.
http://www.tonipepe.com/

Tam's work seemed to me to have lot in common with the work I was doing last semester, with old family photographs. I spoke to her briefly as I looked through her project Can I Come Home With You? and she said she was using photographs of her "Family" series, and adding her own drawings of old family photos...this is something I briefly tried but abandoned, I wasn't happy with my results, but hers look ok .
http://janetam.com/index.html