kate hollenbach

Trying to get things in order on the new site — I think I have everything moved over, but lost a little data in comments. New posts coming soon!

We are excited to announce the 2008 Spring term Monday Nights@VAP entitled “Zones of Emergency” which bring together practitioners from a wide range of backgrounds and fields to examine the scale and complexity of catastrophe and disaster scenarios through lectures and panel discussions. Lectures and panel discussions will range from the philosophical and cultural understandings of the emergency to practical “on the ground” operating organizations to current use of networked technology examining its own breakdown. This lecture series is co-organized by Ute Meta Bauer (Director of the MIT Visual Arts Program), Jae Rhim Lee, and Amber Frid-Jimenez.

In tonight’s lecture, artist Alfredo Jaar will present a selection of works that focus on his practice in zones of emergency like Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship, and in Rwanda in the aftermath of the genocide (1994 -2000). Kayvan Zainabadi, former president of Amnesty International at MIT, will speak about his experience at MIT working with Amnesty on crisis in Darfur.

The lecture is open to the public, so if you’re in the Boston area feel free to drop by! If not, you can catch tonight’s lecture (and future lectures) on our video blog at http://www.zonesofemergency.net/.

Last night I presented some highlights from Openstudio at Pecha Kucha Boston #3. I had never been to a Pecha Kucha Night before, but really enjoyed the fast-paced format. Each speaker showed 20 slides at 20 seconds per slide, sharing their art/design work and/or philosophy. If you’re curious, here’s a PDF of my slides, and the organizers will be posting more pictures from the event in the Pecha Kucha Boston Flickr group.

Putting together the presentation for the slideshow made me a little nostalgic about being in the Openstudio community. It was fun to revisit the project and look at some of the creative things people did with it.

Happy New Year!

I’ve spent some time lately thinking about an idea that came out of a conversation with my adviser, John, at the beginning of last semester, but I had forgotten about until recently. We talked about what it meant to have a visualization that was “alive” in some way. I brought this up with Seth today and we spent some time trying to come up with some examples and define what “alive” means in a visualization context. We agreed to describe this type of a visualization as a “visual ecology” and he has a nice post on his blog summarizing some of our ideas. Hope I’ll have more to say about this soon.