see a puffin eat a fish

We want to the Morgan Library last week to check out the ‘Bob Dylan” early years retrospective, “Bob Dylan, an American Journey”. We showed up about an hour before closing and raced upstairs to see the show. Looking now at the website, it looks like there is some other really incredible stuff there:

The Morgan Library & Museum, occupying a newly enlarged, midtown Manhattan campus designed by renowned architect Renzo Piano, houses one of the world’s greatest collections of artistic, literary, musical, and historical works. Included in its holdings are original scores of Mozart and Beethoven, drawings by Rembrandt and Rubens, medieval and Renaissance works, three Gutenberg Bibles, literary manuscripts of Dickens and Twain, and five-thousand-year-old Near Eastern carvings.

Three Gutenberg bibles! I’ll have to come back. They clearly scheduled this Massively popular show to coincide with the redesign of their building. We made it upstairs where there was another wait to get into the smallish room which held the exhibit. Of note was the elevator, a glass container that appeared to be hovering in mid air, supported by a single rear beam, blending into the background. When the elevator was on another floor, two glasses doors on each floor were the only barrier between the visitor and the drop below. It’s as if the elevator was floating.

The Bob Dylan exhibit covered ten years of his career, from the end of high school, through his travels to New York to meet Woody Guthrie to the release of his first few albums and his rise in popularity. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen such an exhibit about someone living. There were listening booths where you could hear early albums and read explanations. Parallels were shown to the civil rights movement and when the split happened; when Dylan stopped writing topical protest songs, plugged in and dropped out to sing interpersonal material. His silliness and brilliance was a pleasure to see.

(Thursday at 5:30)

I’ve been interested in location awareness for mobile devices for a while now. GPS and cell tower information isn’t as accessible as it is outside the US, so oftentimes application providers need to be very creative in figuring out exactly where a person is located. This may involve GPS, user entered location, cell tower discovery and making sense of FCC data. ZoneTag’s approach is to have the community do the heavily lifting. As you send photos over to Flickr with the ZoneTag software you also send cell tower information which comes up as a Flickr ‘tag’. You can then add other location based tags to your photos.You can add a zip code, state and street (e.g. 700 Main St, Boston, MA) or you can add an informal location tag (HarvardSquarePit). The cool part is that all photos uploaded by other ZoneTag users from the same location as your tagged photo will get the same tags you mapped in! So if I took a photo near a cell tower near the pit, it would be mapped in as HarvardSquarePit automatically.

I wanted to test how the ZoneTag community is doing. I’m going to route an MTA subway train along a ZoneTag suggested route. I’ll take ZoneTag pictures along a train line and see where ZoneTag decides that same train line is running. Hope it doesn’t end up in Kanasas.

The beauty of ITP is that every semester, regardless of the seemingly diverging classes I take, I find everything following a common thread. Even my independent projects and my internship are all connected. It’s a beautiful thing. I’m thinking about networks with Shirky and creating soft networks with Despina. I’m thinking about museum’s and how they can be open to the public with Nancy and i’m considering open ended clothing/architecture design with Despina. Even Danny’s mirrors class overlaps with the Waymarkr in terms of perspective and reflection.