My Thesis Proposal
22 Apr 09

What the blurb for one of my 1st talks will be

“I have 413 Facebook friends and in one week I saw more then 100 of them in RL. I wanted to create a work of art about virtual friends so to do that I visited them in person. I got a picture of me with lost friends, childhood buddies, ex girlfriends, family, and people from high school I didn’t talk to. I asked them about their RL friends, asked for a physical souvenir, and took their pulse to be used for a ‘digital painting’ of lightning bugs. The ‘painting’ is a wall mounted laptop running a looped program.”

01 Apr 09
I read a Steven Strogatz book which spoke of emergence and how lightning bugs were able to synchronize. This concept hasn’t really been applied to individuals connecting through the Internet. I represent this in an ambient light brightness pulsing of the work and the virtual environment of the bugs. Strogatz suggests that it was essential that each individual has an input and output, an input which listens to a group and an output that can contribute to a group. It is also essential that the output can be adjusted based on what the group outputs. This is the same in virtual social networks. Every member has a unique output and takes in information from the group.
— excerpt from the paper
30 Mar 09
Facebook’s huge growth is creating inevitable collisions as the whole notion of “friend” takes on a highly elastic meaning.
— NYTimes: Is Facebook Growing Up Too Fast?
04 Mar 09
is using a social network to tell ppl on a social network that I am helping a buddy with a project about social networks. Infinite Loop FTW!
— torandus

Thanks Tom. :)
28 Feb 09
I mapped out the general location of all of my facebook friend who reside upstate new york. I just wanted a general idea as to how to schedule the trip to visit facebook friends. Now I can start contacting them and telling them where I’ll be and at what time. I also want to give them a better idea of what the project is and what to expect.red = 10 friends, yellow = 1 friend

I mapped out the general location of all of my facebook friend who reside upstate new york. I just wanted a general idea as to how to schedule the trip to visit facebook friends. Now I can start contacting them and telling them where I’ll be and at what time. I also want to give them a better idea of what the project is and what to expect.

red = 10 friends, yellow = 1 friend