Chanel Mobile Art exhibit

Pictures inside the exhibit.

Pictures from the VIP party.

Miraikan Museum of Science and Innovation

Club Womb

Graffiti near PS1 in Queens.

Helped set up the Habitat Hotel model at the MoMA for a new photoshoot.

Went to Indiannapolis for the public art installation with Vito Acconci. Tested out the sensors and LEDs onsite.

Good friend Todd Holoubek had a sound installation at a gallery.

Whitney Biennial

Olafur Eliason.

The view from the hotel we stayed at in Macerata, about 30 minutes from the iGuzzini headquarters.

The iGuzzini main office.

Interior lobby.

Lighting showroom.

Lighting Education center with many physical setups to show the different effects of luminous values and color temperatures.

Lots of very tasty food was eaten througout the week.

The classroom where they went over various projects that integrated their lighting.

After a few days in Recanati we went Rome to see various lighting projects there.

The Auditorium in Rome by architect Renzo Piano.

The last day was raining but it was nice to walk around Rome and see some shops and sights.

The PLDC in London was, as I believed, to be an open conference for all people working with light. The conference focused on lighting design theory and practice, and had some great speakers involved like Mark Majors of Spears & Majors among many other great architects or lighting designers, mostly based in Europe and the States. It was really refreshing to be at a conference where ideas were the focus and not manufacturers or products.

While the conference itself was great the 'awards' ceremony at the end of the conference was certainly a letdown. It became very clear that the awards ceremony was a way to congratulate PLDA members and those within their community with what they had achieved. It made absolutely no sense to include such high-profile people up for awards such as Tadao Ando or James Turrell, only to let them lose to someone who is directly associated with the PLDA. Did these people even submit their work into the contest?

That being said, I gave my own lecture that clearly garnered a strong response (many people telling me it was an engaging lecture, more than one said it was a highlight presentation, an invitation to present at Parsons in New York, etc..), nevertheless, they gave the award in my category to a student whose teachers and mentors happen to be the very organizers of the conference.

While there is no problem with recognizing the work of members of the PLDA, why bother calling it an open awards ceremony and just say its a ceremony to recognize work of people in your community? (ie. let's award people who pay our membership fees...)

The PLDC was a great conference for the content alone. The PLDA and the PLDC have a lot of potential to validify and create a stable platform for lighting designers everywhere, but only if they become an open community not an exclusive one. I hope that after patting themselves on the back during the awards ceremony at the 1st PLDC, the PLDA will open their arms to all those working with light (after they pay their membership fees, of course)...

Shibuya.

Dj'ing at my friend Dave Twomey's and his party YUK at Womb.

Quality food, presented well.

My friend Shane Berry doing a live Techno set at Module.

Visiting Hachiya at his Petworks company.

The lecture at Tama University went really well. Really nice to meet Penny and Dan from PDlab and also Professor Wada, who gave us a tour of Tama's great facilities. Being a student there must be fun!

Some random gallery was going to have an opening in a week where the grand champion of yo-yo was going to perform.

More images of the installation here.

Ending the night, Josh and I did a live electronic performance of acid tinged dance tracks which was very enjoyable.. Acciiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiidddddddddd!

Various Building Designs:

Various City-Sized Developments:
These are huge areas being developed as a whole, sometimes under a central idea or theme, and can house/office anywhere from 100k - 1million+ people.

Zaha Hadid Architects also had a booth at the conference.

Delta Lighting does interior and exterior lighting for everything from malls, hotels, towers, landscapes, and city projects (and with my involvement, will now offer dynamic lighting solutions), so we had a booth where we were able to establish new connections and pick up more projects.

Our team is really great with very experienced and award-winning lighting designers from Germany, France, and the States. I really look forward to working with them on some large projects out here in the desert.

Patches of skyscrapers jut out from the desert. There isn't one main downtown area but 2 or 3 currently with various other downtown areas currently being developed.

Burj Dubai will be the largest tower in the world when it is completed. It's exact height is being kept a secret to ensure it's title (for however long the title is held before the next superscraper is built..).

Indoor skiing at the Mall of the Emirates. This used to be the largest mall in the city but 2 more are being developed that are larger.

Burj Al Arab, the famous hotel building. This is the largest dedicated hotel in the world and is built over the ocean, accessible by a bridge and helicopter. Each room is at least $3000 per night.

An example of a development of skyscrapers being built in unison.

Almost every presenter brought a focused and specialized viewpoint to the table. It was enjoyable to see every one of them. Here are some highlights.

Brian Eno (influencial musician/producer, invented modern Ambient genre and produced for Talking Heads and U2): talked about minimalism and art. How the process of interpretation lives within the viewer's brain and that there really isn't much physically needed to trigger ideas and to communicate.

Will Wright (Creator of SimCity, SimLife, The Sims, and the whole catalog of reality simulations): talked about how as game productions have increased that more and more resources have been assigned to content development, and that is where his games are trying to reverse. He is creating games that set up a structure that allow the player to create the content for it. Then he demo'd his newest game called "Spore" where the player can create their own creature and go through the whole evolution process from multiplication to intelligence and then to exploring other planets, all the while other people are doing the same thing, so you end up meeting thousands of different creatures created by other people at various levels of development.

Tom Friedman (3 time Pulitzer Prize winner, NYTimes foreign affairs columnist): Energy is directly linked to the geopolitical situation. We are funding both sides of the War on Terror. Our dependence on foreign oil funds terrorism. China, India, etc are all developing and they want the “American Dream” cars, house, washer, etc. but if they follow our same energy model the world cannot sustain itself. Green industry will be THE industry out of necessity. China will go green because it has to, and that will mean trouble for the US when all the green innovations are coming from China. If you think we are having problems now with all the labor coming out of China, think what will happen when all the innovations are coming out of there too. The richest man in China now is a solar power engineer. For the sake of our culture and the US we need to rebrand Green as progressive, innovative, and aligned with capitalism.

Also in this section of speakers was Lester Brown (MacArthur Fellow, Earth Policy Institute): The new economy is where the new energy sources are. Cars can pretty much run on anything, but there is no awareness at the federal, US, or even global level to track biofuel manufacturing, demand and development. There is no one in charge of this. The key to restructuring the global economy is getting the market to tell the truth. (for instance, the price of oil does not take into consideration the cost of the EFFECTS of using oil; such as pollution, disease, ecological costs, etc.)

Socialism collapsed because it did not tell the economic truth.
Capitalism could collapse because it does not tell the ecological truth.

Kevin Kelly (Founder of Wired magazine): Technological Determinism. All the machines in the world are connected and form one large machine. In essense, we are developing and nurturing a super machine. There are 1 trillion links on the web and there are around 1 trillion links/synapses in the brain. And he goes on to make comparisons to many other parameters that are similar between the web and the brain, but states that our brains aren't doubling in power every 2 years. Does technology have it's own agenda? Kelly makes the case for viewing technology as a seperate entity thriving and developing with it's own agenda.

Richard Dawkins (Oxford University): Faith is the belief in the absense of evidence. Faith is hereditary and a childhood indoctrination.There is no such thing as a Catholic Child, only a child with Catholic Parents. Religion has been uniquely allowed to map children's behavoiur. Science has often been accused of arrogant certainty, but what about Religion and Faith? It's ridiculous to think that Faith has been expected to be treated with respect ("We have to respect their Faith") when we are critical of everything (government, art, etc). We must be critical of Faith. We must believe in the truth and promote people to live in a world of truth not of faith. Faith is a virus.

---

Also later in the conference, it was great to see Clifford Ross present the highest resolution camera in the world (100 megapixels) along with his 360 degree video camera.

Also there were some great performances by Jazz Musician Jason Moran, and electronic performance artist Reggie Watts.

At the closing gala on Saturday night I did an installation using the 3D Display Cubes in a similar way as NextFest in New York. 14 Display Cubes were linked together to create a large 3D Display that spelled the words "Pop!Tech" in spinning letters with various other spatial animations. The response was very enthusiastic at seeing the Cubes at work. It's always great to let people see these works in person as it's difficult to get the real sense of space from viewing the pictures on there web or press.