Memes and Multi-Touch Panels

I recently created a proposal called Taking Meme-ories. From my web site:

Taking Memeories is about engaging a new audience and evolving aesthetic…one that is participatory and challenges the status quo.

Part of this proposed project is to make a statement about the nature of art (as memorial) in the digital age. It's fluid, it's impermanent, and it’s ever changing. My initial idea of meme+memorial looks back to the trains being ‘bombed’ in NYC back in the 60s and 70s. Some of these moving graffiti murals were memorials and they were not permanent. Our very existence changes what a memorial is. Tags in the 70s used for individual, or artistic expression in a changing urban landscape now define the contents of the World Wide Web.

I think a little more work/research would make this a stronger proposal. I need to tie in my love of hip-hop culture and show more of what I think is the future of hip-hop and art in the 21st century. For example, I found a demonstration of the Multi-Touch Interaction Research project by Jefferson Han (and others) who is developing devices that are "inherently able to accommodate multiple users simultaneously, which is especially useful for larger interaction scenarios such as interactive walls or murals."

See the demonstration at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89sz8ExZndc

or here:



More recently, I learned about a new revolutionary digital instrument, Reactable, that was developed by a team of digital musicians at the Music Technology Group at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain. The Reactable, is a

multi-user electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving physical objects on a luminous table surface. By moving and relating these objects, representing components of a classic modular synthesizer, users can create complex and dynamic sonic topologies, with generators, filters and modulators, in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.

Read the article HERE.

After recently reading Jeff Chang's Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop I discovered the work of Brett Cook.

Cook's Colors of Compassion: Healing Our Familes, Building True Community is a project that was an

interactive, multidisciplinary, revolutionary experience in mindfulness that culminated in a large public work illustrating what makes a happy community.

I am inspired to simplify my original proposal and be more focused, to include youth and personal development. Rather than apply to a PhD program I will seek funding...