Greetings from Portland ! We arrived late last night. Woke early to start start my work day.. Soem good meetigns today.. including one where I’m helping arrange a Fulbright teaching gig at UVM for my good friend Selim . Selim was one of 8 year old twins whose family I lived with when I was n exchange student in Austria in 1979 (!). he’s now the head of the Industrial Design department at the Volkshochschule Wiener Neustadt. Looks like we”re goign to be able to make that happen next fall (?).
When Gabe got home from school we headed to Hopscotch a new interactive experience zone in Portland. It’s an amazing interactive tech/art venue. As we were getting there our good friend Tucker and his GF Hailey were just coming out. It was great seeing them. Hailey lost an earing in teh ball pit (ball pit ?!) we took a picture to see if we could find it.
Hopscotch is beautifully laid out.. your guided through a maze of corridors that lead you between very cool interactives. Its a bit like Meow Wolf.. but more techy and less story. Here are some pics of the demos. Pics dont really do it justice though.. you really have to be there !
One of my favorites was the most simple.. three rooms filled with pure colored light.. It was so cool to see the world in monochrome.
Next was an interactive space which transmuted motion to projected images
Then there was a room full of suspended spheres with addressable LEDS.. It reminded me of the piece my friends Mat and Eric made at Echo. several years ago.
My favorite was a piece that allowed a person or small group to dance at one end of the room to music , then their images were sliced and diced and re-mixed into a n amazing video montage
One crazy conceptual piece was called “Secrets Hotline”. people could call in their secrets.. then they were randomly played back under a bunch of mushrooms you could walk under and listen. Soem of them were funny., some were dark.. some were really heartfelt
Another favorite was a huge ball pit which was washed from beneath with color patterns from LEDS. pretty simple, but very effective.. The guide told us that people lost all sorts of stuff.. cell phones, earbuds., iwatches.. and earrings.. we jumped in looking for Haileys eating.. we found one, but it wasn’t hers 🙂
then on to soem other LED stuff.. like this room of lit up tubes
Then a kaleiascope room.. two round displays with a nice interactive control panel for each
We loved hopscotch.. you should definetly check it out if you can.
One the way home we stopped by Gabes lab to do a few steps on an experiment he’s running. Always so cool to see where he works.. and all that he knows how to do !
More from the coast tomorrow !
nite all, nite sam
-me