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So, after a very long week, sheets and sheets of frosted window film, hundreds of lines of code, and help from some great people, the new Urban Echo interactive façade is complete. The interactive artwork will be running after sunset on the front of the Regis Center for Art on the UofM West Bank during the Spark Festival.

You can send your text messages to 612-501-2598. Or come by and participate in person. We are broadcasting the sound outside too you know …

A nice color spread of 0o400 (Reprise) was featured in the last issue of Metro Magazine. The story (pdf 18 mb) featured a story on the upcoming Spark Festival. We will be presenting an updated version of Urban Echo at the festival. You can find a festival program here.

MyMap was awarded “best in show” at the student design exhibition Monday evening. It was a great event and a wonderful opportunity for some true cross-disciplinary conversation.

It was also quite exciting to share the project with the larger public for the first time. Some viewers were skeptical that it was a custom program. Some assumed that it was hand drawn. I was also struck by how unexposed this kind of mapping remains. While I (and others) have been immersed in the field for a quite some time, and can easily see precedent for my work, many viewers did not have that same knowledge of the precedents. It was gratifying to be able to give them a glimpse of the field.

For more info on the project, take a look here.

(note: more info @ here)

I recently submitted “My Map (A Self-Portrait)” to the College of Design’s All Student Exhibition. You will find the exhibition in the Commons Area at Ralph Rapson Hall (a map). On display for your enjoyment is a massive 44″x44″ archival print of my email corresopondence between May, 1998 and Jan, 2007.

Please stop by before the 6:00pm reception on Monday to cast your vote for “Student’s Choice Award”.

Here’s the my statement:

Email became an integral part of my life in 1998.  Like many people, I have archived all of my email with the hope of someday revisiting my past.  Of great interest to me is revealing the innumerable relationships between me, my schoolmates, work-mates, friends and family.  This could not readily be accomplished by reading each of my 60,000 emails one-by-one.  Instead, I created My Map, a relational map and alternative self portrait.  My Map is a piece of custom designed software capable of rendering the relationships between myself and individuals in my address book by examining my email archive.  The intensity of the relationship is determined by the intensity of the line.  My Map allows me to explore different relational groupings and periods of time, revealing the temporal ebbs and flows in various relationships.  In this way, My Map is a veritable self-portrait, a reflection of my associations and a way to locate myself.

Here’s a picture:

An abstract I recently coauthored was submitted to the 2007 Computational and Systems Neuroscience (COSYNE) conference. Much of the research I contributed was carried out at the CNL while I was working on my Masters of Biomedical Engineering at the BML with my brilliant advisor, Peter Steinmetz.

Title: Separate image durations activate distinct neuronal populations in the human medial temporal lobe
Authors: Eve Isham, Christopher Baker, Chris Thorp, William Banks, Peter Steinmetz

(a link)