Wow - there is a TON going on in New York this weekend. 

FIRST OF ALL, an old friend, and my favorite: the Conflux Festival which is, in it's own words:

"the annual New York festival for contemporary psychogeography, the investigation of everyday urban life through emerging artistic, technological and social practice. Visual and sound artists, writers, urban adventurers and the public gather to explore their urban environment."

I've participated in three different Conflux Festivals -- two sound walks and one panel at the New Museum -- and have consistently found the projects (not to mention the adventures in finding tem) to be innovative and invigorating. Highly recommended. This article gives a good introduction to the Conflux experience. Keep an eye/ear out for pieces by Sabine Gruffat and Bill Brown ("Love Box"), Katarina Jerinic ("Public Utility Trail Network," Eric Bessel and Shawn Stucky ("Letters to a Stranger") and Providence's very own Rachel Jendrzejewski ("Daydream.") Update: in the course of writing this blog entry, their servers have become overwhelmed. Could be a very popular Conflux indeed!

SECONDLY, the Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice, which begins its second year of bringing more than forty artists, activists and other cultural producers together to discuss the political implications of socially engaged art practice. Unfortunately, Creative Time Summit is sold out but luckily you can watch the entire thing streamed online from the comfort of your bedroom. Lucky you!

AND LAST BUT CERTAINLY NOT LEAST, the Art in Odd Places Festival ("exploring the odd, ordinary and ingenious in the spectacle of daily life") finishes up this weekend, with more than thirty artists creating works investigating the idea of 'chance' along 14th Street in Manhattan, from Avenue C all the way to the Hudson. You may come across new walking rituals, public projections, roving boom boxes, and site-specific dance along your way. Todd Shalom and Juan Betancurth will lead Elastic City's "Lucky Walk" which will attempt to consecrate urban territory and find meaning in its symbols.

... then it too has come to a place where the road falls off, a place where there is no public space and the landscape is being paved over, where leisure is shrinking and being crushed under the anxiety to produce, where bodies are not in the world but only indoors in cars and buildings, and an apotheosis of speed makes those bodies seem anachronistic or feeble. In this context, walking is a subversive detour, the scenic route through a half-abandoned landscape of ideas and experiences.

Tomorrow evening (Thursday) at 6:30 pm, I'll be speaking on a panel organized by the wonderful slowLab, entitled "Slowing Down: Artists and Designers Mapping the City" at New York's Museum of Art and Design, at 2 Columbus Circle. On the panel with me will be Christian Nold and Natalie Jeremijenko, and the evening will be moderated by artist Sabrina Gschwandtner.
Christian will present his mapping projects, which reveal aspects of the complex relationship between us, our environment and our fellow citizens. I'll discuss my work, particularly my Park Bench Cinema series of site-specific audio work -- Almost Grand and Eleven Dreams in Red Hook. Natalie will discuss her health activism clinic that dispenses prescriptions for local data collection, urban interventions, and participatory art/design projects to improve an individual's wellbeing in the city.
 
More information is available here. Please come by if you're interested!

"Most of the time walking is merely practical, the unconsidered locomotive means between two sites. To make walking into an investigation, a ritual, a meditation, is a special subset of walking, physiologically like and philosophically unlike the way the ail carrier brings the mail and the office worker reaches the train. Which is to say that the subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic."

- Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust

I've been reading Gaston Bachelard's book, The Poetics of Space, which I have been meaning to read forever. And I'm happy to say that it lives up to the hype, although the introduction was rather tough going - basically a logically rigorous defense of the poetry to follow. I'm happy to just read the poetry.

From Wired. Listen to the reverb!

I think this is the official video from Creative Time.

It's fascinating to see people's reactions so close up.

A longer feature, from Boing Boing.