E89 New Media Arts in the 20th and 21th Century, a class taught by Hillary Mushkin, had its annual student showcase. The course goes over major art movements and pieces stemming from around WWI such as Dada-ism, surveillance art and mediated realities. Each lecture is an exploration and discussion of various pieces, and the course culminates in a student-designed art piece that relates to the themes coveredover the term.
A crawl-in experience, this enclosure has mirrored walls that reflect the various strands of LEDs, making it seem as if the viewer is surrounded by infinite lights. Music plays as a wearable device on the viewer's wrist translates his or her heart beats into pulses of light. In a way, this extends the viewer's body into a large, expansive space.
The 1960's Fluxus Performance Notebook is a collection of instructions, proposals and propositions for readers to perform their own "happenings". Viewers at this exhibit are invited to perform in a more modern rendition.
Viewers step in front of a camera and are turned into mini-virtual characters on the screen. As the exhibit went on, the virtual world became more and more populated with small moving avatars.
To help users embody a web crawler, ads from a live web crawl pop up and overlay over a video of someone taking a walk. Users can control how quickly the web crawler (and correspondingly, the video of the nature walk) navigates the web by pulling on a joy stick.
The shopping cart is fitted with a monitor that shows lots of added features, such as GPS for navigation through a grocery store. Users can shoot at it using a wave gun to make the cart roll by itself. This absurd piece is meant to highlight how many consumer products are overwhelmed by superfluous extra features.
It was the Friday night of midterms during my first year at Caltech, and I was alone in the library. That weekend (week five of term, if you’re keeping count) also happens to coincide with Halloween. But as a bright-eyed frosh trudging my way through Ma 1a lecture notes, I was just baffled that no one else was studying alongside me. Spoiler alert: not all Caltech students spend Friday night—or every night—studying or grinding sets, even during midterms. And especially on Halloween weekend.
In order to get a good sense of the Caltech community, there is no better way than to talk to the students themselves. To give a little bit of an inside perspective of Caltech, I asked some students a variety of questions. Questions ranged from conspiracy theories to Caltech-specific takes and other random topics.
I’d like to think that I keep a tidy desk, but hey— entropy prevails for everyone. Here’s a breakdown of all the items you could find on my desk, circa February 2023.
My grandma always says that it rains whenever Dragonssuperior zodiac sign
travel, and sure enough, it was raining when I landed at LAX for my last calendar year at Caltech. It’s officially my graduation year—but between leaving campus just before spring term in my freshman year and returning, twenty-one years old, as a junior, it really does feel like my time here has flown by.
