This morning Zach gave us a show and tell of projects he has worked on that interfaced with hardware. Some included Talking Shoes,Connecting Light, and Play the World. He answered questions about his experience with working with clients and agencies and also gave us a general time frame for the projects he showed us. In my head I have always had this vision that media artists make these amazing projects in a week or two, so it was really refreshing to find out that a lot of these projects were worked on over a time frame of a couple months. It was nice to see the amount of research and trial and error that went into all of them as well. When approaching my own ideas, I had always felt like I was super behind, naive, or not good enough if I couldn’t just make it on the spot without much research, but hearing this really removes that anxiety. All of his projects became so much more relatable and made similar goals seem more achievable for me.

After lunch, Sha Hwang came and spoke about his work and gave us a lot of background and insight into his current project, redesigning/fixing the debacle that was healthcare.gov. He really is an amazing speaker - extremely articulate and just so calming. He has a very pure peacefulness to him. Some of his past work includes meshu.io and gifpop.io which are pretty fun. It was interesting to get an insight into how his team interfaced with other government contractors, the issues they ran into, and how they were resolved. He had a few very simple phrases of advice: ‘never assume malice’, ‘the best way to complain is to make things’, ‘simplicity is clarity is kindness’, ‘access is responsibility is empathy’, as well as a quote by Mandelbrot when asked to describe fractals: ‘They’re beautiful, damn hard, and increasinly useful.’ Overall, I think his was one of my favorite talks at SFPC, right up there with Sara Hendren.

At the end of the day, we had another artist talk by Joanie Lemercier. He does a lot of really awesome work with light and projection mapping. His work that most impressed me was Nimbes. After his talk, he invited us all back to a gallery to see a show he had curated and also has works in called Bright Matter. It was nice to see a few more of his pieces in person and hear a little more about the intention and work that went into their creation. There was also this really awesome light sculpture piece that just looked like a box with mirrors from the sides, but upon looking in, the space expanded in crazy ways and it felt like you were inside a much larger world inside a tiny box.