AMD
Hi, I'm Audubon, a writer turned anthropologist turned media producer turned mobile tech researcher. Presently I work as a research scientist at EIT-ICT Labs in Berlin, where I make mobile apps and other interactive experiences.
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- May 06, 13
Updates, in no particular order: Angie is visiting from Germany! Central Park has become beautiful. And my beloved great-aunt Mary passed away.
Regarding Aunt Mary: she was the most loving person the world has ever known, despite going through some extremely difficult things, and her spirit will be an inspiration and example to me forever. Also, she was 95 (beat that!). I drove to central PA and back (10 hours) yesterday for the funeral, but the scenery was lovely and I sang songs the entire drive. I got to see estranged second cousins and stop at WaWa. Here are some photos, also in no particular order.
- Apr 27, 13
going through my personal poetry archives tonight. most are really old, but i think this one is from 2011.
seven years and one falafel
You come around the corner from out of a time machine. A few hairs on your beard have gone white but otherwise the only thing that has changed is the presidency and my teeth. Also you are wearing new glasses. Perhaps you don’t remember the time you put me in a headlock and I instinctively punched you in the face, my fist backwards, the way you’d taught me. Pieces of glass fell in triangles at our feet. I notice them now between the concrete and futility between us. I was so proud of my strength back then. I still am.
- Apr 26, 13
This is who I want to be when I grow up. I have a Google alert set for her next appearance at MoMA so I can run down there and throw myself at her glass coffin and cry.
Ebertfest 2013 Dance Along from Ebertfest on Vimeo.
- Apr 22, 13
I’m a big fan of Ari Seth Cohen’s Advanced Style blog. He posted this video of one of his regular muses talking about the power of positive thinking. Since I agree with everything she says, I thought I’d repost.
- Apr 19, 13
Feeling rather ill this week over what’s been going on in the city where I spent more than half my life. First the marathon bombings, and now (as I write) a gunman on MIT campus, who has killed an officer and right now can’t be found. All my friends at MIT are on lockdown in their dorms and offices.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with MIT campus police, but they are an amazing group of people. Many are former secret service officers. They’re kind to students, understanding (and very lenient) about crazy technological/chemical/dangerous physical pranks/hacks by students, and work very hard to ensure the protection of the entire MIT community. To hear one of them has been killed right outside Stata (with his own gun) is chilling, especially in the face of our idiotic Senate’s ruling on, as a former student put it, “an extremely tame bill” imposing minimal measures for gun control. The MIT officer was killed with his own gun, grabbed by guy he was investigating, on this sidewalk outside Stata:
All this has made for a very scary week. And yet it’s my responsibility, I feel, to keep my thoughts up – not merely to think generic “good thoughts” but to seriously pray about the situation, this very aggressive suggestion that bad things happen, bad people happen, and that is more powerful than anything good. It’s not true. That which is good is real and lasting. It’s where life comes from and what life is. You can’t kill it. Which is why the community has and continues to come together to help one another and look past these horrible events, and they will continue to do so – and THAT is real and lasting and powerful.
I wish I was at MIT now more than ever. I just feel like I SHOULD be there; I should support everyone at the Institute at this time…but I thank the students and staff and professors I know there for keeping me informed tonight, and for staying safe themselves. I hope this generation of MIT students goes on to tackle the endemic cultural problems of this era (gun culture, greed culture, “self” culture), which are societal as much as they are political.
And tonight, let’s send some love to the people who’ve been lost this week (including the MIT campus officer), and the Boston and MIT community.
- Apr 18, 13
My Irish friend S.W. sent me this, with the caption:
The Dublin Galway train last Friday. These are your people Bon :-)
- Apr 18, 13
Layar
An AR app by devs in Amsterdam. Augmented reality is not a new technology, and this app admittedly solves no problems (it’s a cool idea, but to view “secret videos” layered onto a printed page, one must download the app) but if the technology becomes native to the phone, like a camera – not app specific, like Instagram – then one could view hidden videos more easily, without the technology being proprietary. That said, QR scanners have been in abundance for years, but QR codes on printed pages are annoying to use and are also superfluous, as they usually link to a URL that you could manually enter faster that you could scan the code. Still, AR like Layared could be a nice opportunity for wearable computing engineers to play around with wearable devices to reveal hidden media texts.The New Political Map
Found this via a contact on Facebook. At first I thought it was sarcastic, then realized it wasn’t. Totally gets to this generation of technocrats (myself included? Or not?) and the subculture(s) that have built up around them. Manuel Castells would have something to say about it, which is a reminder to myself and others to read his latest books.Quartz
Quartz is “a digitally native news outlet, born in 2012, for business people in the new global economy.” I like it. A lot. You should sign up for their daily news brief. - Apr 14, 13
Tonight I went to the gym. I live in Queens, just across the river from midtown Manhattan. My neighborhood (Astoria) is considered one of the most diverse in the world. It’s a nice place to live, but, like anywhere in a city, there are “bros” around, and these bros like to bulk up at the gym.
Most of the time, the bros don’t overwhelm the environment. They work out next to overweight gay dudes, old Greek men, and svelte young women who probably work in mid-level marketing positions downtown. These bros lift weights and grunt, which is fine. It’s when they start spouting expletives that I get perturbed.
Tonight, a perfectly normal, almost non-bro type guy was lifting heavy weights when he started swearing. First it was the f-word, then it was bitch, then it was f’ing bitch. I looked over at him, his tendons strained, his anger peaked and misdirected, and I felt…how shall I say…wary. Because aggressive men who have no problem screaming ‘f’ing bitch’ at inanimate objects in public aren’t the type of human beings I feel comfortable around. I think there should be rules against this type of behaviour, and I think New York Sports Clubs should enforce these rules. The overt ‘bros’ in this case were actually quiet and behaved, expressing themselves exclusively in grunts; it was the average-looking guy who acted threatening.
On my walk home, two similarly normal-looking dudes pulled up on bicycles, waiting near me for the light to change. They were talking about someone, using normal words. Then one of them said, ‘I’m gonna kill that bitch.’ The other laughed. Now, I’ve never been overly sensitive about the B-word (in college, my best friend and I constantly called each other ‘bitches’ in the plural, referencing hip hop culture to which we had largely been exposed in childhood but were not a part of), but my ex didn’t like it at all and his sensitivity did rub off on me a little. It is, after all, a derogatory term for women, no better or worse than any other derogatory term, and like all the others, its existence in our canon should no longer be accepted. Our country has a long way to go before enacting legislation that supports and protects women (not to mention countless other populations), but it’s insidious that dialogue like this has seeped into our culture to the extent that we no longer notice. That we withhold complaining is even worse; somehow it seems uncouth to tell someone he (or she!) shouldn’t talk like that in public, because it’s derogatory and insulting. And because it makes them sound ignorant, hateful and stupid.
Like anything, hatred is insidious. It sneaks into the mainstream, masquerading as slang, as a joke, or appropriated from (in some cases) various subcultures. We start to use the words, thinking they are just words. They seem funny, we don’t mean it in an insulting way. We see celebrities doing the same thing. We hear it in the workplace. We know respectable people who talk like that, too. It’s ok.
But here’s the thing: it isn’t. Stop talking like that. Stop saying ‘bitch.’ Stop saying ‘fucking bitch.’ Stop allowing the undercurrent of (ok, I’m gonna say it) the patriarchy – or any other dominant cultural force – dictate how you talk or behave or what you believe. I need to put this into practice myself, and I hope others do the same.
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Photos
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Tweets
- RT @faintlyfalling: An end to "facepalm" now pleaseMay 16, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @Cmdr_Hadfield: It's cliche, but this is my 1st meal back on Earth. The smell is like an old friend. http://t.co/LR02LEM8QpMay 16, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- this is so cool: photographer mom shoots her daughter posed as historical female role models for 5th birthday: http://t.co/6aEqmRCLmuMay 13, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- i like this. // Robert Montgomery’s Conceptual And Poetic Public Art http://t.co/n3fILKss7k
- someone invent a time machine so I can go back to the 1990s & appreciate thom yorke more than I did
- a kitten hugged me today. hugged me full-on, like a human. http://t.co/TxnnPtHvfc
- RT @Papapishu: There. I fixed the cover of TIME magazine. http://t.co/BEhgxw8iH5May 09, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- another reason to love berlin & lima. RT @qz: How much space each person has in some of the world's major cities http://t.co/pLeZR1H4LE
- just finished a fitness class taught by a woman in her 50s with muscles bigger than my Cape Verdean body building former landlord.
- art. tonight. 6-8 RT @ZakSmithSabbath: I painted that http://t.co/2NSVTcVG9r
- RT @natematias: The individual is a myth, an oligopticon with a local site, two way data collection, a collation instrument, visualisation …
- the best thing about having an internet radio, aside from @bytefm, is Galway Bay FM & their community announcements about duck races.
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Info
- Summary
Manage web content, social media and member engagement for a comedy site. Still enjoy doing photo/video/mobile app projects on the side, volunteering for HR orgs, painting and pottery.
If you're an xcode developer and you want to donate 2-3 weeks coding an app that is otherwise totally done, please get in touch!
If you're on a film crew in NYC and want an AD or director for small projects, also get in touch!
Specialties: content management, engagement, user-centered design, ethnography, social media; video production; graphic design; mobile sociology; media studies.
Want to do more: mobile interaction design & product management; film directing; running a physical & digital art studio someday
Experience- Jun 2012 - PresentDigital Director / Thing X
Part of Adult Swim / Turner Broadcasting
- Jan 2012 - Jun 2012Research Scientist / EIT ICT Labs
Interaction & mobile engagement. I made an poetry game iPhone app that will be released by 2013, hopefully.
- 2008 - Jan 2012Research Associate / MIT Center for Civic Media
Helped supervise the development of Aago, a mobile app and web platform for youth media creation and curation (alpha release in Jan '11, beta release in May '11); published papers and book chapters on trends in participatory and mobile video production; helped plan the development of a new documentary lab at MIT, including website development and filming interviews.
Previously (2010): led an intergenerational mobile video project with a Kenyan community near Boston. Made a documentary on internet in rural Peru.
- Oct 2006 - Aug 2008Senior Communications Specialist / 1199SEIU
Managed all print, web, mobile, e-communication and advertising for large-scale labor organizing campaigns (including all writing, graphic design and web design); filmed/edited/produced DVDs, video press releases and advocacy videos; helped organize and promote press conference and major events.
- Jan 2003 - Oct 2006Communications Asst. / UUSC
Updated web content; did all photography and video for live events and publications; assisted in PR outreach; visited partners internationally to report on their human rights work.
- 2002 - 2003Marketing Associate / FreshAddress
Represented the company at trade shows; was online customer rep and created graphics.
Education-
2008 - 2010Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyMS in Comparative Media Studies
Activities: Ceramics Studio, Carroll Wilson Circle, MIT Entrepreneurship Center, MIT Center for Civic Media -
2000 - 2001Smith CollegeBA in Anthropology
Activities: shot a lot of video for fun -
1997 - 1999Emerson CollegeWriting/Lit/Publishing
Activities: Hands On (ASL club); AMIGOS (latino club); EC Programming Council; Writer's floor; Poetry groups; Orientation Leader.
Additional Information-
Websites:
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Honors:Graduate Student Award, International Conference on Technology, Knowledge and Society (Berlin, Germany, 2010) Carroll Wilson Award, MIT Entrepreneurship Center (2009)
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Interests:traveling, making films, web stuff, photographing clouds, writing, gelato, human rights, meeting interesting people
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