I am attached to a group putting on an exhibition in Cambridge this coming week, December 8-11th. It should be interesting, and it generating a bit of buzz in the art blogs and news letters going around the art world. It has something we have worked pretty hard on, so I am looking forward to the opening. My part was in collection, editing and display of the visual media of the exhibit, a sort of video collage of conceptions of utopia in modern media and collective consciousness.

This is from the press release about the exhibition:

<sub>"Graduate students from MIT's Department of Architecture display their investigations and the way these terms are represented in visual, audio and literary media. Following the principles of heterotopian spaces the way the French philosopher Michel Foucault defines them in his 1967 lecture 'Of Other Spaces', this project seeks to delineate the complexity of fictional narratives, virtual designs and existing realities. X-topia is a spatial collage where the viewer is invited to enter and to wander through islands of excerpts and citations, illuminated by film fragments and surrounded by sound bites. The elements of this exhibition – juxtaposed quotations gathered into a spatial narration offset by montages of film and documentary footage – portray the interrelation of these urban imaginaries from the 20th century. X-topia questions the overarching social constructs that lead to the pursuit of the utopian ideal society by mirroring it through its inherent dystopian aspects and conclusions. X-topia is an exhibition project of student participants in MIT's Visual Arts Program course 'This is Tomorrow? Urban Utopia, Dystopia, Heterotopia,' taught by Ute Meta Bauer and Yvonne P. Doderer. The course was inspired by 'This is Tomorrow,' a ground breaking, trans-disciplinary exhibition by the Independent Group at London's Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1956. X-topia is the result of reviewing and reflecting on selected texts and a wide range of 20th century fiction and documentary films supplemented by a weekly transdisciplinary lecture series with guest speakers from all over the world.

Students were assisted by Mary Hale and Morgan Pinney.
Contributions by Gabriel Chan, Lee M. Dykxhoorn, Adam B. Galletly, Mishayla T. Greist, Natsuki Maeda, Robert J. Mastro, Timothy R. Olson, Lisa M. Pauli, Mais M. Sartawi, Gerhard J. Van Der Linde."</sub>


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So the new promotional video for the University of Florida School of Architecture is out, and I was browsing through it the other night and I noticed that I made a cameo appearance in the background when I was explaining one of my projects to a jury last fall.

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Check it out, I am at 8:05 through about 8:15. So a short appearance, but check it out anyway. I was pretty surprised to see that myself.

Update on my travels:

I feel like I have been on the road forever now. I have been back to the US since December 27th, and in some ways that is a bit liberating, and others it really weighs me down. I miss the foods and friends I was used to back home.

But I wouldn't trade the last few months for anything. I have learned so much about culture, the way Americans are seen from the outside-in, the different kinds of architecture in the world, and the way things are actually built. I have also been on a whirlwind building tour of Europe, a non-stop itinerary of the best and most interesting buildings on the entire continent. It is has been my own version of Le Voyage d'Orient, almost a hundred years after Le Corbusier's 1911 travels and subsequent writings on the nature of traveling and architecture.

Since I left home, I have been to

_{Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Rotterdam, the Netherlands
Germany,
Prague, Czech Republic,
Vienna, Austria
Venice, Italy
Florence, Italy
Dublin, Ireland
Belfast, Ireland
Rome, Italy
Munich, Germany
Cinque Terre, Italy
Barcelona, Spain
Valencia, Spain
Madrid, Spain
Siena, Italy
Vals, Switzerland
Belinzona, Switzerland
Como, Switerland/Italy
Basel, Switzerland
Weil am Rheim, Germany
Mullhouse, France
Naples, Italy
Capri, Italy
Pompeii, Italy
Athens, Greece}

And I have been taking 15 credits this semester, so needless to say I have been busy. I still have two weeks left before I graduate with my bachelor's degree in design from the University of Florida, and then off to MIT in the fall I think. I have not committed yet, but that is looking like my best option at this point. I had to choose between Columbia in NYC and MIT in Boston, and I think I like Boston better in terms of a city to live in.

I have a couple more weeks left to travel before I make the return journey home, I aim to stop in Munich one more time, hit up Wolfsburg Germany to see Zaha Hadid's Phaeno Science Center, and then to Berlin. From there to Oslo to see the Fjords, and possibly cross into the arctic circle is the stars align. A week in Ireland in the countryside with my best friend back in the states, followed by a couple days with family in the Dutch countryside will about wrap it up. With slightly more than a month left, I can say that this has been one of the more incredible trips I have ever taken.

Look for lots of pictures this summer when I get a chance to sit down and process I that I have seen and taken. Its going to get nasty in here.


On that note, happy Spring everyone, I hope you are all as in love with life as I am. That is really the only way to live, to love every second of who and where you are.

It has a been a little while since I have had the time to be active, but how is everyone doing? I hope the holidays treat you all well this year. For me it has been very good to spend some time at home and see family.

In a couple of days I am moving to Italy for the Spring, to do my last semester in Architecture undergrad in Vicenza. I will be about an hour from Venice, so hopefully some good pictures will come of that. On my way I plan to visit Amsterdam and Prague before I have to report to classes, but does anyone have any must-see recommendations for the continent of Europe? I am also thinking of going to Swiss alps, probably Spain at some point, and maybe a little jaunt down to Cairo if I feel up to getting all of the necessary shots. Should all be some good fun.

I might have intermittent access to the internet while I am gone, but for the most part, I will be around. Let me know if you have any recommendations for travel plans, or just to check in and see how everyone is doing.

I found this website a while back, but I just rediscovered it in my favorites list a few days ago and I figured I would share it. UbuWeb is a website dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts. You can go there to watch classic film by Salvador Dali or Andy Worhol and the like, or browse through their impressive collection of musical archives. To any who enjoy the avant-garde, I highly recommend it.

http://www.ubu.com/