Final Project: Messing with Texas

Welcome to the Austin Center for Dance and Hand to Hand Combat. If you follow our strict regimen of exercise and stretching you will be able to defend yourselves against attack from any kind of criminals, kooks, aggressive car salesmen, insurgents, investigative reporters, angry spouses, or any other perils you may encounter in everyday life.


First, you must select some suitable attire. Nothing too constricting, please. You must have full use of your limbs at all times.


"--Sir, I need to go to the bathroom..."

"You! In the black pants! Get out of here--I will not tolerate your insolence!"


We'll start you off with some basic Salsajitsu techniques. We brought in some lifelike male dummies for you to practice with. Don't be shy, you can't hurt them.


From there we shall move on to advanced belly-dance kwon doe, a secret and ancient form of self defense practiced for over 4,000 years.


Meanwhile....

"Alright men, this is what you've been training all year for. The siege of the Austin Center for Dance and Hand to Hand Combat begins in an hour. Let's focus, people...this ain't gonna be no cakewalk!"


Back at the studio--

"Once you become as good as me, you will be able to move so quickly you will be nothing but a blur."


"That's it, you're catching on! Nice leg work, Sally..."


It is also important that we be able to communicate with each other in the field. This is the basis for the most impenetrable code ever devised. Read it and memorize it, because the board will self-destruct in exactly 1 minute.
"--Wait. What is that I hear in the distance?"




"Right, left, right left..."



"Quietly now, men. We're getting close. Everyone stay on full alert>"



"Here they come. Quick, ladies, rond de jambe, chagement, glissade, pas de bouree, arabesque....ATTACK!!"

Mori: an Internet-based Earthwork

On November 30 our class took a trip to the Arlington Arts Center in (where else?) Arlington, Virginia. It was there that we experienced Mori, a multimedia artwork that was a collaborative effort between Randall Packer, Ken Goldberg, Gregory Kuhn, and Wojciech Matusik. According to multimedia legend Randall Packer, "In this installation, minute movements of the Hayward Fault in California are detected by a seismograph, converted to digital signals, and transmitted continuously via the Internet to the installation." Mori represents the idea of telepresence to a T. Standing in a room in Arlington, Virginia, we could feel the tiniest movements of the earth along a fault all the way across the country. The vibrations inside the room took me back to my childhood in California, where I experienced several earthquakes.