Draw Me An Interview : Sara Varon
The Walker Art Center has an awesome interview with illustrator and writer Sara Varon. Sara's latest book is Robot Dreams which is put out by :01 (pronounced first second). Robot Dreams is a wordless graphic novel about the friendship between a robot and the dog who creates him. Sara also wrote a short comic for the Walker called the Present.
MinneDemo: Free Beer Wins Again
That's right, along with its teammate "bad acoustics" a perfictly good evening of technology demonstrations was defeated by "Free Beer".
The turnout at MinneDemo was great! At 300+ geeks, in what could have been mistaken as St. Paul's largest gay bar. Free beer tickets were given to the the first 100 guests and they did their best to talk over the speakers like they were nothing more than a $25 warm up band.
Sure the speakers were a mixed bag. I'm not sure how they were chosen but my guess is that the first ones to sign up got to speak. That is just a little too nice and it is no way to run a good event.
I hate to pick on the organizers because I had a lot of fun, but they need to learn how to stack the deck a bit. Pre-select the speakers and have them ready to sign up as soon as the event is announced. These people would never make it as music promoters.
That said, I quite liked a few of the participants. First up we had CrashPlan, an automatic off site and peer-to-peer backup solution for small to medium size businesses. Their product works on Windows, Mac and Ubuntu/RedHat. They had a lot to say and maybe this wasn't the greatest venue for them.
SotaComm is offering phone solutions to small business that is usually only available to mid to large sized companies. Their services are based on opensource designs instead of proprietary systems like Cisco and Nortel. I have clients that will be very interested in them right away.
Finally, Wonderfile is a company that is designing file systems based around meta data and keywords instead of file names and dates. This makes retrieving archived files easier and turns data into information.
Enemies With You
So I ventured down to south Minneapolis to view the Friends WIth You Exhibit at the Soo Visual Arts Center, and the trip was not good. First of all going from NE to S Minneapolis is no fun anymore. What use to take 3 minutes now takes 20 minutes. If that wasn't enough, the exhibit was nothing what I hoped it would be.
The Gallery consists of 2 rooms. The large front room consisted of 8 - 10 mediocre paintings and 2 large inflatable heads (as pictured in my earlier preview). The rear room was called a playground and consisted of several large inflatable type objects that could be moved around the room. All of the objects in the rear room were similar to each other.
My problem with the show was 2 things.
- All of the art looked like simple Murakami rip offs.
- The inflatables and playground art were completely worn out.
I wouldn't mind the art being a rip off of Murakami if it were complex and thought out. This seemed to be a couple of people who are just exploiting a genre as fast as they can. If they took the quality and craftsmanship that went into their dolls and put it in their art then they might be considered as real followers of the art style instead of just capitalizing on a fad.
The items in the playground consisted of large creatures that I assume were to be moved around by the viewer. These creatures at one time had faces and designs on them but were now badly worn and lacked any artistic flair. Maybe the artists should visit a children's museum to get an idea of how to create playable art that will last. If nothing else they should resew the items before sending them on to the next gallery exhibit.