PRODUCTION NOTEBOOK//PROPOSAL WITH IMAGES!! CLICK HERE FOR GOOGLE DOC

TEXT ONLY:
My Dinner with Andy is a video-narrative immersive experience told through publicly-available crowd-sourced videos from YouTube. It represents an intimate dinner party featuring the edited likeness of:

JESUS, JOHN LENNON, and YOU
Hosted by ANDY COHEN

Participants are invited to book a 1-hour reservation for breakfast, lunch, or dinner over the 1-week installation on google docs. They can BYOB (B = bagged lunch) or order delivery (anything imaginable via seamless.com) from the project homepage. The installation is a dinner party, as told in three acts: appetizer, entree, and dessert. The table must be reserved by individuals.

The video accompaniment to the meal lasts approximately 40 minutes and starts 10 minutes past every hour, with time between participants to clean up or talk about the experience, leave feedback, join the discussion online, or in person in the gallery.

The audience: the meal takes place in a glass room gallery and participants become part of the narrative. Prompts leave gaps in the dialogue for the participant to weigh in on subjects like marriage equality in New York, war, and classicism. There will be a microphone in front of the participant’s meal. Although the video narrative is set, the participant can affect the performance through his/her participation or lack thereof. There are a few interactive surprises in store.

Participants are encouraged to eat, talk, and be entertained over the course of the meal, but their performance is up to them and spontaneously generated. The installation is a prototype for a completely interactive virtual reality. For this piece, participants are encouraged to suspend disbelief and interact with the screen characters as if they were the real people they represent.

This meal represents a tool for lonely people, entertainment that mimics reality and closeness with any famous person imaginable. “Just a movie” that encourages participation and performance. Dave Carroll told me that if I didn’t like the conversations that were occurring online, to create my own dialogue. I am hoping that by mashing up these different video shorts and blips and images and animations, I can attempt to create my own reality and dialogue.

“If you could have dinner with three people dead or alive, who would it be?” These are my three people, an artist, a deity, and a television producer. The options are limitless, and readily available on YouTube for future projects and iterations.

Although SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) would have you believe this digital content is sacred intellectual property, and I agree that citing sources is paramount, by manipulating and mashing up the YouTube videos I have created a totally unique experience. SOPA will cripple the internet and artistic license. Piracy is not theft, as there is no damage or loss to the original artifacts in this case. Everything I have created is with total respect and homage to the original people and events that I am attempting to represent in the installation. My piece is pro- innovation and free speech.

About the author and his bias. The characters represented in this production are filtered through YouTube first and then my editing of an imaginary dialogue. I am gay, Jewish, and a student studying Design & Technology. Fascinated by art stars, reality television, celebrities, contact, crowd-sourcing, video, design, and technology, so my version of Jesus, benevolent and philosophical, may be different from your version of Jesus (and that is okay.)

HEEBHUBNYC.COM

Future projects include:
Hanky code exploration
Weekly Heeb guy profile
Jewday/Gaydar game
Blind personals exploration

WHO’S THE BOSS?
It is hard to pinpoint what I would be doing if I had unlimited time, money, skills, and resources. I’d love to say that I’d obviously own my own company, travel the world creating products that everyone would desire. I’d be famous, rich, and swimming in ass. But I’ve learned through my graduate school experience that I function best when I have a partner to my work and vision, a client who creates a dialogue that helps me via real world constraints and focus and deadlines. Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of networking and crowd sourced projects, so my client has become a group of people that I am trying to serve/enable. I have enjoyed working from within my own social group, like the Tap2Post project that used my classmates as the peer group using my mobile photo upload site. I enjoyed the feedback and the scene that was created around the project. So I like to be my own boss, but I need someone to answer to.

ALONE TOGETHER
I’m 98% extroverted. If I’m left to my own devices/alone, I would rather just take a nap. I need a group to stimulate my energy, and I don’t want to be the guy behind the computer screen 9 hours a day digitally designing my life away. That’s what I do now for work at my job, stare into the abyss. I want to talk to people, be out, like go out for drinks and have fun and have conversations about art, current events, media and culture. When online, I crave the connectivity of commenting, news blasts, status updates etc., if I can’t be with the ones I want. So blue skies, I would be surrounded by attractive accomplished gay men. If I were looking for a husband instead of a thesis, ideally it would be a New York Jew. So, I’m trying to recruit that user group/social network by reaching out to the New York promotors “He-bro” as part of my research.

HEEB HUB AS THESIS
My thesis seeks to enable my own community to connect in ways that don’t currently exist, utilizing current technologies and popular forms of communication like mobile apps. Although Grindr is the most popular app on the market right now [and I would love to work for Grindr seeing as it has revolutionized the way gay men interact with one another.] I hope my project is more playful and more intelligent than the closest set of pecs. That is why I would like to prototype my analog “kiss card” at the next He-bro party: Christmas Eve. I am meeting with He-bro founder Jayson Littman to discuss what he thinks of social media this week. He seems interested in what I’m doing, though he has put me off a couple of times now and he’s a busy New York promoter. I also need to make contact with the gay and lesbian synagogue, Congregation Beit Simchat Torah. The only problem is that I am more interested in the social aspect of the religion that the worship part. This is definitely an exercise in networking and meeting people and trying new things. I don’t quite know where this is going yet, but I hope to soon!

PROTOTYPING
I am also attracted to celebrities, and people who don’t have a filter to their social media. I think that’s the way I would describe my connectivity: no shame. I think it would be a good idea for me to start compiling content from filtered searches of social media to see how and if Jewish gay guys are connecting now. Although it is a specific user group, I think others share the view that “Jewish guys are hot/cool/smart” and would want to friend up to my appxperience. I was thinking of aggregating content and branding myself across Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, the web. Working title is Heeb Hub. This is what I hope to have ready to present on Thursday next week. I really want to create an honest, meaningful experience, but this could serve as my business card and launching pad AND I want a feedback loop that I can tell the people I’m meeting how they can participate/get in touch.

WHAT IFS
So what if I could do anything I want… didn’t ever really answer that question and I’m not sure I know the answer. I know what I want to work on right now, but not sure where I see myself [working] after school. Blue sky, I’d probably be hanging out with New York gay Jew celebrity: “Andy Cohen is currently the Executive Vice-President Original Programming and Development at the Bravo cable television network, a subsidiary of NBC Universal. He hosts the network’s reunion shows and their topical weekly show Watch What Happens Live.” He is 46 and that’s all according to Wikipedia. I like him. I like his work. I want to know more. I see him as an idea guy who is a tastemaker packaging up content. On air, he is very Jewish, gay, smart. I’ve thought about incorporating an Andy Tracker project into my thesis (based on his frequent tweets), but it seemed a little too stalkerish. I need to reconcile some privacy issues as it is, with all this social networking. I don’t know what I want to do professionally, but I guess I could see myself as part of a team that would incorporate smart guys like Andy Cohen hanging out and coming up with big ideas. Maybe I could interview him for my Jewish Husband thesis?

by “Leif Parsons” via NYTimes