The last weekend was quite a rush of activity as we worked to complete our installation of Audimeter-001 in the show. Brock, Katy and I worked to complete a piece that addressed the themes of surveillance and a fictional piece of Nielsen company technology. The following is the text from a didactic panel that accompanied our work.

“Interactive Media 413 class is a project-oriented course that allows students to participate in the creation of interactive performances and exhibits. The class has worked on four distinct projects over the course of the semester. This exhibit titled, Paged, Staged, Engaged was curated by class members Brock Norman and Katy Otto in conjunction with Professors Jim Ferolo (Interactive Media Program) and Kevin Stein (English Department), the students also created a piece, Audimeter-001 with Jim Ferolo for the exhibition The concept for this project grew from Jim talking with Kevin, who is the Poet Laureate for the State of Illinois. They became very interested in exploring the intersection of poetry and new media and came up with the idea of producing an exhibition. They decided to center on the production of a series of new media and traditional media works that explore a single poem. The piece they decided to use is titled “On Being a Nielsen Family.” The two students involved in this project, Brock Norman and Katy Otto, were given the task of not only creating the media and physical aspects needed for this piece with Professor Ferolo, but also were in charge of coordinating the show with the other artists involved as well as Liz Kaufmann, the gallery director. Focusing on the concept of surveillance, the idea started out simple enough, but quickly changed and grew as equipment changed and ideas for media evolved. Brock took on the task of building the physical aspects of the project, while Katy worked to organize the gallery so that all of the artists could set up their pieces. The students worked together with Jim to shoot the video content on a green screen along with support from the Iona Group and technical consulting by Dave Lennie. The Audimeter Model-001 installation is the result of this semester’s hard work. Thank you to everyone who supported this installation effort: Slane College of Communications and Fine Arts, George Brown, Dean Jeff Huberman, Elizabeth Kauffman, Paul Krainik, Carrie Kroenke, Dave Lennie, Mark Lohman, Cory Rabe, Trudy Ruch, and Joan Wilhelm.