This week i am have been invited to present 360Fashion and be a mentor at the Nokia sponsored, XmediaLab. 360Fashion reporters are creating a live reportage on the XmediaLab Singapore conference. anina.net commands a team of 5 local reporters together with three, 360Fashion pro's who are creating videos, photos, live feedback articles directly from within the event. Working with the University of Technology students and local pro bloggers, 360Fashion brings with the N95 a real-time coverage of the events and the people behind XmediaLab. Using Nokia widsets, everyone can follow along with the XmediaLab events right in the palm of their hand. Thank you to Nokia Asia for loaning us the N95 devices so that my team and i could bring this great coverage from the Digital Art and Media worlds. Please join us and leave some comments on the blog, download the widset. There's a lot of amazing people speaking here today!  www.xmedialab.typepad.com 

SEPTEMBER 19TH 2007

Today i was invited to give a speech about 360Fashion at the University of New York. I talked about and showed how to use the mobile as a content creation and publishing tool. I was especially excited to give this speech today because the entire class is women! The New York Post teacher, David Handshu, told me when he invited me to give a lecture on 360Fashion and anina.net, which is where my motivation came from to fit it in to my schedule here in new york.

i have to admit, i really was not a person to like school when i was growing up. i was always the one experimenting and doing things apart from the pack. i would often be totally bored in school, and get in trouble for not being attentive--even accused of cheating on tests after when i would set the top curve and have to take them over, only to score higher. i did not like school at all. i felt i did not fit in and it was too old fashioned. teachers would pose tests to me as challanges and promise me A's if i could answer the questions right, and then when i did--they would say they were joking and not give me an A for the whole semester. many times i stumped teachers with my answers or question, making them feel inadequate because they could not answer my questions. they often made me out to be the lazy student and the slacker--but i just enjoyed to learn on my own. by the time i got to the arts school where i was accepted with scholarship for the big paper i wrote to get in, even though i had finally a place to nurture me and support me with equipment and who encouraged experimentation--i just wanted to get out of school and get to europe. i regret not having taken advantage of the facilities that were available to me. i remember specifically in the first ever video class that they made, i went out and got my friend Adam from the music program to write some original music, and i went with the video camera to great lenghts to create a whole story in black and white about time and the movement of time. i waded out into a lake with the camera with a bag to film the fish and ran my watch under water and filmed it, even did timelapse photography and spliced it in. when we showed our videos--i garantee you mine was a real film, and the others were just sloppy filmings of what we would call now YOUTUBE. it made me mad in the second assignment that everyone copied me...so i worked on the third assignment with graphics--again copied in the fourth class.

the long and the short of it is to say, i really didnt like school. so you can imagine now on my third invitation from a major university to give a lecture on 360Fashion, that i could never imagine in my wildest dreams that i would EVER set foot in a school again--let alone be giving lectures as an expert in them. it's a very strange feeling after disliking school for so long. it left me with a crazy feeling inside--i really liked showing the students new things and helping them to think laterally. after the class the teacher was so overjoyed EVEN HE said he wants to join 360Fashion....kinda funny...and 7 of the students all wanted to be a part of 360Fashion and one girl wants to write about me for her journalism class...not a bad start in NYC....

NYU has gotten all new fascilities that are amazing! check it out here--these stylish classrooms and computer hangout lounges actually INSPIRED in me the feeling of wanting to go to school--especially when i saw the video editing and television suite--boy would like to experiment with what i am doing and broadcast television...as always my equipment budget out numbers my ability to test my ideas....someone out there own a TV station feel like making some experiments........?

IMG WORLD banned from the catwalks this year all "unprofessional equipment". their concern is the quality. i discussed this issue with IMG WORLD online media head, and he said simply [i paraphrased it as best i could], "fashion is about beauty. fashion is about quality. designers spend 100,000 and more on presenting their collections during the fashion week. what is the point of spending so much money, if the results will be a blurry, fuzzy, video online? this does not serve the designers, and it does not serve the the consumers, and it serves no purpose. you have to choose the right tool for the right situation, and currently cellular technology and consumer electronics products do not produce high enough quality results for the fashion industry."

while i would in one regard totally agree with him, from a personal perspective i would have to agree with robert cringely when we spoke during my PBS interview (they are making a documentary on me during the fashion week). if no one pushes the envelope--how will the technology evolve? if i don't make tests, try out new things, make experiments live, then how will the technology get better.

here you can see the interview with top photographer, randy brooke, where i asked him why with my n93 did i get pixelation and color variation on the catwalk. you can see here a video i uploaded with my n93 (still the superior device in my opinion for fashion quality video) and a test device n95 loaned to me by nokia. the light meter in the n95 is MUCH WORSE, (along with other featured they have eliminated from the video editing software). the video is completely washed out in the n95 video of the same show.