Hello, my name is Aaron Uhrmacher, and I’ve always been interested in how we remember people. Today, I specifically want to look at how our digital tools are changing the way that we remember and memorialize people as well as some of these tools that are helping us to do that better. Let’s start by taking a look at how we live.
Video documentation of the presentation I gave in May 2011 for my ITP thesis project, Telestory.
I am presenting my thesis project, Telestory, today (Thursday) at 5:00 PM ET.
About Telestory: Mark Twain demanded that 100 years pass before the publication of his memoirs so that everyone referenced therein was no longer living. What stories do you want to pass on to future generations of your family and how long will you wait to reveal them? Telestory auto-generates calls at a determined frequency (once a month, twice a year) and prompts the user to record a story on a theme. By default, all stories remain private until the user’s 85th birthday unless the user chooses to release them sooner. While we can’t (yet) live forever, our voices can.
ITP Thesis Main Page: http://itp.nyu.edu/shows/thesis2011/
Chat room: http://itp.nyu.edu/shows/thesis2011/chat-room/
Live stream: http://itp.nyu.edu/thesis/audience.html
Thanks to all of you who have participated in the early beta testing and for all the support along the way! It’s been a lot of fun building this, and I can’t wait to continue developing the site over the next few months.
Chris and I collaborated on our final presentation for Reading and Writing with Electronic Text, which we titled, “Showetry.”
Together with my Reading and Writing with Electronic Text class, I’m excited to invite you to an upcoming experimental poetry reading titled, “Hello Word!”
Friday, May 6th 2011
7pm
721 Broadway, New York, NY
Ground floor (Common room)
FREE
This is the final project for a group of us who have spent the semester exploring new forms of creative expression and generative poetry using the Python programming language.
Adam Parrish has more information as well as links to previous class work here.
This is an example of the type of performance Chris and I intend to present.
Hope to see you there!
Just a short post to announce that I’ve been selected to speak at TEDx this Friday. TEDx is a community organized TED style event, and this one is put together by the students at NYU’s Gallatin School.
My presentation is titled, “Digital Death, Online Afterlife” and here’s an overview:
Over the course of our lives, we will spend thousands of hours updating our status on social networks like Facebook, sharing observations on Twitter and our locations on Foursquare. But what happens to all of this “content” when we die? What’s becoming clear is that future generations will have access to the minutiae of our lives unlike any previous generation. So how do we prepare for our deaths from a digital perspective? Turns out there’s an entire industry cropping up devoted to it. This presentation will explore some of the ways the government, organizations and companies are asking us to consider our online afterlife.
This is a topic that I’ve been researching heavily for my thesis project, which I’ll blog more about in the next few weeks. The public is absolutely welcome to attend. More information here.
In the Fall, Microsoft organized an event at a half dozen universities called Firenze BXT (Business, user eXperience, Technology). Each university is given a theme, and the students are tasked with finding an innovative business solution on that theme to present to Microsoft. The winning team from each university earns a trip to Microsoft’s HQ in Redmond, WA to compete for a very large (literally) $20,000 check. My team won the NYU portion of the competition this year and flew out to Microsoft for the finals.
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