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I took a day off yesterday to hang out at the Met. It’s hard to describe the Metropolitan Museum of Art without sounding completely maudlin. It is a truly amazing place. I was there researching an upcoming project. It is definitely worth the trip. I spent most of my time in (from top to bottom) the Ancient Near Eastern, Southeast Asian, Medieval, and Modern Art sections.

Dia:Beacon houses part of the permanent collection of the Dia Art Foundation. Located in a renovated Nabisco plant in Beacon, NY, the facility has amazing natural light and great textures. Exhibits range from inspired to pretentious. The no-photography policy is unenlightened, but the museum staff did not seem to mind a few people discretely taking pictures with compact digital cameras. Highlights include Torqued Ellipses by Richard Serra (top), North, East, South, West by Michael Heizer (middle) and Shadows by Andy Warhol (bottom).

Blue Man Group performed in Albany, NY on 10/6/2006 (How to be a Megastar 2.0 Tour). No photos allowed, so this was the best I could do. The show was great – amazing sounds out of schedule 40 pipe. The comedy bits worked better than the serious songs with cheesy rotoscoped concept videos.

It’s grainy, it’s low res, and it’s one of my favorite pictures. It was taken by my older daughter on vacation five years ago. The subject is her sister standing behind a curtain. The large coffin-like object on the left is a blanket chest. The remarkable thing about the picture is how well it captured the pre-teen angst of the subject. – Photo by Elise Martin

The third annual WIRED NextFest was held in New York City last week at the Javits Center. There was a heavy emphasis on robots (top), but some of the demos failed to impress. The Green and Design Pavilions had some of the more interesting exhibits. One of the items in the Design Pavilion was Daniel Rozin’s Circles Mirror (middle). The Circles Mirror consisted of a video camera and 900 rotating disks (bottom). Images captured on the camera were broken down into a 30X30 grid. The disks on the surface were then rotated to match the digitized matrix. Shadowy patterns drifted across the mirror as objects moved in front of the camera.