Site 3 CoLaboratory and the Treehouse Group worked very hard bringing Maker Faire to Toronto. Although this was officially a "mini" Maker Faire, the phrase heard most often from those in attendance was "I don't see how this is mini".
This was the first time presenting "Take a Picture" to the maker community, and I was anxious to see how they would respond to it. Would they see the connections to museum and pop culture? Would they agree with the criticism we were making? Or would they ignore all the BS and just focus on the really cool thing we had made?
This show will forever have a warm place in my heart: this was the first time I had ever received advanced approval for a show application. Brad and I worked really hard to put together what we felt was a very strong submission. Usually this is followed by a month of waiting to see if we got in or not. Not this time. I had a message sitting in my inbox the very next day, "you know you're in, right?"
The night was capped off with a series of Lightning Talks, which were put together by Alex Leitch. Brad and I had been "voluntold" to give a Lightning Talk several months earlier, so we gave our presentation on "Take a Picture" to the Maker Faire audience. Marc Reeve-Newson was nice enough to hold my camera for me while I took the stage and record the talk, which is posted at the bottom of this page, along with some other videos from the event.
Things rarely go as smoothly as I would like during a show set-up, especially when the venue is not a fine art gallery. After setting up my display for Toronto's Mini Maker Faire on the Friday night before the opening, I realized that I had too much competing light, and the piece was being washed out. When I got home, I built a quick shade for my paintings out of boxes found on the street.
Brad and I are wrapping up as day one of Toronto Mini Maker Faire draws to a close. We give a quick recap of how the day went before getting ready for our Lightning Talk.
Oh, and I also aggressively plug our photobook, Illuminated Landscapes
Our 5-minute lightning talk. Brad and I actually wrapped up and were done by four-and-a-half minutes. Starting with the line "...I could have done that...", we focused on the importance of simplicity in an idea and execution, and how complexity or inaccessibility aren't necessarily virtues. "You could have done this, anyone one could have, but you didn't. We did." This is followed with a technical description of how the project works, and how the invisible paintings were built.