welcome.
The Minute Waltz is the collection of projects, writing, and research by Thomas James Lodato, a Digital Media graduate student currently at Georgia Institute of Technology.
Questions, comments, advice, or requests:
thomas [dot] lodato [at] gmail [dot] com
recent work
Issue the Margins.
2009-present
created with Carl DiSalvo and Thomas Pinkney Barnwell IV
Concept:
Explore new ways to visualize data that are embodied rather than informational.
Research how the meaning of urban space is negotiated when it is taken over by a contestational event, such as a protest.
Uncover new ways of re-presenting spontaneous events within a gallery space.
Product:
An installation involving a series of robotic sculptures and video projections
More here.
2009
created with Cinqué Hicks; advised by Celia Pearce
Concept:
The traditional folk practice of quilting has largely been viewed as static, outside the reach of technological innovation and modernization. The internet proves otherwise. People commune in forums to discuss their current projects. Patterns can be downloaded from quilting sites. Dispersed patch projects assemble quilts outside the traditional face-to-face bee. Many quilters maintain blogs, discussing their work with a world at large.
Grounding our work in theory and case studies, the project explores how marginal uses of the internet (that is, computer-enabled and computer-enhanced practices) impact traditional practices. Important to this research is how traditional tenets of tranmission--codes, skills, aesthetics, and traditions--are carried out within these augmented communities.
Our approach asks a series of questions:
Does the computer maintain traditional values of quilting?
Does computer-enabled or computer-enhanced quilting and quilts differ categorically from non-computer quilting?
Do digital media and quilting share any particular traits, especially in terms of procedure and community?
Product:
A series of three documentary films looking at what constitutes the internet-age of quilting.
More here.