Looks like my ugly mug got a full page in the Spring 2007 RISDViews, and infoBreath on the cover. Apologies to Chris Mendoza, who didn’t get mentioned in regards to the cover pic, as he wrote the particle code that controls how the text moves. I didn’t realize Infobreath would be in it until they told me they had already gone to press and it was on the cover!

I must say I am psyched that they put a shot from LA LINKIS! in the article. Fake accents, annoying music, and BIG UGLY YELLOW BUTTONS 4EVER!

The whole issue should be available for download here eventually.

For now, here’s the text of the article:

newly sited

On a cold February morning, a sturdy 14-foot tree sprang up just north of the construction chaos on Benefit Street, outside The RISD Museum of Art. Sensuous and beautiful, it was destined for a short life and hence the title: There Was a Man Who Made a Tree, Just So He Could Chop It Down.

The 33-year-old man in question is Christopher Robbins MFA ‘07 DM, a Digital + Media major who got “turned on” to wood by faculty member Tucker Houlihan MFA ‘02 FD during his first Wintersession at RISD. When Robbins submitted his winning proposal for the museum’s annual Sitings competition, in which students vie for the opportunity to create site-specific work to show in and around the galleries, he wanted to continue his research into “purposefully misapplying materials.” But rather than work with pixels or sound waves or moving imagery, he chose to use “the lowest grade construction material” — the same plywood seen in the construction barriers on Benefit Street — to “make something soft and beautiful for this tortured little space” outside the museum.

Prior to landing at RISD, Robbins earned a BA in Psychology and Asian Studies from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and spent a decade working overseas . Much of his work, as a Peace Corps volunteer in Benin, West Africa, and as a multimedia specialist at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, involved the development of cross-cultural instructional material,. But “as an outsider in these cultures” — albeit with altruistic purposes — Robbins began questioning whether he could develop culturally appropriate, high-tech educational materials without neo-colonial overtones or imposing western values.

“I spent so much of my day working at a computer that I realized I was flattening my experience of these cultures,” he says.
In his quest to create a better fit between new technologies and the developing world, Robbins chose RISD’s Digital + Media program because of it’s node-based approach to physical computing, along with the conceptual emphasis of the curriculum. “RISD looked like a bridge to something more physical,” he says, noting that by enabling him to explore his interest in cross-cultural computing and push beyond the digital world through his work with wood, his two years here have provided just the bridge he wanted.

Ever questioning, Robbins took what he learned from his travels to focus his research on a series of “misguided tasks,” including exploration of “the gap,” as he puts it. “I discovered that I learn the most about another culture when I’ve made a mistake big enough to show me the gaps between my assumptions and theirs.” He balanced his explorations between the virtual and physical worlds, making a series of furniture based on the impact of negative space (the gap) on the wood he used to construct his pieces. This led to an exploration of the gap in communication between humans and plants, and between “what we do and what we’re conscious of doing.”

To explain his unorthodox approach, Robbins says, “I’ve found that these purposeful misapplications can often cut through the assumptions that we use to unwittingly limit how we define and explore media and cultures. It’s a valuable technique — a method I’ve developed here — that I can use in the future in any part of the world.”