First of all what the fuck is a “guest star”? I hate that heirarchy wierdness.

Second of all, this is my project. I am documenting the documentation of my day doing a project as a participant in 5-in-5 at ITP. I will post things as soon as they are captured. I’ll be doing everything I can to let you know about my progress throughout the day. I’ll be doing tutorials on life, uploading music videos that I make, uploading precious photos of myself, and interacting with my readers. Basically, I’m doing everything that comes to mind. Filtering is low. Release early and often. Make desicions quickly. I don’t know how I feel about that yet, but I’m going to see it through. Here’s the ongoing documentation. I strongly encourage and am asking for commments, questions and participation of all kinds. My phone number is 917-701-3226. Call it. My email is metablog@andrewjs.com. Write it. What happens now.

“The oldest surviving samplers were constructed in the 15th and 16th centuries. As there were no pre-printed patterns available for needleworkers, a stitched model was needed. Whenever a needlewoman saw a new and interesting example of a stitching pattern, she would quickly sew a small sample of it onto a piece of cloth – her ‘sampler’. The patterns were sewn randomly onto the fabric as a reference for future use, and the woman would collect extra stitches and patterns throughout her lifetime.

16th Century English samplers were stitched on a narrow band of fabric 6-9in (15-23cm) wide. As fabric was very expensive, these samplers were totally covered with stitches. These were known as band samplers and valued highly, often being mentioned in wills and passed down through the generations.”

I decided to do an interpretation of the band sampler and have the base cloth for my sampler be a long, narrow form:

Since the idea with the sampler is to collect techniques as you learn them, this is just the beginning of a work in progress. The first example on it compares various soft conductors: ironed-on conductive fabric, as well as machine-sewn and hand-sewn conductive thread.

Soon to be added are different insulation techniques, crimp beads with surface mounts components, as well as various connectors and switches. More pictures to follow!

Dennis Crowley and [Christian Bovine] spent all day doing 5 different Olympic Events: 100m freestyle, 100m dash, 110m hurdles, long jump and the rings (in gymnastics) and compared ourselves to Olympic athletes. This was to see just how amazing these athletes are in comparison to average Joe’s like Dennis and [Christian] and as an excuse to do Olympic events all day. Since we only had one day to do all the events with Robert Moon video taping us and then edit all the footage it could have been done a bit better but I think we are all happy with the outcome.

Link to Video

From Robert Moon’s Perspective:

I worked with Christian Bovine and Dennis Crowley for our Day 2 project: Average Athlete versus Olympic Athlete. My day started bright and early at 6 am so I make it on time to meet the two average athletes at the public pool on the corner of Pitt and Houston. We were quite lucky that the pool supervisor let us shoot that day for the 100 meter freestyle. For our next events, we shot the track and field events at the East River Park and ran into camp councilors who helped us properly set up the hurdles and long jump events. And for our final rings event was held at the Neistat Brothers studio where they have a set of rings set up for doing the “muscle up.”

As the person behind the camera, I wanted to match the camera angles with the Olympic trials footage we used for this project. Christian and I edited throughout the evening and set it to render over night. You can check out the video below.

Special thanks to our track & field experts:
Nandi Dozier-Lewis, Andrew Olsen and Stephanie Velez

And our rings expert:
Van Neistat

MP4 | Blip.tv | Youtube | iTunes

I also had the chance to interview Robert Moon about his ecofabulous wallet, Adam Parrish about his pixel linocuts, and Joshua Berry about his summer mittens. This is just a taste of the projects that are coming out of the 5-in-5 Challenge. To learn more and to watch the projects that emerge over the week, check out the 5-in-5 blog.

My guest Michael Zeltner of GRL Vienna and I worked on a Frankenface project to play with videos in the same way you can play with collages.

Etsy Street is a video series about things I see in the world and want to share with the Etsy community. Check out the first post here. Feel free to give me feedback and let me know what you think!