REMOTE SHOW #4 August 2017

Anthea Foyer
Aug 24, 2017 · 15 min read

This edition curated by 2016 & 2017 alumni Anthea Foyer & 2015 alumni Caitlin Burns

For this edition of the Forward/Story Remote Show, we asked alumni for (1) what they were doing if they weren’t at the latest F/S in Indonesia? (2) What were people in Indonesia up to? (3) What have you been doing? Here are the responses:


First, An Apology.

This Remote Show is seriously late. Good Lord. It’s ridiculously late. Penance has been made through a donation to Story Planet, a not for profit organization that supports the next generation of storytellers through literacy, art and digital programs, dedicated to Forward/Story. [Ed: you didn’t need to do that, but geez that is a great cause to have our name behind!]


What Were People NOT in Indonesia Up To?

James Carter, F/S 16
While y’all were in Indonesia, I was writing for Extended Play, working with Q Creative out of St. Charles, IL to create interactive videos with Rapt for Accenture Banking, and taking my kid to art class. And….I WASN’T IN INDONESIA, DAMMIT, STOP RUBBING IT IN!


David Fono, F/S 14
Hurtling through space, clinging desperately to a tiny spinning rock.


Christian Howard, F/S 16
I wasn’t there. Hi to all the new F/S friends!


Hank Blumenthal, F/S 15
Teaching Visual Design to HCI students at Georgia Tech and executive producing startup apps remotely for a company in Florida. All NDA. Road tripping to NYC, DC, and Ohio. Battling to get rights to some books. Still at war.


Matt Forbeck, F/S 16
I was definitely not in Indonesia, but I comforted myself with memories of Costa Rica from the year before. Actually I was in Colorado Springs on a trip with my wife, doing a short celebration of our upcoming 25th wedding anniversary in July.


Sarah Dahnke, F/S 16
I was not in Indonesia, but I checked Instagram daily and jealously “liked” every photo from the trip I saw. Instead I was in New Orleans working on an extension of Dances for Solidarity at A Studio in the Woods, creating a performance danced by women who were formerly incarcerated in Louisiana, choreographed in collaboration with a man who is currently incarcerated in solitary confinement.


Lee-Sean Huang, F/S 15
I was not in Indonesia, but I was at Cannes Lions recently, where I was a guest expert on the official Cannes Lions podcast produced by The New School Open Campus. In the podcast, I talked about design thinking and the creative process. My design studio (Foossa) also recently launched a podcast (FoossaPod) about creativity, community, and the things that matter. We would love to have F/S alumni come on one of our episodes. We can record the interviews on the phone or through the Interwebs. We are particularly interested in how do tell “civic stories” that bring diverse groups together and ways to design transformative collective experiences.


Jose Pablo Monge Chacon, F/S 16
R/ I was stranded in an alternate dimension where all doors led to a room with a table and an old crosswords magazine… that had been completed with a pen… A PEN!!! Some people like to watch the world burn.


Michelle Senderhauf, F/S 17
What am I doing right now? Well, I’m sitting on a dock on a lake in Upper Michigan, which feels kinda sorta like F/S Indonesia. I’m being creative by the water, relaxing, eating good food, mixing questionable drinks, and struggling to get cell service, all while keeping an eye on the bats flying overhead. Oh, and also mosquitoes. Lots of hungry mosquitoes. The atmosphere makes me miss my F/S cohorts even more than I already did.


What Were People in Indonesia Up To?

Simon Staffans, F/S 15, 17
Well admit I was that man with the black vodka. Nectar of the gods IMHO (at least the Finnish Kalevala-gods).

Indonesia was everything I had hoped for and more. Great people, great conversations, a very well thought-out setup regarding the sharing of skills and best practices… and wonderful food, stingy stingrays, dengue-fever mosquitos, the best back-heeled goal in any football (“soccer”) game on the Equator this year, and much much more. I do hope I get the chance to experience more possibilities like that in the future, because they help you grow in ways you couldn’t imagine — for a long time afterwards.


Christy Dena
At F/S17: Lance and I experimented with a new venue and it was super lovely. The pictures were mainly taken with the tide out unfortunately, but it is gorgeous. I love bringing great people together, and coming up with ways for them to connect deeply, and help reveal their practice and life to themselves. I love the Zam Zam game. I feel really torn by strong group bonds that happen, and the need for a greater group bond to happen across all F/S alumni.


Michael Epstein, F/S 17
Indonesia was a dream. A sweaty dream. I’d often wake up in a gauzy net of my own making, and then realize the gauze was my friend keeping me safe from mosquitos and closer to my bunkmate Topaz. My one regret is that we didn’t have a mosquito zapping contest with those fancy electronic racquets they gave us.

You know how in so many conferences the best part can be the hallway conversations you have with random people you meet? Well Indonesia was like the most amazing series of hallway conversations I ever had, but instead of being in an air conditioned, windowless hallway, we were perched out over an amazing bay looking at bushy islands. I think I found my tribe.


Michael Rau, F/S 16, 17
I WAS IN INDONESIA! I traveled halfway around the world to discover another cool dude from Austin. I also spent my nights cuddling a Finnish man, and managed to convince some other F/S folks that Nordic Larping is cool.


What have you been doing?

Michelle Senderhauf, F/S 17
Creatively, I’ve been doing a whole lot of housekeeping. I’ve let go of some of the long term gigs that were no longer fulfilling or enjoyable, which was a major step for me. I’ve spent a good amount of time digging through piles of junk at antique malls looking for supplies for a new personal project inspired by a random comment made by Anthea. (It’s amazing how you can dance awkwardly around an idea for so long without quite getting it right and one comment makes everything crystal clear.) My company, Dog Tale Media, has a new roadmap in place that I feel pretty good about too.

So while I don’t have a released project to tell all of you about (yet), there are multiple really exciting things I’ve just started to work on. One involves kids, so I might be calling on some of you in the near future to help find some young beta testers!

A side effect from F/S Indonesia is my rekindled desire to travel and visit friends. It had been quite a while since I had gone on a big adventure and the first time ever traveling to another country alone. So I’m hoping to change that and visit some F/S-ers!


Mary Pilon, F/S 16
‘m FINALLY wrapping up my book “The Kevin Show” coming out in March 2018 from Bloomsbury. I spent a month in Mexico as a Guapamacataro fellow (THANKS LEE-SEAN!) and am now back in NYC resuming work on stories about politics, sports, business. I wrote a TV pilot about women truckers and am now harassing people about making it. I’m profoundly jealous of those who were in Indonesia.


James Carter, F/S 16
I’m currently working with The Civilians’ Extended Play and with Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Lynn Nottage and her husband Tony Gerber’s Market Road Films, which will occupy Franklin Street Railroad Station in Downtown Reading with This Is Reading, a dynamic, site-specific multimedia installation blending live performance and visual media, re-animating the long-vacant building. Using as its foundation the challenges, and triumphs of people living in and around Reading, PA., This is Reading will weave their individual stories into one cohesive and celebratory compelling tale of the city. Extended Play is publishing transcribed excerpts of interviews, crowd-sourced videos of people from around the country talking about their favorite and worst times in their city or town, and using Facebook Live to encourage visitors to the train station to become roving reporters and ask other visitors about their experience living in Reading.

I’ve been clearing out my schedule for some pet projects. It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve got two projects I’m getting ready to crack. More deets on this in the next update!


Simon Staffans, F/S 15, 17
So I’m juggling what feels like too many projects… from historical dramas to documentaries to space-centered self-improvement apps with reality shows attached to a couple of potentially very interesting job offers to pan-European mentorships and so on. At the same time I’m not sure I’d want to change anything. It’s a beautiful spot to be in, where you can feel that all that stuff you’ve been doing up to this point has accumulated some sort of knowledge, skill, perhaps even wisdom, that can be of use to other people and that can help different projects realise their full potential much better.

That said, if anyone has anything interesting going on, I’m all ears :)


Hank Blumenthal, F/S 15
Right now: I am moving to Bowling Green, Ohio (Toledo/Detroit area) to take a research position as an assistant professor at Bowling Green State University in Visual Communication Technologies in the College of Technology, Architecture, & Applied Engineering. I am developing my research agenda in VR, AR, design, and setting up a lab. I look forward to visiting the museums in Toledo, Detroit, and Cleveland and the reasonable hop to Chicago. I am open to meet anyone in these places. I’ll be traveling more next year, so I hope to see some of you. Developing TV, movie and VR projects. (Also, my Ph.D. dissertation on Storyscapes, a subset of transmedia studies is available for anyone interested!)


Christy Dena
Current things: After doing lots of travel and running two events (F/S17 and then Crafting Intangibles— which has all the videos now released!), I’m now back to working on my playbook on Traversal Design, and a few ace consulting gigs, and teaching remote practice and interactive storytelling. I am very happy to have been experiencing a lot of contentment lately. Not crazy highs and lows. Instead, feeling at peace with my life. I’m not scrambling for anything to happen in order for me to be happy. I am happy.


Christian Howard, F/S 16
A . I just returned from Russia where I wrapped up a 6-month program, “Designing Compassion,” which was a contemplative art/practice collaboration between myself and Tibetan Buddhist monks to create a secular course on compassion using design principles. The program has been running for several months while I provided feedback from afar. During my visit, I gave two talks and facilitated a men’s co-creation session on emotional intelligence through narrative exploration. In light of the recent culling of LGBTQ men in Chechnya, I also spent time meeting people and developing/enhancing methods of compassionate response in Moscow in St. Petersburg. I’m in talks now to develop a book from the work and several interactive experiences are likely to pop up in NY and elsewhere.

I was also interviewed by a few media spots, so I may have links to share featuring me talking about:

  • the science fictional universe of OJ Simpson and the Kardashians
  • what I learned from dating monsters
  • my first job with the Vatican

B. The group that I host at the Brooklyn Zen Center called, Undoing Patriarchy has been growing steadily over the past year and now that we have a permanent space we’re ramping up for our second annual weekend retreat. Feel free to reach out if you’re interested or keep an eye on the site.

C. I recently took a new position as an Associate Strategist at SYPartners in New York.

D. For the second time, I’ll be curating a series of speakers, workshops, playtests and more at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering for their Integrated Digital Media Program! If you or anyone you know is interested in speaking feel free to reach out. This semester the focus is on workshops and I’m (informally) centering the semester-long series on the idea of “fluidity and adaptation.” Feel free to let me know if you have workshop ideas, pitches, speakers or inspirations. Everything from Networking 101 and Deep Dives on Blockchain for Entrepreneurs, to designing multidimensional universes for interactive transmedia are welcome!


David Fono, F/S 14 (& Byron Laviolette F/S 16)
Fellow alum Byron Laviolette and I just released our videogame based on the clown duo he directs: Morro and Jasp. It’s a strange little game, and it took 3.5 years to make, probably because there’s 30,000 words of dialogue that’s 100% player-chosen.


Matt Forbeck, F/S 16
I’m currently writing a novel for the tabletop RPG Exalted. I’m also working on some pick-a-path books as well as on a video game. On top of that, my eldest son graduated from high school and is off to the University of Wisconsin in the fall.


Michael Epstein, F/S 17
I’m currently working on a multi-platform project about the history of affordable housing sponsored by a NEH Digital Projects for the Public grant. My background in is mobile/location-based storytelling, mostly using sound and the built environment. But there has always been an issue in getting the proper entryway into such outdoor, walking-through-the-city projects. Websites can help, but often feel too removed from the real city, the experience of seeing history for yourself. So I’ve started working with the director of “The Speakeasy,” an immersive theater show in San Francisco to build an immersive theater prequel into an episodic series of smartphone walks through the history of affordable housing.

I’m really interested in figuring out the right balance in this project between experts giving history/theory, subjects telling their own true stories in affordable housing, and some elements of fantasy and fiction mixed in. Whether its re-enactments of historical scenes, the use of music from the time period, or throwing in a totally scripted character or two, I’m wondering how to pull this off in a way that doesn’t jeopardize the integrity of understanding housing’s complex history and shaky policy decisions. Love to hear about any projects/films you all know of that do this well. Steven Soderbergh’s HBO series, K Street, about political consultants in DC did this really well I think.

I’m still hiring writers and producers for this project, so let me know if you or someone you know is interested. I’ve attached job postings to our group discussion space.

And I’m working on a pilot podcast right now for Amazon/Audible about a failure consultant in Silicon Valley. The idea is to morph the wild startup ideas of conceptual artist Jonathon Keats into a coaching service for tech bros, helping them fail harder, faster, and in pursuit of more redeemable endeavors.


Michael Rau, F/S 16, 17
I’m in Brasilia, Brazil, devising a new theater piece with a group of actor/researchers from the University of Brasilia and two faculty members from Texas State University. We’re developing three conceptions of “Liquid characters” (any actor can play any role), and subjective time (seeing the same event from different perspectives). It’s really rad and super weird. And I’m practicing my Portuguese!


Sarah Dahnke, F/S 16
I’m on the road until September with Kode with Klossy teaching girls across the United States how to be badass technologists/developers/wonder women. It has proven to be a genuinely life-changing experience for almost everyone involved, and I especially love that every girl who attends does so cost-free, reducing the financial barrier to entry for learning tech-based skills.


Lee-Sean Huang, F/S 15
Podcasting Designers and MOOC’ing with Finns.

I have also been in cyberspace among Finns and Finnophiles (is that even a word?), but alas no Finnish man wielding black vodka. As part of my research and design process for developing a new online certificate program in Design Leadership for Business for The New School, I have been immersing myself as a student in other online courses to understand ways to engage students remotely. So I signed up for a free online Finnish language course with Aalto University. I learned how to introduce myself and order cinnamon buns and coffee. I even got myself a Finnish name: Kaleva Koski (Mythical Giant White Water). And I also learned that “I love you” is “Minä rakastan sinua” (imagine a heavily rolled “R”). That sounds like the most heavy metal declaration of love ever.


Jose Pablo Monge Chacon, F/S 16
So this one is a confusing one, right know I am flying to Bolivia because they invited me to give a game production workshop. So I’ll be there for the next 2 weeks. We are also working on VR game for PSVR/HTC-Vive called Let Me Go, I am rewriting parts of the script since at the beginning it wasn’t a VR game.And we are taking our first intern after I come back from South America. So lots of things happening, I wish I could be doing more.


Wishlists!

Mary Pilon, F/S 16
On my wish list is finding a game designer who can help me build a badass digital excerpt for “The Kevin Show” come launch day. Email me!


Simon Staffans, F/S 15, 17
I probably need a lot of stuff, but I’ve always been quite bad at pinpointing exactly what is needed for me to move forward. I’m usually much better at spotting what everyone else would be in need of. But let me instead say that if anyone needs something to do with Europe and Finland in particular, let me know :)


Hank Blumenthal, F/S 15
I’m happy to help on projects and looking for collaborators for research/projects/design/art. I plan to have graduate students working soon, and I want to explore the variety of VR/AR applications and possibilities — especially with off the shelf solutions. Also looking for consulting or producing part-time gigs. Stay if you are going up 75 or across 80/90!


Christian Howard, F/S 16
It’s been a whirlwind and as I settle into this new job I’m wondering how others have managed their #adulting when starting a big new adventure. Did you sort out a financial advisor (i did!), a personal trainer, a spiritual guru, speed reading courses and an executive coach? Did you set aside time and space for a monthly massage? Did you pay off all your debt and run naked in the streets? I’m looking for ideas and resources to add to my own that balance self-care and hedonism after landing that first big gig.


David Fono, F/S 14
So, I just released a game I’ve been working on for 3.5 years. And it’s a tremendously disheartening experience, because, y’know — mostly, people don’t really care when you release something! Unfortunately, we didn’t really follow the best practices of PR and community building during development, largely because we were creating something for an existing fanbase. But now that it’s done, we’ve got this thing, and while it’s not exactly a towering achievement next to everything else being done in the games world, it is something that is pretty unique and tries to do something different from anything else out there; and it would be great to show this to people who talk and think about games that are pretty unique and try to do something different. So all that to say: If you know anybody who likes to talk and think about strange little games, perhaps publicly, I’d love it if you could let me know how to get in touch with them. Or even just share some advice that’ll set me straight!


Sarah Dahnke, F/S 16
My wish list: Tips and tricks for long-term travel/living out of a suitcase. Fiction and non-fiction book recommendations along with advice about what to do with said books when finished reading them so that they don’t add to the bulk of my luggage.


Michael Rau, F/S 16, 17
I’m developing an interactive experience using bluetooth beacons! I need pointers/resources/tutorials/advice/examples/etc. I’m going to use the eddystone beacons, unless someone else tells me to use something else!


Michael Epstein, F/S 17
1. Academics: I’d love to do a skype or a some sort of team brainstorm about how my/our work in multi-platform storytelling can move further in academic environments. For two years now I’ve been teaching location-based and mobile storytelling at the California College of Arts and I’d like to learn more about proposing a Center for Hybrid Storytelling or getting a more permanent position there or at another university. Talked with Lance and Kristy about this briefly, but I know a few of us would like to hear more from them and our fellow f/s ers about this.

2. Conferences: when I was at and working with MIT, I used to do a lot of speaking engagements and in the past couple of years that’s fallen off. Partly because I’m producing more, have a family, etc. But also because I feel out of the circuit or not sure what circuit to hit. I’d love a skype or chat of sorts from folks who speak at conferences currently to get suggestions of how to promote myself, specific conferences/people to target, etc.


Jose Pablo Monge Chacon, F/S 16
R/ The things higher on my list is getting new projects. We have been struggling a lot with new projects. I keep meeting up with people. sending emails and getting praise for the type of projects that we are offering. But nothing ends up into an actual project. I have moved around my price range, project scopes, added new technologies and been going around on LinkedIn like a prowling tiger. But it all seems futile, and we are slowly getting closer to the point of no return. So I guess it could be summarized as saving the company from bankruptcy?


End

Forward Slash Story Alumni

A gathering of creatives who work at the fringes, with a focus on developing practitioners rather than projects

)

Anthea Foyer

Written by

Smart Cities, Art, Community, Innovation, Activation, Storytelling, The Future — basically I’m a curious human who believes in positive change.

Forward Slash Story Alumni

A gathering of creatives who work at the fringes, with a focus on developing practitioners rather than projects

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