Here's the video. You can find more on the ITPedia page. The Chance to Play from Aaron on Vimeo.

I heard so many things about Red's class before we arrived for the first day. I heard that the presentations were crazy, and that every group tried to one-up the groups from the previous week. I heard the week you presented was the most hectic and intense week of the semester. I heard the audio better be perfect. I heard a lot. So imagine how fast my stomach turned when I learned that I was in the first group. It was bitter/sweet. Bitter because I was supposed to go to Seattle over the weekend for a close friend's wedding, but there was really no way I could go. Sweet, because going first, as Todd said, meant that our group would set the bar for the semester. Bitter, because going first meant that our group would set the bar for the semester. The speaker? Vito Acconci. I had never heard of him before, I have to confess. But I absolutely loved his narrative. He told us the story of his artistic career, which was an incredible journey from making intensely personal private art to more community focused art to collaborative, architectural artistic installations and expressions. I'll include some of my notes here, since Vito was so articulate and self-reflective:

• He began his career as a poet obsessed with words moving over a page and how his readers could journey with him across those pages. He wanted words to be something like matter, and therefore took them as literally as possible. But stuff had to change context, thus he moved from poetry to art.
• In 1969, he completed his Following Piece where he picked a person each day to follow until they entered a private space.
• He continued to make many intensely personal films, some of which you can watch here.
• He then moved in to art installations, which allowed the artist to transform unique spaces. He said that the specificity of the space was important because art isn't universal and when people talk about ART, the forget people are there. But to Vito, interaction is important.
• In the 80s, he started creating work that was actually transformed by bodies, like a house that was erected only when someone sat in a chair triggering the walls (painted as a US flag on the inside and Russian on the outside) to rise and form around the individual. It was after this period that he built his studio and started collaborating with architects.

I'm pretty sure that of his entire presentation, this image will stick with most of us the longest:
The artist masturbating for his exhibit,
But in addition, there were so many choice quotes:

Make a world, then poke a hole in it. Theory has to fail. The motivation for my work is, "what if?" Public is an amazing collection of private moments.

After his 90 minute lecture and a couple of questions, it was time for us to come together as a group and decide how we might respond.