Hello friends, I've been in touch with a few Bay Area people on this list since I joined last year, and I was thinking that we ought to be able to muster enough critical mass to put something great together for WPPD. Now, maybe someone's already working on this, and I hope you'll invite me to join, but if not, here're some thoughts.
Originally, I contacted someone at the Exploratorium that I've worked with in the past, but she didn't call me back. Turns out that's okay, because I've since realized that WPPD coincides with the Spring Open House at the Headlands Center for the Arts, where I have a studio. The Exploratorium is a museum, after all, and this is probably too short of a timeframe for an institution of that size to react. The Headlands has a lot more flexibility. My studio is not big enough to host what I have in mind, but it appears that I'll be able to get one of the bigger, general purpose spaces in my building, where we could show and maybe build some cameras, hand out PP (pinhole propaganda), and have a one-day exhibition of local work. I'd like to try and convert a room or three in various buildings into camera obscurae, and most of all I'd like to come up with some way to let visitors do some shooting and get those images posted on the WPPD site. No way I can do all this myself, nor would I want to. But a group of 4-6 people, or more, working on this, in advance, and especially in the few days leading up to the event, could produce a truly amazing event. Open Houses usually draw way more than a thousand people, and with publicity, we could pull in a few hundred more people just for our slice of it. So... if any Bay Area people can devote some time to this, drop me a note offlist at mat...@cyberwerks.com. Once we've got a quorum, we can probably move the discussion over to that site-based forum and/or get together somewhere in town or out at the Headlands to brainstorm and plan. Hope this sounds like a good idea... Eric PS. WPPD is Sunday, April 28th. Open Houses run from noon to 5pm. The Headlands is... well, you can see the map and directions on their site at http://www.headlands.org/