Dan Shiffman isn't like most professors. Instead of Scantron sheets and bluebooks, Shiffman prefers to give his final exams on a 120-foot video wall that's the equivalent of six 16:9 displays linked end-to-end.
Yes, it is final exam time for Shiffman's Big Screens Class—at 6PM on a Friday night, with free wine—and I am standing with a couple hundred other likeminded art techies in the lobby of the IAC Building, a curvy glass Frank Gehry creation on the West Side of Manhattan. We are in front of a 120-foot screen that's the equivalent of six 16:9 displays arranged end-to-end, and we are doing what it's telling us to do. We are obeying it.
It tells us to clap, and we clap. Then we stomp our feet and say "la la la." Then we send text messages to it, filled with the anticipation of influencing what appears on its glowing greatness. We clap to shoo white birds off a power line that's strung across its great length. We do it while drinking and taking pictures of the action, and it is good—a techie church for bigger screens, always bigger! We kneel!
Big Screens - Claptime by Vikram Tank
Big Screens - White Sun by Mooshir Vahanvati
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