I tweeted this just now, but I feel like it deserves a bit more context. This came out of an email with Adam Hyde (his coinage!) trying to convince him or one of our collaborators in Berlin to find and scan a print version of this article about our collaborative book project. I have found that the committees reviewing my materials for tenure not only frown on all forms of online publication, they also frown on printed copies of electronic versions of documents even if they also appear in print. A scan of the meatspace dead-tree newspaper is viewed as significantly more “legitimate” than a screenshot of the same text from the newspaper’s website. They are Dead-Tree-Huggers.

Whenever I am asked, I never remember them all at once. And I seem to be asked more and more, so I am writing them all down here, to refer people to.

I should emphasize, that these are just opinions, not hard facts. Every situation is different. And this is primarily based off of experience in arts focused searches.

Advice on Academic Job Interviews

1. You should ask the department administrator or search chair (whomever your contact person is) for the names of the people who will be interviewing you. This is an ok question. Research their research. It might give you a sense of what they will ask. If you think it is relevant, and doesn’t look too sycophantish, you may refer to their research in the interview process.

2. The whole day of an on campus interview is an interview. Though it may seem purely a formality or informational when you meet the Dean or Provost, that is part of the interview; she may be sizing you up to see how you will do in your tenure process, or just getting a sense of whether you will fit in the school’s culture, or the makeup of that particular department. When you are having lunch with the members of the department it is part of the interview; that is where you prove that you are a nice person, and can have a relaxed and collegial conversation that IS NOT about work — do not talk about work, or yourself at the lunch/dinner. At all. And, when you are walking with the department chair, or search chair from the meeting with the Dean, to lunch with the department, that is part of the interview too. Is the chair silent? Is he chatty? How do you respond to his personality, during those five minutes walking across the campus quad, or walking down hallways. Explicitly or not, this will all be evaluated.

3. Identify what you want the committee to know about you. What are the key points you want to get across. These are your talking points. You should be presenting these points, ideas, feelings, emotions, etc on all levels, from answering questions, to your body language.

4. Don’t necessarily answer their questions directly. Use their questions do deliver your talking points.

5. Expect certain standard questions. Here are a few common questions:

• Expect a question about your field. “So what is New Media?” or “How do you define Journalism in the blogging age” or “How do you define the difference between art and design”
• Expect questions about what you do, how you define your practice, what your 5 year research plan is. This is your chance to really go off on your talking points about your work, and what you *have* done, and what you are planning on doing. Prove that you will hit the ground running, and become more and more productive. Prove that getting tenure will NOT be a problem.
• Describe a conflict with a student or colleague, and how you resolved it. This is a trick question: this is the collegiality question, so DO NOT pick a peer/colleague. Pick a conflict with a student, and choose something that isn’t just about a disagreement over a grade, or a straight up conflict. Choose something that is not confrontational, and required true pedagogical creativity on your part to resolve it. And choose something that resolved REALLY WELL. Some good examples include any instance of working one on one with a student that turned a conflict student into a star student, helping students overcome their phobias, their disabilities, and their prejudices, or other feel good resolutions. DO NOT talk about when students come to you demanding their grades be changed and how you say no, and then go to the chair, etc… Prove you do not create problems, and that you can diffuse problems by yourself in a way that leads to a better classroom.
• Expect questions about teaching. What is your experience, what you can teach, teaching theory, etc. Again, hit your talking pionts. You may be applying for a job just outside your degree or your experience (a New Media artist applying for a Design job, or a Film maker applying for a video job) so this may be where you subtly or obviously point out that you are totally capable of doing the job.
• Expect a question about the difference between where you are coming from and their department. This could have many many permutations, but usually it is  about context. A shift from art school to small liberal arts college. From a big public university to small private school. From a non-denominational to a religious focused school. Or vice-versa.

6. Expect to be asked if you have questions for them. Always have at least two questions for them. These questions should show that you have done research on the department and the school. These should be questions you want to know the answers to, but more importantly, they should prove that you know where the important questions are to be asked. This could be a question about their current curriculum, where their students end up (grad school, working in the field, working at the mall), the role or interrelationships of different departments or degrees in the program, etc.

7. Generally, you don’t want to ask about teaching load, responsibilities, research support, etc, in the phone interview. You can ask these questions in the on campus interview, but only in very careful ways. You can ask an open ended question about how the school supports research, and how much of a focus it is. This may or may not lead to a discussion of what kind of annual travel funding, annual research funding, or one-time new-hire research start-up you may or may not get. But don’t push it too much. Most of the time, the department decides they want you, and then you get to fight over the details with a Dean or Provost.

8. Most importantly: it is all about fit. Do you and your research fit with what the department needs are. Can you teach the classes they need taught? Is your research in line with what they feel will benefit the overall research climate of the department. Is your professional profile high enough to be competitive within the institution, especially when it comes to tenure? Is your professional profile too high such that the committee is either threatened by your achievements, or is afraid you will not stay long at their institution? Will you be able to handle the students and their specific demands or requirements they bring to the classroom — this will a very broad range of specific needs that will be different in every case, from a small Community College to an Ivy League University.

9. Aim for a conversational tone in your interview. If you can make it become as if you are just in a faculty meeting where you are discussing curriculum and the future of the department, you have proven that you fit in all of the above ways. Watch for pronouns. If someone switches into the plural “we” and is including you in that, it is a sign. While this is a rare occurrence, in a sense, it should be your hypothetical goal to focus on. Make them feel like you are really part of them already.

10. On the flip side, do not change who you are and what you do just to fit in. You are who you are. Stay true to that. If you turn yourself into someone else, they are going to figure it out. If they don’t figure it out during the interview process (which they probably will), it will become apparent over your next 3 or 5 or 7 years in the department. If you are a Photographer, and you manage to convince the department that you are a Video artist, you are going to end up having to teach courses that probably don’t interest you as much as they should, and more importantly, you are going to be evaluated based off of your Video art… but you are a Photographer, and you don’t really make Video art… See the problem here? Stay true to yourself, and your practice, it will make you happier in the job, and will make the job happier with you.

Its always weird to look back on my calendar and think about all the things that happened in the past. It seems strangely foreign in this form. I wonder if analog date-books and calendars have the same effect, or feel different? Do people keep calendars and date books (other than famous people who keep everything b/c it is part of their archive?) Maybe it is that the digital calendar allows you to go back so far so easily, and see things with such precision.

It is amazing to think that someone would get upset that they started a meme. And as lame a meme as a cat eating corn. Really?

And I’ll be honest: its a lame meme: animals eating obviously tasty things doesn’t do it for me. I’ve seen animals eat much much much weirder things. Like when we discovered Karlee (my family’s second irish terrier) had eaten an entire 64 count box of crayons. She pooped rainbow for three days.

Incidentally Marisa has suggested that is the origin of the "I Poop Rainbows" meme.

So its Karlee’s. This is the original. All the others are fake!

I think this is the new thing for celebrities. A retroreflective headband, or a retroflective hat. When the paparazzi pop their flashes on them taking a bat to their ex’s car, or doing drugs, or walking out of court after being arraigned for doing drugs… all they camera will record is a halo of a face. great protection. you can’t prove it was really that person. and anyway, it is unpublishable.

Plus its much more reasonable than Michael Jackson’s head to toe black getup he sported in Bahrain.

Watch the whole thing. Or at least the first 12 minutes. Its worth it. Fascinating. It is so familiar that I feel like I was shown this in grade school… alongside Powers of Ten.

Some things have changed since Ulrich Franzen made it: waterfronts are now viewed as more precious potential parks than he views the street. Putting a two mile long building on any waterfront would not work these days. Also, his vision of shared cars is starting to come true, with shared rentable cars now available in most cities, and bicycle share programs across Europe and heading stateside. I wondered if today’s political and economic culture could handle he importance and respond to the difficulty of such massive change; a review of Boston’s tragically executed and financially draining Big Dig would be a good case study in what can go wrong. All that said, I felt there were two things missing: Subways and Bicycles.

He never addresses subways: do we keep them, do we make more, are they better or worse than busses (electric or otherwise)? Which really is a question of fixed route transportation: you can put a bus in anywhere you want when you need it, but you can’t just add or take away a subway. There are vast swaths of Brooklyn and Queens that are underserved by Subways because in the first half of the 20th Century, either no one lived there because they were factories and are now living lofts, or (I would guess) the people that lived their lacked the political or economic power to bring the subway closer to them.

The other absence is any discussion of the bicycle. And while the bicycle is not the cure-all, for every transportation woe, having spent time in cities like Amsterdam, Portland, and even Shanghai & Beijing, it is clearly a hugely important part of removing strain on existing private and public infrastructure.

Just for comparison look at Shenzhen. Located just north of China’s border with Hong Kong, Shenzhen was designated China’s first Special Economic Zone roughly 30 years ago. At the time, it was rice patties. Now it is a city with the same population as New York City. It is the location one of the countries two stock exchanges, has remarkable skyscrapers, but has almost no urban planning to speak of. Much of the development has been dictated by the swaths of land set aside for corporate factories made possible by huge foreign investment. A subway was opened sometime in the last ten years, and it is in the process of being expanded. But it is one line. Running east to west. And only covers a small percentage of the width of the city. Running above this subway from the water to the city center is the main thoroughfare. When I visited we drove in my host’s car through this mostly-stoplight-free congested two lane road at a mere 25 MPH; all because of congestion, a disproportionate number of accidents by new drivers, and a lack of any other east west transportation mode. In Shenzhen new wealth lead to massive purchase of cars by first time drivers as a proud sign of their rise into economic power. At the time I was there, Shenzheners were purchasing 200,000 new cars per year. All this in a city of roughly 10 million. It corresponds with a Los Angeles like breakdown of the transportation system.

Inversely, the much much older Shanghai and Beijing have established subway systems, and a long standing bicycle culture. Despite being much larger cities traffic moves much faster, even though more people moving from one place to another. The citizens of Shenzhen do not commute far, as much of Shenzhen is made up of large and small factories that usually contain their own workers housing, which ranges from formal dormitory style high rises, to informal ramshackle wooden bunk beds in unlit rooms divided by curtains.

All this always interests me, but I am especially interested in these questions right now, as I am about to participate in the New Amsterdam Bike Slam a Transportation Alternatives co-sponsored bike related three think-tank as poetry-slam. I’ll be on one team, and some of the participants are listed here.

And while the focus of this session is on bikes in the harbor area (something dear to my heart as I commute to teach at the College of Staten Island/CUNY by bike and ferry), seeing (or maybe re-seeing) Franzen’s film has spurred my thinking in a different direction.

(via Urban Omnibus)

In early September I will be participating in New Amsterdam Bike Slam, Transportation Alternative’s co-sponsored bike think-tank as poetry-slam. As the description says:

Over three challenging rounds, each team will defend its proposals in front of a panel of expert judges and a live audience. At the end of the evening, the judges will declare a winner, with the most innovative and practical plan for making New York, and New Yorkers, more bicycle-friendly.

I’m brainstorming already, and I welcome suggestions about how to improve biking in downtown and the NY Harbor area. This is, of course, something near and dear to my heart as I commute by bike to CSI via the SI Ferry.

Dear all,

Though I will be checking my email fairly regularly between July 1st and August 17th, I will be on the road and unable to respond to all but professional obligations such as number of exhibitions I am involved in, ICAM inquirys, critical student or other UC business, and personal matters. I will get to other emails sometime after August 17th, with the exceptions of: Don and his colleages who send a constant stream of email reminding me that I have not gotten back to them about their company’s web design services, offers to tranport funds out of various nations for a generous cut, and the many representatives I have acquired as part of my astounding recent run of winning various national and company lotteries. Related in terms of the annoying email category, a note to members of the public who sometimes send hateful mail about your public servant, a humble state employee like myself, not being there to answer your emails in a timely fashion. Most faculty in the UC are on 9 month contracts, as am I. So when I don’t respond to your angry political diatribes, just know that I am off duty. I love you, and I actually do care about our critics, but I am off duty and will not be getting back to you. Try again after the 17th. Nevertheless, I am away on work related, which is entirely my choice: I choose to continue my research over the summer. So please forgive me if I choose to concentrate on that.

If you are interested, I will be in Brazil working on this: www.walkingtools.net and the HiperGps project, for this http://www.file.org.br/ (FILE SP opens on July 27th and I’m pleased I will be there with so many UCSD colleages, Lev Manovich, Miller Puckette, Todd Margolis, Peter Otto, Sheldon Brown, Nina Waisman and of course my collaborator Cicero Silva and Jane DeAlmeida), and also at the 41º Festival de Inverno da UFMG, http://www.ufmg.br/festival/.
Mídias locativas: produzindo arte digital com celulares (Projeto Walkingtools)

Fred Benenson suggested LegalTorrents. After procrastinating, I’ve started the experiment with the Hamilton’s Wood Type catalog #14 book I published on Lulu.com last week.

PDF Download available here via LegalTorrents.

And Master InDesign file available here via LegalTorrents.

I also threw up some Quicktime full res versions of my three most recent videos. I need to clean up the FCP project files, and then I’ll try to upload those too.

It is all an experiment. If you download them, let me know how it goes.

Project description

1. An overview

Amazon has a web service called the Mechanical Turk where you can have humans perform simple repetitive tasks for you. They call it “Artificial Artificial Intelligence.” I propose to document the inner life and experiences of the Amazon’s Mechanical Turk workforce by creating tasks that explore the personal memories of these workers, as our lives are transformed by cheap bandwidth and outsourcing that is made possible by the Internet

2. The People & The Project

I am proposing a web project that queries Amazon’s Mechanical Turk workers about their memories, their ambitions, their lives, their ages, trying to gain an insight into the lives of the people of the Global Village/Global-Factory-Town. People whom we interact with in fleeting glimpses as customer service representatives, after being on hold for longer than planned, and before being put back on hold to be transferred to another department.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk allows you to create tasks for human workers to complete. Often they are rote repetitive tasks that automate some process that could not be done by software. As Amazon dubs it: “Artificial Artificial Intelligence.” I will ask the Mechanical Turk workers about their memory; what they remember and what they forget, what they desire, and what they have lost. And on a practical level, how old they are, what level of education they have, and where they live.

3. The Outcome

These queries will be rendered as an interactive website, displaying the ages, locations, memories, and emotional states of these individuals who make up the Mechanical Turk workforce. It will also be turned into an artist book, somewhat like a book of found poetry, somewhat like a small town census. The book will be gracefully designed, and depending on cost it will be printed in an edition of 1000, or done via print on demand.

Assistants

I will be working with assistants on this project. My current assistants are Patrick Davison (http://www.whereikeepmythingsontheinternet.com/) and Clara Jo (http://www.clarajo.com/). They will be assisting with research, design, and programming as needed

Production Timeline

Assuming a start date of July (based off of a submission deadline of April 2), I expect it to take:

One month to build and design the interface to the Mechanical Turk API (July)
Two months of input from the Mechanical Turk workers (August-September)
Two months to edit and layout the book for printing (October-November)

The whole schedule could be delayed to comply with final grant deadlines.

Project Budget

Artist Fee/Artist Labor:
20 weeks, 20hrs/week, @ $6.75 (minimum wage)
$2700

Studio Cost:
5 months @ $600/mo equivalent (provided by Eyebeam)
$3000

Hosting/Domain Registration 1yr
$100

Research Assistance
($2000 Funded by College of Staten Island/CUNY Grant)
$2000

Payments to Mechanical Turk workers (each task will be $1, so $1000 will lead to 1000 entries.)
$1000

Artist Book costs
$1500

Total
$10,300

Total secured from other sources
$5000

Subtotal required to complete project
$5300

Total requested from Rhizome
$4000

Total funded by artist (from personal salary)
$1300

Curriculum Vitae

Full CV is here: http://www.mandiberg.com/cv/
Full Bio is here: http://www.mandiberg.com/about/

Short Bio:

Michael Mandiberg is known for selling all of his possessions online on Shop Mandiberg, making perfect copies of copies on AfterSherrieLevine.com, and creating Firefox plugins that highlight the real environmental costs of a global economy on TheRealCosts.com . His current projects include the co-authored groundbreaking Creative Commons licensed textbook Digital Foundations: an Intro to Media Design that teaches Bauhaus visual principles through design software, HowMuchItCosts.us, a car direction site that incorporates the financial and carbon cost of driving, and Bright Bike, a retro-reflective bicycle treehugger.com praised as “obnoxiously bright.” He is a Senior Fellow at Eyebeam, and an Assistant Professor at the College of Staten Island/CUNY. He lives in, and rides his bicycle around, Brooklyn. His work lives at Mandiberg.com

Work Samples

HowMuchItCosts.us, 2009
HowItCosts.us is a Google maps upgrade that calculates gas consumption and emissions along with trip directions.

The Real Costs, 2007
Real Costs is a Firefox plug-in that calculates the environmental impact of air travel by adding CO2 emissions data to airfare websites such as Orbitz.com, United.com, Delta.com, etc. It is like nutrition information labeling for airplane emissions. The Real Costs was commissioned by Rhizome.org.

Oil Standard, 2006
Oil Standard is a Firefox plugin that convers all prices on a webpage into barrles of crude oil, exploring the moment when oil replace(d) gold as the standard by which we trade all goods and currencies.

Bush Poll, 2004
There are 153 persons named George Bush in the US phone directory; during the run up to the 2004 election I performed an opinion survey about their political opinions, their polarization over political issues, and their potential reflection of an American people divided over their Presidential representation.