A Fresh Start (up)

Remy had a conference in Chicago this week so I went with him for the week end. This city is simply awesome! It is a rare example of what my ideal city would look like: there are pieces of art everywhere! All my pictures are here.

First of all, we decided to be fancy and booked the Sheraton for 2 nights: and I remember the time when I said that I was a really simple person…! Truth is, I really enjoyed the sweet sheets and pillows, and the room service of the Sheraton… It feels good not to be a student anymore

In a nutshell, we took the architectural boat tour which describes the most amazing buildings I’ve ever seen, then we took a walk in Millennium Park and saw the great Cloud Gate and we spent at least half an hour watching ourselves in this bean-shaped mirror. If you don’t know what the Cloud Gate looks like, you should better check my pictures, otherwise there is no way to explain what it is

In the evening we went to Shula’s steakhouse, and for a carnivore like I am, Chicago is a real paradise! Then we headed to Kingston Mines, the most famous blues club in Chicago, and one of the bands was great: J.W. Williams & the Chi-Town Hustlers are really worth listening to.

On Sunday we went shopping on Magnificent Mile: and entire mile of great stores, isn’t it supposed to be called heaven? Then we went’ to Gino’s East to try the famous deep dish Chicago-style pizza: 6cm of toppings!! Finally we went to the Chicago Museum of Contemporary art: even if the Koons exhibition only starts in two weeks (I was so frustrated!!), we got the chance to see some amazing pieces, including a big shell in which you can lie down!

Going back to work after a week end like this is kind of tough, especially since I’m all alone in a big empty apartment … And you guys, what are you up to these days?

I spent most of the day in the middle of my paint tubes, brushes and canvas: the result is this piece of junk on the left but I felt so good! It was as if I had what I liked the most in my “old” life back

Apart from that, back to my French week. We had dinner on Tuesday with David and Veronique, two great French expats living in San Jose… It was really cool to share our thoughts about the life and people here, and they had some really great stories (most expats have, but they really know how to tell them ).

On Thursday I went to a dinner gathering HEC alumni on the West Coast. Amazing people there, and it is always reassuring to see that even if, having just finished school, I have the impression that business careers are really “standardized”, it is not always the case, especially among HEC expats. There was in particular an entrepreneur advisor who took the time to tell me how he got there, and I would simply love having a job like that in a couple of years.

Yesterday we went to the Open Studios gathering 160 artists, and I had a real love at first sight with Sunn Yo: her paintings make you calm and serene, her portraits are just astonishing, the colors great, the technique perfect… Anyway, after that we joined the French gang (Cécile and Karim her boyfriend, who is American but speaks a perfect French, Audrey and Guillaume) to a great Moroccan restaurant called Aziza and had a delicious pastilla to share. Yes, I know I’m supposed to integrate a little bit better, but it’s not my fault if I keep on meeting great French people

A dinner with friends on a Saturday night and painting on Sunday, I feel as if I was still in Paris! Oh, I forgot about the difference in climate

It all started with me having my licence…and ended up with me buying this car (on the picture)!

OK, let’s do that chronologically (I don’t even have time to get creative while giving you some news!). On Tuesday evening we had dinner in SF with Thibault and Anne-Laure who were starting their tour of California: wow, that was so great to see some friends, and listening to them arguing about the next steps of their trip felt like home, and more exactly poker parties in Paris!

After a crazy week at work, on Friday night we went celebrating Jenni’s move from our team to the Motors team (this girl really helped me getting settled at work, this is so bad she’s leaving), in a great French restaurant called Foreign Cinema. God, I missed foie gras so much!! Pictures are here.

On Saturday, Audrey, Cecile and I attended a Fashion show organized by the Academy of Arts to recruit new students (pictures here)… It was absolutely great, exactly as we see them on TV, except that the models are even skinnier in reality… To sympathize with them, we went eating chocolate pudding just after :-). And then we went to the SF MOMA, I think I could spend my life there… This afternoon, and in particular seeing those prospective students at the Academy, made me realize that, since I decided what I wanted to do so early, I am not really aware of all the other type of careers and lives people have outside of the business world. I’m not saying that I imagine myself as a fashion designer (even if my mother would have preferred that!), but I would love to meet people with more diverse backgrounds… Speaking of which, on Saturday night Nicolas invited us to meet Thomas, his partner, who just joined him in the US: a true artist, graphic designer and photograph. If you want to check a great photoblog, Thomas’ one will definitely be worth your time. After eating with them and Seb around Castro St, we went to a pub in the same street… and I was the only girl, surrounded by guys who were obviously more interested in Rémy than myself… I’m definitely in SF!

And today… Rémy went checking some cars this morning and came back with a big smile: “I found it, we just have to sign the papers”! 200 hundred signatures later, I found myself writing a check of $11,000, on the verge on falling from my chair, imagining that the next time that I will check my bank account there will be a huge difference… In these kind of moments, you just want to be a kid again and have Mom&Dad (this is almost a brand) take care of everything, so I called them and they scared the hell out of me: “have you checked that the engine is clear? what about the brakes? how can you be sure that it wasn’t involved in any accident?”… Anyway, I bought a really nice Toyota Yaris, that I’m going to pick up probably tomorrow since I need to get an insurance first. What do you think? I find its “face” (no, I’m not crazy, I know that it won’t speak to me like Disney’s ones) really cute

To relax after this stressful choice, we went to… Alcatraz (I know, a spa would have probably been a better choice)! We chose the evening tour, and it was awesome, first of all for the view on the City, but also because you really get to see what you have in mind: the alignment of microscopic cells, the ways prisoners took to escape, the cells of famous prisoners… and you can’t of course miss the entire story of Al Capone… Eh, you know I love Mafia stories! Pictures are here.

After a nice work and a nice apartment, I start to have nice friends and a nice car. This expatriation is going well, right?

I am finally not a desperate case! It started really badly though: I arrived 45 min late because my instructor refuses to buy a GPS, and the examinator I got started by saying “oh, you’re from France? I hate France, people are so mean and rude there!”… It turned out that the guy was delighted to see me smile, since he thought that it might be the sign that “new generations are probably France’s last hope”… The guy was actually really nice, and I couldn’t really disagree with what he was saying: I did leave France for a reason! He ended up the conversation by asking me if Carla Bruni was smart, and I was… speechless! So now I’m going to buy a car… without knowing a single thing about cars! Any advice? I want to keep it under $10,000 (used) and ideally be able to resell it.

Well, this week is completely crazy at work, so I’m going to bed now, but just for info I posted an article about the New Media Arts conference on Tech IT Easy here, and an article about a great conference I attended today by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, about customer satisfaction, here.

I had an interesting week, the kind of week when you feel that your brain has been working more than usual.

I attended a great conference by Dan Roam about visual thinking as part of the eBay Speaker Series. I wrote an article about it on Tech IT Easy, and it felt good to blog about interesting topics, and not just about what’s happening in my life. I realized that I made the right choice to put my personal articles here and the articles with a little bit more meat on TIE. It allows me to experiment two of the advantages of blogging (staying in touch with friends without writing a common email to everyone and generating great conversations on interesting topics) on different and appropriate platforms without mixing readerships. Whereas before I had a large overlap between my TIE readers and this blog’s readers, now it is not the case anymore even if I encourage my dear friends who read this blog to also read tech topics on TIE, so that they won’t make this strange and annoyed face anymore when I’ll speak about my job with them

Apart from that, I went to a conference on Friday night about New Media Artists and the Law, which will probably help me a lot to definitely finish my thesis. I might write something on TIE about it too (yes, I try to be back in the game!)

This week-end was a little bit less intellectual: OK, I acknowledge that I went to see “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” at the cinema, and even if I’m sure that this movie can go directly to the “crappy” category for most people, I actually laughed a lot And it motivated me to go to Hawaii, so I might take so holidays and go there for Thanksgiving (yes, I am making plans well in advance!)

And finally today, I attended the Cherry Blossom Festival in Japantown with Seb, Audrey and Cecile (pictures here): too many people of course, but really nice parade, plenty of colors, and plenty of French people (don’t ask me why!). Then we looked for cold places since it was freezing in SF and landed in a really nice café, managed by French people of course, guess you can’t avoid them ;-)  Nice people and hot chocolate: I definitely start liking it here!

  After my worst day ever, a work colleague told me “you’re lucky, because it means that you will have great moments in the days to come, to balance good and bad in the universe”… and apparently he was right! I had one really great week end

On Saturday we went to visit Berkeley and UC Berkeley, and even if the university is not as nice as UCLA (OK, I’m so biased, but if you want to compare pictures are here!), I loved the famous hippie atmosphere. I have never seen so many billboards for so different causes: “Save Tibet”, “Stop Beijin’s Olympic torch and hold the torch of human rights”, “Vote for Obama”, “Save Darfour”…

On Saturday night, we went to the opening of Taste 2008 art exhibition: when you combine art and food (my 2 passions!) you get something really interesting, like paintings of delirious ice creams…and you can check it out here!

Finally, today we went to the San Francisco Chocolate Salon and even if it was a bit too crowded (who is able to resist the power of chocolate?!), I had the opportunity to taste some amazing chocolates, like the “banana froster”… yummy!!! Pictures are here, but you better not be hungry before checking them

The first steps of this expatriation are finally going fine, and I’m delighted by all the great things happening in the Valley; there are too many things to do every week end! The only expectable problem is just that… I miss my friends: I got most of you on the phone this week end and sometimes I feel that I would be more “useful” in France, that I wouldn’t have all the time the impression of missing some important moments of your lives… But I know that, should I have stayed, things would have been the same since you are all going to explore the world soon

My way back to France was hectic (3 late planes, 2 missed connections…), and obviously I caught a cold… But fortunately Christmas was great, even if almost every person in my family welcomed me with a warm “bonjour l’américaine!”….

So I take the chance of having a blog to wish happy holidays to everyone I might have forgotten

I will be in France until I finally obtain my visa to go back to California, and in the meantime I will be writing my thesis about “Internet: a way to democratize contemporary art?”, so I’ll keep you posted, even if I know that I haven’t blogged much lately. If you have any insight on the topic, do not hesitate to contact me, especially since I am looking for people to interview in the sector (gallery owners, museums, artists, net artists…).

The letters of the pictures are made with butterflies’ wings, and is the courtesy of http://www.butterflyalphabet.com/

For my course of entrepreneurship, I had to interview an entrepreneur to understand the major obstacles to overcome when creating a venture. Raphael Labbé, one of the co-founder of U.[Lik], has took the time to share with me the story of U.[Lik] from an entrepreneurial point of view. As many of you know, U.[Lik] allows users to share their tastes by creating their own online library where they can aggregate their ratings of cultural products (music, cinema, arts, people…).

You can find the story here on Tech IT Easy. Be careful, the article is really long, but how can you shorten an entrepreneurial story? Since entrepreneurship is all about mentoring, it has been really great for me to discover Raphael’s entrepreneurial adventure, or “rollercoaster”.

If you want to discover my tastes, visit my lounge on U.[Lik] here. Christmas is approaching, so please also check my wishlist ;-). And good luck to Raphael and Mathieu to build this “cultural Babel” (sorry but this expression rocks!).

As you may have noticed, this blog has been going in every directions these past weeks. I created it a few months ago and was willing to wait until my expatriation to launch it, but I couldn’t resist and I started this blog by talking a lot about Internet stuff, as it is the sector I love, and because I was really focused on that those past few months.

But the Internet is not the only thing I would like to talk about; in fact I realize that I would like to be able to write about everything I like, everything that surprises me, everything that scares me. In a word, I would like to talk about my life, because it’s often what blogs written by a unique author are, and life is diverse, fortunately.

I have spent one week and a half in the US now and I can’t manage to catch up with Internet news, so at this moment I can’t say anything great about Internet stuff but I would love to talk about American educational system, about the difficulties of expatriation, about the fact of being immersed in a group of international people… And I will probably go back to tech subjects in a while because I’ve taken courses in Technology Management at UCLA which are really promising. And I’m still working on my thesis about the impact of the Internet on the art market so I will also bring cool stuff about it.  And I know that it is hard to find a consistency between Internet, entrepreneurship, digital art, expatriation and education topics, but the common thing they share is that they are all part of my life…

But I also know that I can’t ask my readers to be interested in everything I like, so I really don’t know what to do

In a word it would be great if you can give some feedback on the subject. Do you think that blogs have to be specialized so that readers know what to expect? Or that if you like a blog it’s because you like the author (:-)) and would be interested in knowing more about him/her on multiple topics?

PLEASE, I really need your comments to figure that out, and it can also bring an interesting discussion about what blogging really is.

I’m really interested in visualization tools especially when they become art projects. But what about building a visual representation of the Internet itself? Everybody is aware of the success on The Million Dollar Page mainly because of the simplicity of the business model to gain easily lots of money, but it’s also a major Net art project that is a visual metaphor for what the Internet was in 2005. The creator Alex Tew even said: “One of my original aims was to create a piece of Internet art that reflects what’s current on the Internet and what’s possible, because I’ve made a million from that image. I want to create an Internet capsule to keep for years.”

But what we know less (probably because it did not generate any money!) is that they were previous attempts to visualize the Internet, notably ones from a major Net artist called Lisa Jevbratt. 1:1 is one of her project intended to make 5 different representations of the Internet. On her site, she describes the project like that: “1:1 was a project created in 1999 which consisted of a database that would eventually contain the addresses of every Web site in the world and interfaces through which to view and use the database. 1:1(2) is a continuation of the project including a second database of addresses generated in 2001 and 2002 and interfaces that show and compare the data from both databases.”  In Migration, she represented the Internet by allocating dots to the sites of a database, with different colors depending on the year of creation of these sites, and it is the only representation that allows to see changes over the year, to see the web “moving”,  whereas the other ones are static. But my favorite from the 5 is “Every“, which is really beautiful and gives access to all the websites from the database.

I love the way she describes the purpose of this piece of Net art: “When navigating the Web through the databases, via the five interfaces, one experiences a very different Web than when navigating it with the “road maps” provided by search engines and portals. Instead of advertisements, pornography, and pictures of people’s pets, this Web is an abundance of inaccessible information, undeveloped sites and cryptic messages intended for someone else. Search-engines and portals deliver only a thin slice of the Web to us, not the high-resolution image we sometimes think they do. The interfaces/visualizations are not maps of the Web but are, in some sense, the Web. They are super-realistic and yet function in ways images could not function in any other environment or time. They are a new kind of image of the Web, and they are a new kind of image. “