Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga

Structural Patterns

Reflections on Art, Technology and Society

Archive for the ‘travel’ Category

Tech Excursions in the Bay Area

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Touring Pixar

Although I travel to San Francisco at least once I year, I don’t get to see many friends as I’m in the City to spend time with family. However, this time, I made a point of getting in touch with Amera Rizk an old Carnegie Mellon University friend who is an editor at Pixar. This past Wednesday, Amera gave us the royal treatment as we got to tour the Steve Jobs Pixar building, pose with the Incredibles and even get a sound wave and microphone lesson in the Pixar sound recording studio. It was a huge treat for Iggy to learn about the steps that it take to produce a Pixar animation from initial concept sketches to creating models of the characters, story development, storyboarding, environment design, 3D movements… Amera took us through the elaborate animator studios and much more. I was amazed by the outdoor lap pool, it would be nice to work at a place that provides amazing exercise facilities. Unfortunately we couldn’t take pictures or see much of the Brooklyn building as that’s where the current projects are in production.

Touring Pixar

This past Friday, we made two San Francisco tech excursions. First was lunch with Brooke’s cousin Jimmy Singer at Google’s San Francisco building. At Pixar, Amera treated us to lunch, at Google, lunch was on Google as meals are provided! I only wish I had skipped breakfast. As we were not at the Google campus, the Google visit was not nearly as exciting as Pixar… It wasn’t a creative’s playground. But we did enjoy a beautiful view of the Bay Bridge along with a delicious meal with Jimmy’s company. Here’s Iggy’s cousin, Joaquin Zuniga making an around the world call in Google’s 4th Floor reception office.

Visiting Google

From Google we headed to the California Academy of Science to enjoy the rain forest environments and then to the Otherlab to have beer and pizza with Brooke’s old collaborator Jamie Schulte and his family. Saul Griffith the founder of Otherlab likes to throw the garage door open, blow up the jumpy castle and have a party on Friday afternoons. It took me a while to get Iggy out of the jumpy castle in order to head upstairs and box by controlling the pnuematic robots. Once the boys were up there trying to knock the head off the opponent’s robot, they forgot all about the jumpy castle. It was great to get a peak at all the interesting work going on at Otherlab.

Otherlab

I don’t know what this project is all about, but I love the concept:

Personal Energy Tracker

There’s so much amazing work being done in such a tiny area of land that is the Bay Area!

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August 16th, 2015 at 11:48 pm

Who Needs Art in Iceland!

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It has been a couple weeks since returning to the United States from Iceland – we got back FridayJuly 3rd. However, since the second or third day of arriving in Iceland, I’d been thinking about this blog post title – “Who Needs Art in Iceland” since I was so overwhelmed by the landscape and natural beauty. In traveling around the Golden Cirle and to southern Iceland to see melting glaciers, I was not searching at all for a cultural fix as I found myself doing in Copenhagen and Stockholm. (Of course, on our last day in Iceland, walking around Reykjavik, I did go into an art gallery and found some very funny video art by Ragnar Kjartansson.) So here are a few images on why I did not search out for interesting art in Iceland and view more herePinterest Iceland

Iceland lanscape

Iceland landscape

Iceland landscape

Iceland Landscape

Written by ricardo

July 22nd, 2015 at 1:35 pm

Posted in aesthetics,Natural Disaster,travel

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Stories in Reserve, Volume I now available

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The Temporary Travel Office has published a set of artist audio works as audio tours of sites in North America. Last winter, Ryan Griffis contacted me to contribute to the publication by revisiting Dentimundo, a 2005 project commissioned for inSite05 that investigates medical tourism in the form of US citizens traveling to Mexican dentists along the border for dental care that is unaffordable in the United States. For the project, I traveled the length of the U.S./Mexico border and met with dentists and patients to learn about this detail of the border economy and relations.

For the publication “Stories in Reserve,” I revisited all of my old files, photographs, interviews, research and writing to compose a narrated audio work. I recently received the publication that also includes America Ponds by Sarah Kanouse and Siting Expositions:Vancouver by Ryan Griffis, Lize Mogel and Sarah Ross. The publication includes a full color booklet with statements by the artists and translations of the works as necessary along with three CDs for each of the pieces. It’s a great little publication and worth checking out online for free – Volume One.

Eight Hours in Lima

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Kurt and I left San Francisco at 1:30am on July 26th, arrived in San Salvador around 7:30am and then borded a plane to Lima at 8:30am. We arrived in Lima in the early afternoon, perhaps 1pm and would not be catching our next flight until 10:30pm. So we headed for the downtown to check out the Museo del Convento de San Francisco and its catacombs. It was once the main graveyard of the city and you can still tour the catacombs and see the bones of city citizens buried below the church. As well as a great collection of paintings, an amazing library that is disintegrating and the architecture of the church itself.
Photo of the library in the Convent of San Francisco, Lima, Peru
Photos were not allowed, so we took pictures outside and then toured the downtown.
Iglesia de San Francsico, Lima, Peru
We had excellent ham sandwiches at EL Cordano, an old bar and restaurant near the president’s house. That’s the cook, behind Kurt’s head cutting our ham.
El Cordano
Then we headed to the central square and the rest of downtown and I bought a great wool sweater and a nice shirt for a fraction of what it would have cost me in NYC
La Casa de Pizarro, Lima, Peru
We hadn’t prepared for Lima and were surprised at the poverty of the capital. On the way in from the airport, many buildings appeared unfinished, abandoned or as if they had suffered a disaster. The general energy of the downtown was incredibly calm, which was surprising as they were about to celebrate their independence. The taxi drive back to the airport was one of the most horrific rides either of us had experienced, it was exhilarating and scary, Kurt tried to put his seatbelt on, but it didn’t work. I tried taking some photos, but it didn’t work:
Crazy Lima taxi ride

Written by ricardo

August 1st, 2010 at 7:48 am

Posted in travel