Joe Edelman

Ongoing Projects

• Rendezvous—I've begun posting a new instructional works series to Pinterest.

• Cadre—A stealth project from my current startup, citizen logistics.

• Come Out and Play—I help organize a yearly festival of novel street games. This year in November.

Inventions

• CEML—a scripting language for coordinating real-world interaction.

• Groundcrew—a mobile and web platform for organizing events in real time.

• Notecard Parties 2002-2012— All guests at a party are assigned precisely-timed tasks, distributed on little cards or via SMS. Tasks interweave. Strangers find themselves in intimate encounters, quiet moments, facing challenges together, being theatrical, etc. In some versions (2004-2006) tasks were developed by an onsite team, based on the wishes and dreams of the party guests themselves.

Partipatory Works

• Tryst (2011)—A text-messaging rig that organized rendezvous and subtle mobs at the Open Engagement conference. With Sara Thacher. (script file) (photos)

• Continuous Play (2008)—A performance collaboration with choreographer Maura Donohue in which the audience switches from passive to very active performers, directed via SMS, over the course of the evening. (photos)

• EarthSync (2006)—A social calendar-sharing website. Allowed you to see what all of your geographically-dispersed friends are doing today and "sync-up" by doing the same thing at the same time.

• Take to the Streets Radio (2005)—A radio show and weekly street event for more than a year. We give listeners instructions every week for public space adventures near the centers of Northampton and Florence, MA.

• Share a Quiet Moment with a Distant Stranger (2006)—A web installation. Spend a minute or two in synchronous silent contemplation with a stranger somewhere else on Earth. Users are given the relative compass bearing and degreesbelow-the-horizon of their companions, so as to more fully feel "with" them in contemplation.

• Inaction at a Distance (2003)— Site-specific performance. Two people stand quietly, shoulder to shoulder, 250 miles apart, for 10 minutes. Synchronized to atomic time, they inhale at the same moment to begin. Performed three times in NYC and VT.

• Geoloitering (2003)— Email/physical installation. For more than a month, I spent part of each day standing quietly in Vermont while elsewhere in the world (Ireland, Australia, New Mexico, Japan, etc) a complete stranger was also standing quietly

• Trustfall Dinner (2001)— A computer program was used to scramble the instructions of several gourmet recipes and to assign guests at the dinner party cooking tasks in such a manner that it was difficult for anyone to guess what was being prepared until the very end. A primary focus was on the mechanics of danger and trust -- for instance, in having one participant leave something prone to burning on the stove and having another participant remove it.

• Invoke (2000)— Web/physical installation. A gift-exchange community was created. Participants were making, hiding, and finding postcards in back pages of low-circulation books in the San Francisco public library. Each user would enter the call number and page of a book within which he or she would like to receive a postcard, and within a week another user would place one there.

Past work

• Joe has worked for The Gov’t of Tibet in Exile, Interval Research Corporation, the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, WGBH Television, Dartmouth College, a post-Katrina soup kitchen, couchsurfing, an unschool called North Star, renesys.com, and other companies. He's a software architect, an event producer, a dance teacher, and a participatory artist.