Kurt, I suppose there were a couple of things going on that pushed the critique in the direction it took. First, I don't think that you sufficiently articulated an objective for the project in its final form - you gave the impression that you had tried to do one thing and it didn't come off, but rather than develop it further or strike out in a different direction, you essentially presented the same thing with a new rationale. While there's nothing inherently wrong with this strategy (often in experimental work, failure sparks a new direction), I couldn't help feeling that your professed satisfaction with the project in its final form involved some measure of rationalization. And I was a little taken aback at your lack of interest in pursuing further development that would have enabled you to do what you had in mind in the first place. Your defensiveness (on this point and others) probably let me to push a little harder than intended, which is what led to my comment about sounding more critical that I meant to. There were many things I liked about the project which had already come up, and I regret that those weren't reiterated at the end of the critique. Certainly you had the bad luck to be the closer of a long day - at the end I waited for comments from the rest of the room, but everyone else seemed to have zoned out completely. So I apologize for not having the wherewithal to end the critique on a more satisfactory note. But please believe me it certainly was nothing personal.

Thanks for the response Perry. It helps immensely to hear how you perceived the project and me during the presentation. By no means did I intend to show a level of satisfaction that exceeded the accomplishments of the piece, but I did feel it was necessary to express what I thought the project was doing in the final form that it took. I am intensely interested in pursuing further development that would allow for greater flexibility in the system as well as an implementation of the behaviors that I was originally attempting to design. If I came acrross as rationalizing the final piece as better for my shortcomings as a programmer, it was not intentional. I think what was most frustrating was realizing that given the time that I had at the end, I knew that I didn't have the skills to accomplish building the ideas that I had. My defensiveness comes from both my desire to be able to do more and from my belief that the work must be evaluated based on its final form. As insiders in the process, out closeness to the production lends us an unique perspective and we see interactive work very differently for it.

Trust that I have no hard feelings about the process. I feel that I learned a lot. And now that my Director demo has expired I can move back into Processing, an environment far more suited to the work I was trying to do in the first place.