Tim Griffin was settling into his first full season in charge of the programming at the Kitchen theater and art gallery on West 19th Street in Chelsea, with hopes of re-establishing the space as an artists’ meeting place, when Hurricane Sandy flooded it with four feet of water from the Hudson River.
The damage came to about $450,000. On the casualty list: lighting fixtures that had been taken down to accommodate the Richard Maxwell play “Neutral Hero”; speaker systems and electronics; and the theater’s stage, a Masonite and plywood sprung dance floor.
“But we didn’t lose the piano,” said Mr. Griffin, the Kitchen’s executive director and chief curator. “The water came right up to the bed, right underneath it. But I think it, remarkably, stayed in tune.”
The Kitchen was able to reopen by the end of November for a few performances of Mr. Maxwell’s play and a benefit auction, and now its schedule is back in full swing. An avant-garde music-theater production called “Inflatable Frankenstein” — a show by the ensemble Radiohole and P.S. 122 that is part of the Coil Festival — begins on Saturday, and “Untitled,” an exhibition of art works by Jacob Kassay, opens on Wednesday.
Insurance is likely to cover less than half the loss from the storm. But grants from Time Warner and the Art Dealers Association of America, as well as from nonprofit organizations and foundations, have gone a long way toward making up the difference.
“You’d be shocked to know how far we take the dollar,” Mr. Griffin said in a recent interview at a coffee shop near the Kitchen, which has a $2 million annual budget. “If you look at how many productions we have coming in and out, it’s startling.”
From September 2011 to last July, that meant 52 projects (counting the openings of gallery shows, which usually run about six weeks, as well as theater, music or dance pieces) and 115 performances.
With life back to a semblance of normality, Mr. Griffin is looking to get back on track the Kitchen’s new L.A.B. series (the letters stand for language, art, bodies), which addresses one of Mr. Griffin’s most cherished hopes for his tenure. The L.A.B. programs, which got under way in September, are interdisciplinary discussions that Mr. Griffin wants to host as free events two to four times a month.
“The idea is to have people from different disciplines in a room at the same time,” Mr. Griffin explained, “discussing single words that have different meanings in different disciplines — hashing out the differences, in their respective contexts, and ideally, having them collaborate. I’m creating ambiguous events, at some level.”
For the inaugural L.A.B. discussion, Mr. Griffin asked the author Lynne Tillman to speak about the concept of “presence” as part of a panel that also included the rhetorician Shannon Jackson, the choreographer Tere O’Connor and the visual artist Elad Lassry.
“Tim recognizes the need for discussion about what we’re all making and seeing,” Ms. Tillman wrote in an e-mail, “and that discourse itself is a part of how we see and what we make.”
The Kitchen was started in 1971 by Woody and Steina Vasulka in the kitchen of the Broadway Central Hotel in Greenwich Village as an exhibition and performance space for their fellow video artists.
When the hotel collapsed in 1973, the Kitchen moved to SoHo, where it quickly became a headquarters for experimental music and early Minimalism, not least because the composer Rhys Chatham was appointed music director and brought in Steve Reich, Glenn Branca, Maryanne Amacher and other experimental composers.
Another move, to its current location on 19th Street, just off 10th Avenue, in 1986, gave the Kitchen significantly more space. But there was a downside. In SoHo the Kitchen had become not only a thriving performance space, but a hangout as well. The move to Chelsea put it off the beaten path. Though it is less isolated now that Chelsea is a premier art world destination, the Kitchen has never quite regained that status.
Mr. Griffin would like to change that, and he comes to the job with the experience to speak to different kinds of artists in their own languages. Now 42, he worked as a musician (he played trumpet in several ensembles), a theater producer and an art curator before taking a detour into journalism, first as the art editor at Time Out New York, then as the editor of Artforum for seven years.
Mr. Lassry described Mr. Griffin as “quietly charismatic,” and added that under his leadership, the Kitchen has “this kind of looseness, where disciplines can meet without the conceptual compromise that often overwhelms interdisciplinary practice.”
Mr. Griffin has said that running the Kitchen is similar, in some ways, to editing a magazine “in the sense that one tries to put different pieces together in a way that will amplify the meaning of any one piece, and make its potential meanings proliferate.”
Mainly, he wants to turn the interdisciplinary exchanges of the L.A.B. programs into the dominant spirit at the Kitchen.
“There’s a cross-disciplinary impulse in the arts now,” he said, “but I feel that very often, things get programmed from above.” He added, “What I’m trying to figure out here is, how do you create a special place where artists will want to come and hang out, and where they will happen to see things that aren’t immediately related to their own medium.
According to Petersen, Sense Networks applies big science to mobile location data for predictive analytics in advertising. The company receives streaming location data from mobile phones in real-time, processes the data in the context of billions of historical data points, and analyzes it to better understand human activity. They process 4 billion location points per day and have processed over 1 trillion location points. “The key is understanding context from the data—not only where you are, but what are you doing,” says Petersen. “We’re the neighborhood flyer of the 21st century.”
“We are insanely focused on one aspect of a problem—sifting through data from over one hundred million phone users to help local marketers better predict and influence buying behavior,” says Petersen. The quick serve restaurant business is a key market vertical for Sense Networks and it’s a large opportunity in itself: Over 200 million people in the U.S. have visited a quick serve restaurant in the past 30 days, according to Scarborough research. Sense Network’s predictive analytics are helping companies like regional bakery Swiss Bakers use mobile advertising to reach local customers and drive walk in traffic to any one of their 11 locations, driving up response 200% over the past three months.
Headquartered in New York City’s Flatiron neighborhood, Sense Networks was founded in 2003 and incorporated in early 2006. The founding team is composed of top computer scientists from MIT and Columbia University. The company is funded by Intel Capital, Javelin Venture Partners and investors from the hedge fund community. David was named CEO of the company in July 2010 and while he seems the perfect match for Sense Networks, his path to the CEO role is atypical for most technology start-ups. He’s not from the Stanford or Harvard MBA start-up crowd and doesn’t hail from Pal Alto or Cambridge. But he is “rabid about learning,” as he put it, having grown up in the world of math and academics.
Both his dad and grandfather were engineers with an academics bent. His Dad earned his PhD in electrical engineering, having been put through school as a lifetime employee at Bell Labs. They set him on path of what he thought would be a life in academics focused on economics, math and statistics. He earned his undergrad degree at Washington & Lee, an MA in Finance from Georgia State and later a PhD stint at the University of Minnesota. He worked for the Federal Reserve by day and worked on solving math problems at night. Later an analysts job at technology start-up Telephia in Silicon Valley provided the opportunity to learn more about the intersection of math and the mobile business.
Telephia turned into a proving ground for David, where his analytical skills were broadened across the company’s operations, sales activities, leading to a management role. “At Telephia, I volunteered to fill-in for a sales person. I was the quant guy and the move felt risky to me at the time, but it set me on a path of learning to stretch myself and to move out of my comfort zone,” said Petersen. He learned he was very capable of handling the roles that would ultimately lead to his current CEO position. Telephia was sold to Nielsen for $440 million in 2007, leading to a comfortable 7-figure pay-day for Petersen—enough to take a year off to take time with his young family and to decide on his next move. He was then recruited to take on the CEO role at Sense Networks.
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