Max and I recently finished this video for the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. The video illustrates Chris Caplice’s talk on Scenario Planning, a brainstorming technique that helps prepare for abrupt changes in the future.
We use Boxing and Judo to compare between different planning techniques. Boxing represents the traditional approach, based on precise predictions of specific events, and Judo represents Scenario Planning, where it is more important to outline a number of potential futures and prepare for them. This way, specific events become less relevant as the effects they might produce. It makes sense, because lots of different events may cause the same effect over a given system. Preparing for this effect is a lot better strategy than the nearly impossible task of trying to predict each one of these events.
Last month I worked with BuzaMoto on a website for the MoMA Armory Show 2012. Mud made the website and I provided the content artwork for the main feature of the site: A personalized virtual BobbleHead creation tool.
These BobbleHeads are offered by MoMA as an extra token for people that buy access to the live stream of the Armory Show closing event: a live performance by mexican chill wave band Neon Indian. In addition to this, the collection of generated BobbleHeads will be projected on stage during the performance.
Aside from it being an interesting fundraising participation system, momaarmoryshow.org is an excellent example of a seamless, low-effort online transaction experience. I would probably spend a lot more money on digital content if other online stores made shopping as easy and pleasant as momaarmoryshow.org does.
I designed most of the BobbleHeads based on dead celebrity artists (Frida, Picasso, Warhol, Louise Bourgeois, etc. ), together with a couple of celebrities from pop culture, one science celebrity, and a monster made from body parts of several cadavers. This flickr link features the complete BobbleHead collection in the form of a wallpaper, including a famous superhero that didn’t make it to the website for obvious copyright reasons.
We all know most of the decisions made in the U.S. congress have a direct impact on the rest of the world. Even though most of our countries suffer from some degree of internet censorship, and some people might suggest that we should protest our own disastrous legislations first, the state of the internet in the United States is something we all use to our advantage, something worth protecting, and a good-enough example to look after for some. Perhaps it’s time for the world to take a stand and USE THE INTERNET to tell the U.S. congress that people everywhere have something to say about the decisions they make, like for example, that SOPA/PIPA belongs in the toilet.
I am not going to black out my site because, honestly, I don’t think anybody will care, but in case you happen to see this today (or any other day), I leave you here in the hands of Science Fiction superstar Cory Doctorow, delivering a keynote where he paints a pretty good picture about the current state of things. Additionaly, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has more information on this and other issues central to your freedom online.
Update: The same Cory Doctorow just posted another video on boingboing, where the Khan Academy explains the implications for legitimate sites in a world where SOPA/PIPA is law.
Update Two: Clay Shirky’s take on SOPA/PIPA “Get ready because more is coming”:
Some of my prints and laser-cuts have just been featured in a group show called Urban Nothingness, curated by Gene Wyrick for the Jefchak/Wyrick Gallery.
The work I have on this show is part of two ongoing series that I have been doing for a while:
Black and White City is a series of ongoing drawings, prints, animations and public interventions that I started in 2004 for my artistic residence in ISCP-NYC. My intention with this series is to extract a graphic language from the experience of big cities that separates urban technological elements from their human counterparts, to combine them later in sequences and configurations that explore ideas closely related to the life in the city, like routine, waiting, isolation, fear and pressure.
Reflections on Symmetry is a line of aesthetic research that I pursue to understand symmetry as concept, system and form. It started as a script for a short film on the work on Escher and Coxeter that I wrote in 2002 and 2003 with Javier Bracho. Over the years, this work has taken the form of writing, 3D models, animations, paper cuts, computer software, drawings and laser-cuts.
A pretty disturbing event was taking place in Puebla next door to the location where I gave a talk in the Gira TelmexHub two weeks ago, some kind of family weekend entertainment put together by the mexican military, where you and your kids were allowed to play with guns, bazookas and all kinds of other weaponry. Strange days indeed. Lots of grandmothers, toddlers, machine guns and helicopters. My friend Gabriella and I spent some time taking pictures of this event. The following contact sheet features some of the pics I took.
I cant help but wonder if turning the childhood playground of a nation’s generation into a militarized carnival is the right answer to the escalating criminal violence Mexico has been experiencing lately.
About a month ago, I made a new backup of the data from tinyDoodle. It is available as a text file consisting of 31.2 megabytes of integer coordinates of 2d points that are put together as a very long sequence of line segments. It’s formatted in JSON in a straightforward way. It doesn’t matter to me how silly this application sounds, there is something I still find incredibly compelling about the ability of computers to capture drawing gestures as sets of numbers that can be performed as drawing gestures that are sets of numbers. I think this drawing-to-number quasi-biyection is priceless.
I was recently talking about how different interaction models determine differences in communication, and how interesting it is for me to look at scenarios where a group of humans is restricted to use non-conventional channels to communicate with each other. Like putting two persons in a room and have them play a game where all they can do is make drawings to each other. Blackboard, paper, whiteboard, it doesn’t matter. Their communication will not be very efficient this way, but they will get very creative at drawing, and maybe come across some ideas that they would have never explored any other way.
More recently, Buzamoto launched a cool iPad app called Pendipity that offers a similar functionality to tinyDoodle, only better. It features a more advanced, yet very simple, drawing interface, and it implements a seamless chatting experience using a Node.js server. In terms of space, the difference between both systems is clear. When someone initiates a shared Pendipity session, the system will look for another available user to create a drawing team of two, and TinyDoodle is an open space where anybody can access the same drawing at any given time. So tinyDoodle is like a public blackboard, and Pendipity is like a shared notebook where every visitor is paired with someone else to draw on a single page of the notebook at a time. In Pendipity, a different session means a different drawing. In tinyDoodle, there will always be the same single drawing, around thirty something mb long at this point. The drawing is so dense, you actually have to watch it in chunks to make sense of it.
The following image is a collaboration Buza and I made on Pendipity. We didn’t find out we were drawing together until later, when we talked about it by chance. The idea of collaborating with somebody close to you without knowing who they are is bizarre, to say the least.
Last weekend, @paseusted invited me to take part as a speaker in a new technology event called Gira Telmexhub. The first round of conferences took place in the city of Puebla, where I joined an interesting group of people to exchange ideas about technology, creativity, and all kinds of social issues. A couple of projects that called my attention were basetrack.org presented by @terukugayama, and publiclaboratory.org presented by @321adam.
I used my time on stage to tell the story about my days in the MIT Media Lab, how I got there (thank you G), who I worked with, what I learned and achieved, and how this experience helped me reshape my ideas about art and technology. Some time later, I uploaded a PDF of my slides, following a request to share them I got from a member of the audience on twitter.
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