This mini-graph illustrates the missing nineteen days that complete one year of logging my sleep. I think I’m ready for a break from this.
I didn’t retain my dreams from last night. They must have been incredibly pleasant because I couldn’t get myself to wake up until it was almost late. I love to sleep and I love my dreams, even the disturbing ones that sometimes are called nightmares. They are all like serialized comics: fantastic and incomplete.
One question that comes to my mind about all this is: When graphs are pretty, does it matter what they mean?
This graph illustrates my sleeping habits from September 4th, 2007 to August 16th, 2008. Days of the year run from left to right and hours of each day run bottom-up.
The blue stripe represents from 1 am to 9 am every day, eight nice normal hours of sleep. The chaotic oscillation rendered in black represents reality. I guess this black area is approximately equal to the area outlined by the blue stripe, which must mean I’m not doing so bad. Or am I?
When I look at measured data I have a fascination for the singular occurences rather than the trends. The things that only happen once, like that day I woke up really late or that day I went to bed really early. I can’t claim to remember what was going on back then -after all, I can only manage to retain the last 10 minutes in my head these days- but I’m certain those must have been real highlights of my MIT grad life.
Once upon a time there was a place called the PLW where many wonderful things had their home, like a large HP printer called MAEDA-BIG-WRATH.
Adhered to the principle of temperamental programming, MAEDA-BIG-WRATH did not work like she was supposed to. She often required users to perform complicated rituals, mostly to summon the goodwill of the ethernet faeries.
MAEDA-BIG-WRATH lived in a big closet where she remained mostly ignored, except for the ocassional times when a poster was needed to promote something. Always printing information, hardly printing things of beauty. She loved it when she didn’t had to print any date, name, diagram or description.
When I met MAEDA-BIG-WRATH I didn’t notice her loneliness at first. Then it took some time for her to follow my call when I finally approached her. If I had known we were meant for each other I would have made her heads dance across the length of the glossy paper rolls every week, turning their mechanical four color motion motion into an endless stream of high heels, flowers, buildings, cocktails, robots, trucks, guns and bikinis. But now I am gone, and life will never be what it was when I could talk to MAEDA-BIG-WRATH in the privacy of that closet.
For my thesis I modified e15 and created a studio web application to log and share my creative process while writing ogfx scripts. To save time, I embedded the studio application within PictureXS. I separated the studio from PictureXS by making a studio controller and adding some functionality to the picture model, like the ability to publish code and snapshots from e15 together at the same time. People visiting the studio website could send messages to the custom e15 I was running, and I could respond to them without leaving the programming environment in e15. It is not very hard to make an application take a capture from the pixels in one of it’s views and post it to a web service, so the interesting stuff to notice is independent from the platforms used, and what really matters is to observe how the creative process changes when it is performed in a digitally mediated public space.
Places like the MIT Media Lab tend to push towards figuring out new ways to make technology mediate between humans and their needs. There are many cases where this mediation might lead to an improvement of human life, but in many others the result is simply alienating. Writing instructions that make pictures instead of making pictures with my own hands is an interesting separation. Sharing the way these instructions change as I search for a different picture might illuminate about some aspects of computational art, but It could also be just another way to produce data where patterns could be found, just as it seems everybody everywhere is doing these days. We live, after all, in a statistical world.
The studio application is called MyStudio. I’ve turned PictureXS and MyStudio static while I find a place to host them outside of the Media Lab, so nothing can be posted in them for now. I will turn the dynamic features on again when I figure out how to pay for the 30+ gigabytes of disk space I need to store all the pictures in PictureXS if I host it on my own.
This image shows the first 110 pictures I published in MyStudio:
I graduated today from MIT. Martini and Buza made water-jet cut aluminum PLW thingies to wear on top of our hats, and my picture made it to the MIT-Tech 2008 commencement edition. Congratulations MIT class of 2008, this has been a fantastic journey.
The last two years I watched the MIT commencement ceremony from the safety of my computer on a live video feed. Today I was one of the more or less 2600 people that walked in formation across campus in preparation to receive their degrees. We were waiting in front of Killian Court when the voice in the microphone said something like “… and now, the guest of honor, class of 2008″. The band was playing a cheesy march. It felt good inside.
This journal is almost finished.
I grabbed two pictures from the MIT-tech website and gave them a little photoshop touch to enhance the romanticism. I already feel nostalgic.
On May 16th John gave a farewell lecture to the Media Lab before joining RISD. While reviewing our theses for the last time before submitting them this morning, Mud, Kyle and I spent a few nights preparing a series of promotional posters for John’s talk.
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