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.

The show will open from August 22nd to October 24th at 8670 Wilshire Blvd. Beverly Hills CA 90211 Suite 114.

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.

As the project website describes, the drawings should be created based on these rules:

 Use a white A4 sheet and a ballpoint pen.
 Draw a closed shape on the paper.
 Repeat the shape inside the original shape until there is no space left at its centre.
 Repeat the shape outside the original shape until it touches one side of the paper.
 Choose the distance so that you can make at least 50 iterations on the paper.
 Try to repeat each iteration in exactly the same way.
 Sign the drawing in its upper right corner in landscape format.

Note the semantic difference between “based” and “following” when you substitute the former with the latter. It is the difference between suggestion and command, and in this case it gives the participants a lot of room for interpretation. Most participants——myself included——chose to draw around the original shape both inside and outside. But that makes it hard——if not impossible——to keep the further iterations faithful to the original shape. Even though it is easier to draw instances of the same shape if you don’t have to wrap them around the original, only two participants have chosen to do that so far, and it is interesting that both of them used triangles.

I explored a number of options before submitting my choice. I wanted to do something that featured some behavior I believed had some degree of originality, but I also wanted to stay away from formal intricacies or technical conundrums. I decided to look for ambiguity in the idea of “closed shape” not by finding a tricky way to define “closed” but by finding a simple way to make the idea of “interior” relatively unclear. By drawing a line with a few self-intersections I produced enough ambiguity to have a some choices about the interior of the shape. The number eight for example, is it a circle with a twist or is it two circles tangent to each other? From a two dimensional point of view, it can be either one, and the choice you make about which one it is will inform the way you choose to repeat it. I drew the original shape one way, but a minute later I preferred to pretend I drew it differently.

This exercise in Telematics and participation is just one out of many—Amodal Suspension by Ralfael Lozano-Hemmer and Absolut Quartet by Jeff Lieberman & Dan Paluska immediately come to mind—but it stands out in a particular way that is relevant to some of the work we were doing back in the PLW a few years ago. UndefPrint is only open to participants that can write code. The general public is excluded. At least a bit of knowledge of Javascript and computer science is required to get anything out of UndefPrint. The idea that code is a mode of expression in a way similar to simple speech, doodling, or any other gesture that can be performed in public is not new, but it is an important one, because it puts code next to activities that come naturally to most humans—like speech or hitting on a keyboard to produce sounds—even when coding doesn’t come naturally for anybody. Perhaps in the future we will be able to speak code—and math—the way we can sort out objects in a crowded room. One can only hope.

Here is the code that draws the pattern in the image above, the fifth in my series of submissions:

for (i=0;i<=pWidth();i++){
  for (j=0;j<=pHeight();j++){
    pSymbolB(219+(Math.floor(Math.sin(j*i))%3));
    pPixel(i,j);}}

And, some fooling around with triangular patterns:

Did I ever mention how much I like simple nested for-loops?

These are the instructions I received from Orvar in Berlin:

1. No usar colores.
2. Dibújate en grafito con tu playera de Batman recordando cuando querías ser escritor. Well here is a colored version anyway.

I am still puzzled about how he figured out I once wanted to be a writer. Perhaps my cousin tipped him off.

And these are the instructions I sent to Adalberto Montes in Saltillo:

1. Materiales: Puedes usar los materiales que quieras siempre y cuando no haya color ni escalas de grises. Usarás sólamente lineas y plastas.
2. Proceso de simplificación del rostro o cabeza: Una cara se compone principalmente de un contenedor — o cara — de forma variable, en que se colocan los distintos elementos que distinguen un rostro del otro. Ojos, boca, orejas, nariz, etc. Inventar un sistema simplificado que permita dibujar rostros chiquititos conservando la mayor expresividad posible.
3. Diagramación: En la hoja de 8×10 cm caben ochenta cuadritos. Ochenta años. Dibujar una cara — muy simplificada — en cada cuadrito, siguiendo la progresión de la vida. La primera cara será un bebé recién nacido, y la última sea una calavera. Es importante que dibujes en chiquitito, a tamaño real.

I am very amused with the results, and can’t wait to see what all the other people did.

Cartoons sit halfway between realism and typography, still kind of faithful to some aspects of realism, but conceding a lot to symbolic representation. It’s not that cartoons can’t represent things faithfully, cartoons choose not to do so in order to communicate things better.

Cartoon shapes and environments can’t be fully defined in terms of geometric systems and mathematical modeling, forcing the intervention of the human component that is the essence of many deep cognitive questions. Cartoons are Gestalt at its best, and they are also fun as hell.

Honey I shrunk the Red Hook on Radar

I had the intention to make a wallpaper based pop-art inspired installation at the time, but it soon came clear that things were going to be different.

First, Laura expressed that she wanted her gallery to focus on collaborative work, and second, she suggested me to work on collaboration with her friend Andy Cavatorta, which is now a student in the MIT Media Lab. I accepted, and soon Andy and I were having lunch from the chinese-vietnamese food trucks at MIT every day of the week [Goosebeary's for those in the know], talking about ideas, intentions, and art. I wanted to use the laser cutter, and we both agreed on having something related to photography, and of a public art nature, preferably participatory, and with no electronics in it.

We decided to make a dollhouse version of the space around Lucky Gallery and call it “Honey I Shrunk the Red Hook”.

This is what I wrote for the opening event’s press release:
“Red Hook has an air of Mystery that I can’t find anywhere else in New York. It feels somewhat uncharted, perhaps separated as it is from the New York comprehensive subway network. When thinking about making art for Red Hook, I immediately felt like using this art as an excuse to get closer to the people in it, and learn about the place from them, hopefully helping them learn from each other in the process.”

And this is the project’s description from the same press release:
“Honey, I Shrunk the Red Hook” is a collaboration between Luis Blackaller and Andy Cavatorta who’s aim is to start a creative discussion about Red Hook. It will function as a public action, interactive installation and participatory performance. A diverse mix of members of the Red Hook community will be brought together to use art and the gallery space as communication devices. The artists will create a cardboard model of the streets around the gallery, and a collection of photographic dolls representing real Red Hook dwellers. Visitors to the Gallery will be encouraged to play with the dolls, having the option to have their own doll ready for the next weekend if they want. The familiar sights and people everybody knows will meet the ones in the imagination, giving visitors a chance to meet (or even be!) the familiar strangers all around them.

The show will open this weekend [August 8th], and will host different activities every weekend of August. If you’re in New York this month and would like to enjoy the warmth of Red Hook [probably Brooklyn's best hidden jewel], just take the free Ikea ferry [it's docked on Pier 11, downtown Manhattan] and check out this show. I will be putting pictures and related media here.

Thanks a lot to everyone that helped us with pictures for their dolls. Their virtual [yet physical] presence in Red hook is going to be awesome.