blacklog

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.

Here are the two BobbleHeads I made so far:

Update: Mud’s post in the BuzaMoto blog.

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.

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

This weekend, I have been swimming inside a projection of the 120-cell courtesy of Jenn3D. The tetrahedrons stand for vertices. Jenn3D looks great. I downloaded the source code but I couldn’t understand most of it. At least I got it to compile.

This afternoon I accidentally found myself submitting tiny snippets of Javascript code to UndefPrint, and watching my submissions transform into prints almost instantly on a live video stream. The video showed a window to the street on the right side, and moving arms holding beer bottles on the left. In the center of the frame, a printer was drawing every submission on an interminable roll of paper. It was 8:30 PM in Berlin when I started looking. It was getting dark, and I stuck around until their clock hit midnight. I think it was 3:00 PM here in California. Ubiquity—to be present in several places at the same time—feels priceless. It even inspired me to write something in this journal for the first time in months ^_^

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?

This is update from a previous note. A few months ago I modeled a few cartoon characters using an experimental modeling application developed by Alec Rivers at CSAIL. Working with it is actually a hybrid process between drawing and modeling. After drawing a few views of a cartoon character from a few basic two dimensional shapes—front, side and top for example—the software tries its best generate all other views required to look at the character from any p.o.v. in three dimensions. An iterative process lets you refine the views that don’t look right, rearranging and deforming the original shapes, until you build a two dimensional character that can be looked in three dimensions from any angle. Hence the name of the project: 2.5D. I believe using this software can be significantly less confusing than my explanation. Alec and his collaborators are definitely more clear in the paper that was featured in Siggraph this Summer. If you visit Alec’s project webpage you can actually download the software and play with the models I made—or make your own—provided that you can run Windows 7 or Vista in your machine.

The character featured in the picture combines features from Disney’s Stitch and the little green aliens from the Toy Story series.

I am not sure if a version of this technique will ever become an industry standard. It all depends on how much smarter computers will become in the future, but it’s a good reminder that the creation of new digital tools is an open door to new forms of expression, even within the constraints of traditional forms like cartoon animation.

This fall I worked on a top secret CSAIL project, modeling toon characters with an experimental system that I can’t talk about until it goes public. This job has reminded me how much I love cartoons in general, and how I should be doing more of those, and less of other things.

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.

I have been working on this with Kyle.