blacklog

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 am working with Ana Domb on this website for the MIT Futures of Entertainment 4 conference.

Thank you Wordpress and Arras Theme for the engine and the template.

Yesterday my friend eomsco inaugurated his flickr account with a bunch of OpenStudio drawings that he saved when OpenStudio was still a functional web application. His drawings are some of the most brilliant cartoons I ever saw in OpenStudio, and it filled me with joy to see them around again. I have my own little collection of OpenStudio drawings in flickr, and I am positive that many others must have interesting similar backups forgotten in some corner of their file systems. For this reason alone it made sense to create an OpenStudio flickr group. Buza, roadrash and burnto have already added some content to the group, and Buza has just uploaded the first 200 in a collection of around 900 user profile pages that he crawled and rendered in early 2008. If you were ever an OpenStudio user, can you find yourself there? Please join the group and share your collections of OpenStudio art if you have them.

Featured illustration: Who’s there by eomsco.

Why did it take me so long to start doing this? Only the Eschaton knows.



I hope it looks kind of like this when I finish painting it.

The reciprocal influence between politics and media during the performance of democratic elections is a spectacle that has always fascinated me. It is clear that Internet and social networking technologies like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are becoming key protagonists in this performance, changing the rules of the game for good. The NYTimes has reported yesterday that the US State Department considers Twitter an important player during the current state of the Iranian electoral crisis. Could Twitter have prevented the destruction of Chilean democratically elected Popular Unity government in 1973, or the Mexican massacre of students in 1968? Probably not, but the combined communication resources provided by the web and mobile phones can help bring transparency and civic agency against the monolithic institutions of traditional media, hopefully contributing towards making a difference some day.

However, to make this kind of communication systems ever work at all without becoming new tools to manipulate public opinion like other media, something needs to be done about the digital divide, because today most people everywhere have no access or representation in the digital communication sphere.

So yeah, on one side, internet can help communities organize and express themselves against an imposed establishment. On the other side, it can facilitate new resources to interventionist strategies. This problem is of particular importance in a world where global notions of sovereignty are ill-defined and always biased.

Based on a Kenyan OpenSource mobile monitoring web engine called Ushahidi ["testimony" in Swahili], a group of friends from MIT and beyond [including me] has put together an application called cuidemos el voto to help report irregularities during the upcoming Mexican Federal Elections [July 5, 2009] using mobile phones and a web application.

I was in charge of creating a concept and designing the graphic image of the project. The biggest challenge was to find a fun way to represent the main idea without compromising the seriousness of the matter. “Cuidemos el voto” means “let’s protect the vote together”, and it occurred to me that there is no better symbol to protect the mexican vote than the anonymous masked mexican wrestler.

Mexico is a nation with a history of fraudulent elections. For many of us, it’s very hard to believe that voting can have a positive effect on how we live, or change anything at all. Experimentation with systems that help foster civic participation in a politically lethargic society sounds like a good idea. It even makes ME sound like less of a cynic ;P.

I will always be amazed by the incredible personalities that come across my way at MIT. This morning I attended a Master Class by Chris Claremont of X-Men fame organized by CMS.

The following lines are directly quoted from the “about” section in Claremont’s own website. I think they say a lot about his contribution to the superhero genre, and the reasons why he was able to give life to some of the most memorable female characters in superhero history.

The class was scheduled early [I should say early for me], and I woke up late, so I had to skip breakfast in order to get there in time. Surprisingly, only two MIT students showed up, leaving Claremont with a comfortable audience of three people to work with: me, a girl named Jennifer that can draw Manga like a pro, and another dude called Chris.

Claremont wasn’t planning to talk about his work or theorize about world building or visual storytelling. Instead, he wanted us to spend the following couple of hours with him and his partner Beth Fleisher brainstorming a superhero plot from scratch. We were lucky to have been such a small group. It made it very easy for us to interact and exchange impressions and ideas.

Beth played the roles of editor and moderator, filling the blackboards with notes from our discussion that eventually became an outline for a 5 issue miniseries.

Right before the end of the class, Beth wrote our names in the blackboard next to the title of the story, added a copyright sign, and took a picture of the whole thing. Over the course of the class, Claremont and Beth made a few interesting remarks about copyright and creator-owned work, and I remember having a really good question I wanted to ask him about all that, but I never found the right time to speak it out, and overtime it diluted in my head under a pile of considerations about super celebrities, indian deities, natural disasters and post apocalyptic global politics.

Graffiti Pizarronero Number 1, Instance 2 by yours truly.

Blackboards and chalks are everywhere around me. From now on I will use them to post short messages about random things as a low-tech alternative to the web. Please don’t erase.