blacklog

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.

Form follows function in this year’s National Design Triennial exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum. The densely populated show features a collection of design efforts that range from solar powered energy towers taller than more than two Empire State buildings, the iPhone, a new generation of eco-friendly coffins, Twitter and Etsy, to modular prosthetic limbs and fool-proof condoms. It’s impossible not to feel the futuristic pull while walking through the galleries of the Museum.

After graduating from the Media Lab in 2008, I worked for a year with Jhonatan Rotberg in the Next Billion Network that is featured in the Health section of the show. Along with some time full of wonderful experiences, working with Jhonatan got me inside the opening event of the National Design Triennial as a featured exhibitor last Thursday.

I believe the exhibition itself is the most eloquent answer to the question posed by its own title.

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.