blacklog

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.

In May 2nd, Nick Montfort is organizing a coding event called Processing Time as part of the Boston Cyberarts Festival 2009. The idea is for people to gather in the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies and join a competition to write programs that display clocks onscreen using Processing. The event is open for participants and spectators alike. Nick commissioned me to make a poster for the event, which I mysteriously envisioned in a nifty Watchmenesque style.

No code was written to design this poster.

I have recently discovered the MIT Science Fiction Society Library in the 4th floor of the MIT Student Center. I feel like an idiot for not having discovered it before, but giving it a second thought, it was probably better that way. I am not sure if I could have afforded to spend my days daydreaming about telepathic detective gymnosperm plants, steampunk robots that will slaughter you if you don’t speak German, or eighty year long space round trips protecting cargos of a few thousand genetically modified frozen teenagers. Today I am as busy as I used to be when I was a student here, but I am not feeling as challenged, and I can comfortably dedicate some space in my memory and imagination to regularly escape into the fantastic stories collected between the shelves of the MIT-SFS library.

Conveniently enough, I have decided to reactivate the picture collecting mechanism in PictureXS, and I will use it in combination with my simple [and overly buggy] Video2Web picture capturing program to keep a visual archive of all the books I will check out [and hopefully read] from the MIT-SFS library. I wonder if I should scan all the covers, they are so remarkably different from anything you see these days in bookstores, and a definite visual treat.

Two weeks ago at MIT, Henry Jenkins performed his traditional Annual Salute to Dr. Seuss for the last time before he leaves to join USC later this year. Perhaps because this was his last performance he read, commented and showed cartoons for a longer time than usual, adding up to more than 120 minutes of Dr. Seuss’ tales and history.

Henry described Dr. Seuss as a man with a political vision that chose to turn his voice in the direction of children, sending them a message of tolerance and diversity through his fantastic fables. Dr. Seuss became a master of propaganda before becoming interested in writing and illustrating books for children, and Henry’s reflections left me thinking about all the tricky relationships hidden between education and indoctrination.

It took me two weeks to access the pictures I took that day for a number of reasons directly related with using film instead of a digital camera. First, I needed to accumulate enough motivation to take the exposed film to the lab in South Station. Then the lab happened to be running an equipment maintenance procedure that usually takes an unknown number of days bigger than three. Time went by rather quickly, MIT style, and I had to start a new process to find more motivation, this time to go back to the lab and pick up the photos.

I still remember the good old digital days when I could have a picture online a few seconds after I took it, but I don’t miss them. Film and the photo lab are a positive influence in my behavior, moderating my attention and adjusting my vision.

Next thing I know, two Mondays have gone by, IAP is over, and I already feel halfway through a semester that I was supposed to keep myself safely distant from.

Early this year I was offered the opportunity to teach animation over IAP by the MIT Student Art Association. IAP, or Independent Activities Period, is a special four week term at MIT that runs from the first week of January until the end of the month. The class would consist of three weekly sessions of three hours each, and I was required to start teaching right away.

Originally, I was asked to teach a software based 3D computer animation class, but I preferred to forget about computer software and approach animation from a more general perspective. I think learning animation is more exciting -and useful- than learning how to use a computer program. The most sophisticated animation software in history doesn’t help to become a good animator, but a basic set of animation skills can easily be applied across a broad number of mediums.

My first challenge was to find a way to remain entertaining for 3 whole hours. I summoned my favorite moments from Frank Espinosa’s teaching—here at MIT—and from when I studied animation at VFS, including a copy of the classic Illusion of Life by Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas.

Having talked about some basics and history of animation over the first session, I needed to outline some kind of program that could be run as a workshop over the remaining couple of sessions. My purpose was to help the students produce simple animations from scratch to completion over a 3 hour interval, and use the results to start a discussion on storytelling, timing, and animation.

After being introduced to Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind Protocol, where he describes a program for people to produce amateur movies over an amount of time similar to what I had in mind, I adapted his approach to design a number of animation recipes, hoping to help the students focus on a range simple enough to conceive a situation and animate it in a short amount of time.

In the end, Computers and digital cameras played an important role in facilitating a quick way to test and screen the animations, but the use of editing or animation software was avoided. I wanted motion to be controlled by adding and removing frames by hand, so that none of the thinking during the animation process could be delegated to the computer.

The following pictures are frames from a Stop-Motion animation created last Sunday by Vvva and Lezno PlaK using a tatami mat, a broomstick, a hand cut banana peel, a hand crafted paper robot, and a Motorola Razr cellphone camera to capture each frame. The recipe they followed required them to create a biped character, and think about a situation where the character would walk until an external force stopped it.

Last night I was invited by my friend Andi (dj vVvA) to join the Global Frequency program at the MIT campus radio station, wmbr 88.1 fm. Together with dj Baby, Dj M Singe, MC Verb, and dj LoneWolf, we played a carefully curated selection of Cumbia Mexicana, including Cumbia Swing, Cumbia Rock, Cumbia Andina Mexicana and Cumbia Sonidera. The following are some of the bands and artists we featured in the program: Rigo Tovar y la Costa Azul, Sonora Margarita, Los Askis, Los Yes Yes, Grupo Soñador, Los Ángeles Azules, Rayito Colombiano, Grupo Kual and Celso Piña. When it comes to Cumbias, I could have made the program last a whole week, non stop.

A link to the audio stream of the whole session is available directly from wmbr. The first three minutes feature some unrelated stuff – like Nirvana and such – I don’t know why. The next 6 minutes feature two Colombian Cumbia classics – Manuelito Barrios (by Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto) and Caiman y Gallinazo (by Lucho Bermudez y su orquesta) – courtesy of dj vVvA, an introductory tribute to the Colombian genre that originated everything.

If you wanna hear my sweet and heavenly voice accompanying my favorite selection of Cumbias right away, I recommend that you skip those nine minutes.

Right after I graduated in June, my friend Jhonatan -the Telmex visiting scientist in the MIT Media Lab-, invited me to work on an idea that I found interesting for a number of reasons. He wanted to know if it made sense to combine a MIT mobile technology class based on real world projects with a group of student reporters from a film college to help the MIT students report and communicate their progress, as they develop solutions to the problems they face. “I think it makes sense”, I said, and we began talking about how to set up such a thing, later to be called “Reality Courseware” by Jhonatan himself. I spent the Summer putting together an internship program scheduled for deployment at MIT during the Fall.

On the one hand, I saw an opportunity to experiment with documentary video, education, vernacular perception of technology, MIT as a narrative, social feedback systems and distribution of cultural content from a very flexible perspective. On the other hand -and most importantly- I saw the potential to bring together a team of documentary filmmakers and a group of MIT students in a situation that could reveal unexpected truth to everyone involved. Three months after my initial meeting with Jhonatan, the class taught by him and his collaborators has an additional group of fourteen film and television students from Emerson College that are helping the MIT students communicate their ideas, share their dreams, broadcast their work ahd expand their horizons.

After I finished setting up the internship over the Summer, I am now playing the roles of Producer and Creative Advisor to help put together and distribute this content. What will be the result? Only time will tell. For now, I am finding the process of leading the film students and learning from them incredibly rewarding.

We decided to structure the class website as a journal. The instructors and advisors will update it all the time news and related material: 6.976 / MAS.965 / SP.716 – nextlab I: Designing Mobile Technologies for the Next Billion Users. In addition to this website, we will launch sites for each project, and the content generated by the film students will be regularly posted there, along with other relevant materials.

You can access each Project journal by following the links in this page.

Here are a few frames I grabbed from videos I’ve been shooting of the film students at work (you can see pictures of all of them in action in the nextlab flickr group).