blacklog

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).

And will you succeed?
Yes! You will, indeed!
(98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed.)
Dr. Seuss in Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

I graduated today from MIT. Martini and Buza made water-jet cut aluminum PLW thingies to wear on top of our hats, and my picture made it to the MIT-Tech 2008 commencement edition. Congratulations MIT class of 2008, this has been a fantastic journey.

The last two years I watched the MIT commencement ceremony from the safety of my computer on a live video feed. Today I was one of the more or less 2600 people that walked in formation across campus in preparation to receive their degrees. We were waiting in front of Killian Court when the voice in the microphone said something like “… and now, the guest of honor, class of 2008″. The band was playing a cheesy march. It felt good inside.

This journal is almost finished.

I grabbed two pictures from the MIT-tech website and gave them a little photoshop touch to enhance the romanticism. I already feel nostalgic.

On May 16th John gave a farewell lecture to the Media Lab before joining RISD. While reviewing our theses for the last time before submitting them this morning, Mud, Kyle and I spent a few nights preparing a series of promotional posters for John’s talk.

Some time ago, after realizing I don’t really care much about running, I decided to make a web logging application in the style of Takashi’s runlog about something I would care a lot about: sleeping (and dreaming). The following graph displays my daily hours of sleep since september to the present. I am not surprised with how chaotic everything appears; this has been the best way for me to deal with life at MIT.

Bottom is early and top is late. Colors are for separating nights into the following three categories: not enough sleep, sleep just right, and too much sleep.