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.

Two years ago John took us to Home Depot. We bought supplies to create the PLWall, and had lunch at the Good Time Emporium: hot-dogs, fluorescent lemonades and sweet-n-sour gummy worms.

Tonight we added a farewell visit to the Good Time Emporium in the PLW countdown to-do list.

My PLW days are coming to an end.

I visited São Paulo two weeks ago with Muntadas and MIT VAP class 4367. The purpose of the trip was to use the city of São Paulo as a case study to review contemporary notions of public space and the role of public art with a group of artists, urbanists and anthropologists living in São Paulo.

It has been of extreme emotional importance for me to have a taste of Latin America before entering the last few weeks of thesis crunching, experiencing life in a city that feels a lot like Mexico City, my home.

The picture shows a view of São Paulo from the top terrace of the edificio Italia. The Copan buliding by Oscar Niemeyer, the largest apartment building in the world, is partially featured in the right side of the picture. Um, the other right side I mean.

Somebody recently made the icon number 200000 in the Tiny Icon Factory. It’s the letter . Very close to it is icon number 199996. It is a skull. The following are icons number 199996 and 500:

On other things, this is icon number 131313, a very realistic depiction of pong.

Some of them love me, some of them hate me.

My friend Andres from CMS sent me a map to help him move a desk to his new place and introduced me to an interesting mapping service called quikmaps that lets you doodle on top of a Google Map.

It reminds me of the work of my friend Andrea Di Castro, my computer hero Ken Perlin, and my screenprint mentor Jan Hendrix. Andrea made a GPS based system to record the drawings he has been making with airplanes over the surface of the world, like a trefoil shape the size of Dublin and stuff like that. Ken Perlin has an applet in his collection of online curiosities that lets you zoom as much as you want within a digital drawing and render entire landscapes inside the space between the edges of a line. Hendrix likes to look at a leave as if it was the size of a continent, and makes a map of it accordingly.

Our world feels smaller than the world of our ancestors partially because we can imagine where every single corner on Earth is just by finding it’s position in the globe. How does it feel when we are able to fly over 3 dimensional representations of it, and embed all kinds of content in this representations with any level of precision? I just wonder why there is no social component to the quikmaps application; I can easily see people sharing landmarks, trails, and routes.

Just to get a feel of how this application works I made two map drawings today. It was incredibly easy to manage my maps and embed them in this page, although drawing became a very slow after a few strokes; I’m sure the developers of quikmaps didn’t think somebody would abuse their object model as I did. (Just as a sidenote, Safari 3 doesn’t seem to like quikmaps, it dramatically displaced my drawings by thousands of miles) (As another sidenote, it seems Safari 3 likes quikmaps now).

This is an attack to Mexico City:

And this is a progression of shrinking giants that points to where I used to live in Mexico City, from the size of America to the size of one block.

You think things are the way you think they are.