Like lost humans in the planet of the apes, Kyle and I were the only ones left to witness the end of the PLW.

I’ve just deployed a simple web application called tinyDoodle. It is a javascript based public canvas where people can draw at the same time from any computer in the same place. When I made it i was thinking on opening a space for people to chat with drawings, or a place when somebody else could come up from nowhere and screw up your drawing. Every stroke made in the canvas is stored as a different object in a database, along with enough information to let me playback any portion of the drawing process at a given time. This idea is half inspired by John’s own oneline, and explores how much easier and interactive can a similar project be if made with current technologies. As with other interactive drawing scripts I have made, tinyDoodle is based on the html canvas tag, and for this reason it is only supported by firefox and safari. Sorry about that.

I also took some time to research over the web and look for other drawing systems that use the natural resuorces on the web to engage users in drawing based social interactions. I was surprised to find a ton, some of them very similar in spirit and implementation to the tinyDoodle canvas and other ones I have been involved with. The following are the ones I chose to describe and display:

Oneline (1997-1999):
By Maeda. A pioneering Java based system, this one is sadly not online anymore, but it is the first one of this kind I’ve known of. John’s website provides detailed information on how it used to work. The illustration shows a collection of drawings displayed over the same surface.

Drawball:
This one is very fun. Drawball is a collective anonymous canvas implemented with flash. It has an interesting interface that zooms in and out the surface of the drawing, and keeps track of the portion you’re looking at by identifying it’s location with a URL. It also features an ink counter that keeps track of the ink you’ve used, and gives you ink if you keep the drawball page open in your browser. It also updates itself continually, so you can see others drawing in your spot while you draw, just like in tinyDoodle. The following illustration shows a sequence where Takashi and I were drawing our corresponding graffiti tags at the same time.

BennetonPlay Flipbook:
The online collaboration model is a total trend these days, and several corporations have started their social network based sites under creative activities like drawing. Benneton’s Flipbook is a very successful example that’s based on providing a tool for making animations, user accounts, and a rating system that lets the most popular animations emerge from the collective pool of little animations. Benneton claims they have 89,761 in there, and some of them are pretty good. Benetton also has a doodle community site, which features drawing canvases where you can chat with your friends using drawings, just like in, um, tinyDoodle. As most other social network applications supported by corporations, both of Benneton’s systems are user centric, and request visitors to create an account before they can use them.

Openstudio:
By the PLW. In Openstudio, the drawing tool and the social network are put together with a simple open economy. Unlike different social networks where you get to choose who are your friends, Openstudio keeps track of your relations with others by looking at the history of your transactions, connecting you to the people you’ve had bought from, sold to, or those that chose to show your art in their own galleries.

Sheepmarket:
This one is funny, because it turns out to be related with openstudio and with an entry I wrote in this journal some time ago about the shepherd, in which it seems I was completely clueless about where the shepherd comes from. I don’t understand exactly how it works, but I think it is hooked up to amazon.com so anyone could draw sheep and get payed for it. The collection of sheep is displayed online where you can buy prints. Of sheep.

Tiny Icon Factory:
The tiny Icon Factory is an anonymous online repository for tiny icons. 168047 so far. By Brent Fitzgerald and yours truly.

ZeWall:
Zewall emulates graffiti. It gives you pictures of walls of metro trains to paint on. It is kinda contradictory that you have to give away your email address before you can paint, becuase it takes away the whole point of graffiti and anonymous vandalism.

Modster:
Created by Javascript mastermind and browser commander Takashi, Modster is a html canvas (safari and firefox only) user based exquisite corpse web application. You start by drawing the top of the drawing and invite someone else (from within the system) to do the next part. The point of exquisite corpses is that the people in turn can’t see what people made before them, leading to a fresh result of surreal, fresh, and dislocated images.

… and tinyDoodle:
After all this, tinyDoodle doesn’t seem like much of a contribution to the world of online social drawings, except it joins Modster and Rafael Robayna’s painter example as an effort to find more natural ways to embed creative applications into the browser space, using drawing as an example to explore new ways to deal with digital interpretations of time, and how it can affect the interaction with process and data. Time and user actions make parts of the drawing disappear into the database limbo as each stroke grows older, illustrating a path to find meaningful relations between the ever changing information multiverse, and the ways we choose to represent it.

In the end, all of these tools are all nothing more than social toys and explorations. Even though I consider play as one of the most important human activities, I’d like to see the act of drawing incorporated to interactive technologies as a common place in daily life, just as typing and clicking are today.

Cannibal Boy was created as the mascot for the PLW Cannibals. The PLW Cannibals are Kate, Kyle, guest cannibal Meg from the real world, and me. We teamed up to participate in a 24 hour build-a-prototype competition called prototype-a-thon that takes place every year during january in the Media Lab. The theme this time was about media and food. After a long night of think, design and code, we came up with eyeTaste, a computer vision augmented set of glasses that keeps track of what you eat, tries to control your habits by sending messages to an embedded display on the surface of the glasses, and loads data to a log of what you eat in a social networking web application, where you can examine your stats and correlate them with those of your friends. It’s Just another example of intrusive technology. During the competition, we were only beat by Brent’s team with their foodstckr project, and Takashi’s and Amber’s team with WeCook. Overall, PLW dominated the prototype-a-thon.

The website:

Callibrating the vision system:

Snapshot of Kate using the prototype glasses on an apple during the competiton:

I love the posters and the stickers and the graffitis, and I specially love the black and white. I usually scan the streets looking for the surprising, rebellious kinematic images, and I don’t really care much if some of them actually are dummies of profitable merchandising or disguised alternative advertisement. Even after all this years, I still smile when I find a new manifestation of the OBEY propaganda campaign. I wonder if the internet could allow some of that, if there was a way of sneaking artwork in the space between transitions or somewhere else. If there was a way to scratch on advertisement banners or draw a mustache on the pictures of the celebrities. If there could be a layer of persistent user expression on top of everything else. I guess community generated websites can be understood to play that role a bit. They allow for free space of expression that can eventually lead to surprising mutations of street art. For example, the last time I saw the OBEY trademark was not on a street corner, it was not on a mailbox and it was not on a street sign. In fact, it could never be found anywhere in the street world at all. It was created within the web by some anonymous contributor to the Tiny Icon Factory that miraculously managed to translate the curvy shapes of Andre the Giant’s graphic portrait into a 13 by 13 square black and white little grid. I’m sure it must be hard to find such a virtuoso creator of icons. As Brent already pointed it out, there is a potential for making 2^169 different Tiny Icons, and we humans are only around 7 billion, leaving each one of us with as much as 1.0690e+41 possible icons to create. Finding the right combination of black and white squares that looks like Andre the Giant is an impressive achievement that would have never happened if it was not because of an interesting chain of events that started last thursday and fueled the Tiny Icon Factory with unprecedented mouse clicking human power. Brent told John about our Tiny toy project, John blogged it, a few people bookmarked it in del.icio.us, some other people digged it, and by the next morning the Tiny Icon Factory was producing more than 200 ipr (Icons Per Hour) by the creative few out of around 10000 visitors. 6999 Tiny Icons are sitting in the PLW database right now, although the Icon birth rate has already slowed down to a couple of tens per hour. All kinds of stuff, some of them silly, some of them dull, some of them clever, some of them pretty, some of them obscene, some of them brilliant, and all of them equally Tiny. One particular Icon called my attention out of the multitude, a tiny tribute to a giant man.

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0
0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1
0 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0
0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0
0 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0
0 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1
0 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1
0 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 1
0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1
0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0
0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

If you stare at it long enough, you will get a headache, and you will almost see the drawing:

Two weeks ago I was told to give my first public talk in the Media Lab. The situation was far from usual. Not only would it be the first time for me to face an audience in english, my mission was to do it by delivering a report after another talk I just listened to, with 24 hours to get my presentation ready, and around three minutes to get done with it, if possible using nothing more than the projection of a single slide, all for the sake of simplicity. Interesting. And surprisingly unstressful. I was quite nervous, of course, but less than I would have expected. I was offered a rich collection of characters as my audience: Media Lab faculty, media Lab sponsors, other students, and guest speakers. Talks, mini-talks, tiny-talks and super-talks, all organized in a way that everyone there would get the spotlight at least once. Your 15 minutes of fame, would Warhol say, or maybe just three? Anyway, it will be hard to understand what this is about until I explained a little, but here is my slide:

I was lucky. I got to talk about a romantic project I love called olpc (one laptop per child) led by famous founder and former Media lab director pop icon Nicholas Negroponte. The olpc aims to help deliver better education opportunity to the undeveloped world, and if you think a little deeper, it could be a strategy to establish OpenSource Linux as the standard digital platform of the future. The olpc project was born in the Media Lab and has now a life of its own. Chris Blizzard from RedHat delivered a very straightforward message about it to the Simplicity people. Even though he is the ultimate hacker and one of the leading forces developing sugar (the olpc core), he didn’t showoff on tech stuff or even give us a hint of how the laptop’s user interface is gonna look like. He kept himself true to the spirit of the project and described it as a goal: to deliver knowledge and encourage learning, expression, collaboration and sharing. On the real world side of things, I still don’t understand how the laptops are going to be delivered in a functional way to the children they are meant for, specially when (mostly corrupt) governments are heavily involved in the distribution process, but I really hope for the olpc project to work.

configure: error: Package requirements (gdkmm-2.4 glibmm-2.4 gtkmm-2.4 gtk+-2.0 >= 2.4.0 libxml-2.0 >= 2.6.11 libxslt >= 1.0.15 sigc++-2.0 >= 2.0.12 gthread-2.0 >= 2.0) were not met.
Consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if you installed software in a non-standard prefix.

Oh-oh, a handfull of obscure libraries still seemed to be missing! It was already three hours after I began pretending to build the InkScape source and I couldn’t even make it to the make command… pathetic! Another beautiful afternoon disappeared behind the window as I decided to quit on trying to build InkScape because the truth is I am in no position to understand the source code anyway.

I wanted to explore the brains and guts of InkScape in search for a better understanding of the SVG file format and the design of a simple Vector Graphics Drawing Application, like the one we are using in OpenStudio. This afternoon’s experience of mine is just another example of how much of a super complex and extremely cryptic backend can be cloaked away from the user by a seemingly simple frontend. When it comes to drawing into the machine, I want the user’s experience to resemble the conventional drawing experience as much as possible, even though the means and results of the drawing action will hopefully be different from what can be done when using a piece of paper and a brush or pencil. As long as the relation between perception and the material expression of a human gesture on a surface is well established, the experience of drawing will be delivered to the user. Complex backend implementation is unavoidable and will always be hidden from the user by a simpler frontend. The user shouldn’t have to be expert. The question is whether the constraints established by the frontend design will deliver or not a rich experience to the user in terms of function and interaction.

If you’re not the ultimate nerd and you actually read my text and visited some of the links in it, and if you are curious about computers, internet, and information-media technologies in general, you will probably feel like you’re missing on a lot. And you are, just like me. I can talk all I want about what the ultimate super simple vector drawing application should feel like, but when it comes to creating something as simple as that, I am lost and powerless. I have been using digital media tools for more than 12 years and I want to find out where they come from. Creative Techno Culture is not half as global as the products it delivers, most of the times it’s not global even in the same city.