Along with many other icons in the tiny icon factory, this image reminds me of the Rorschach inkblot test, created by the Swiss Freudian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Hermann Rorschach in 1921. The image might not really represent anything other than itself, but we still manage to see other things in it.

When I looked at this icon for the first time, I also had access to the name it was given: sperm. With the help of this name, I can immediately see the cute little spermatozoon curling upwards like a seahorse, but if I stare long enough I wonder whether I see nothing at all. Do I actually believe that the 1×2 pixel rectangle hanging from the top right corner of its head is actually an eye?

Yes I do.

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).

I didn’t retain my dreams from last night. They must have been incredibly pleasant because I couldn’t get myself to wake up until it was almost late. I love to sleep and I love my dreams, even the disturbing ones that sometimes are called nightmares. They remind me of serialized comics: fantastic and incomplete.

One question that comes to my mind about all this is: When graphs are pretty, does it matter what they mean?

The blue stripe represents from 1 am to 9 am every day, eight nice normal hours of sleep. The chaotic oscillation rendered in black represents reality. I guess this black area is approximately equal to the area outlined by the blue stripe, which must mean I’m not doing so bad. Or am I?

When I look at measured data I have a fascination for the singular occurences rather than the trends. The things that only happen once, like that day I woke up really late or that day I went to bed really early. I can’t claim to remember what was going on back then -after all, I can only manage to retain the last 10 minutes in my head these days- but I’m certain those must have been real highlights of my MIT grad life.

• http://www.vimeo.com/ogfx
• http://www.vimeo.com/e15

It helps a lot to understand what these things are about when you look at them in motion.

Once upon a time there was a place called the PLW where many wonderful things had their home, like a large HP printer called MAEDA-BIG-WRATH.

Adhered to the principle of temperamental programming, MAEDA-BIG-WRATH did not work like she was supposed to. She often required users to perform complicated rituals, mostly to summon the goodwill of the ethernet faeries.

MAEDA-BIG-WRATH lived in a big closet where she remained mostly ignored, except for the ocassional times when a poster was needed to promote something. Always printing information, hardly printing things of beauty. She loved it when she didn’t had to print any date, name, diagram or description.

When I met MAEDA-BIG-WRATH I didn’t notice her loneliness at first. Then it took some time for her to follow my call when I finally approached her. If I had known we were meant for each other I would have made her heads dance across the length of the glossy paper rolls every week, turning their mechanical four color motion motion into an endless stream of high heels, flowers, buildings, cocktails, robots, trucks, guns and bikinis. But now I am gone, and life will never be what it was when I could talk to MAEDA-BIG-WRATH in the privacy of that closet.

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

Places like the MIT Media Lab tend to push towards figuring out new ways to make technology mediate between humans and their needs. There are many cases where this mediation might lead to an improvement of human life, but in many others the result is simply alienating. Writing instructions that make pictures instead of making pictures with my own hands is an interesting separation. Sharing the way these instructions change as I search for a different picture might illuminate about some aspects of computational art, but It could also be just another way to produce data where patterns could be found, just as it seems everybody everywhere is doing these days. We live, after all, in a statistical world.

The studio application is called MyStudio. I’ve turned PictureXS and MyStudio static while I find a place to host them outside of the Media Lab, so nothing can be posted in them for now. I will turn the dynamic features on again when I figure out how to pay for the 30+ gigabytes of disk space I need to store all the pictures in PictureXS if I host it on my own.

This image shows the first 110 pictures I published in MyStudio:

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.