blacklog

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

For my thesis I modified e15 and created a studio web application to log and share my creative process while writing ogfx scripts. To save time, I embedded the studio application within PictureXS. I separated the studio from PictureXS by making a studio controller and adding some functionality to the picture model, like the ability to publish code and snapshots from e15 together at the same time. People visiting the studio website could send messages to the custom e15 I was running, and I could respond to them without leaving the programming environment in e15. It is not very hard to make an application take a capture from the pixels in one of it’s views and post it to a web service, so the interesting stuff to notice is independent from the platforms used, and what really matters is to observe how the creative process changes when it is performed in a digitally mediated public space.

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:

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.

I like how John describes it: “A thesis is a letter you write to yourself for ten years from now.”

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.