blacklog

This is update from a previous note. A few months ago I modeled a few cartoon characters using an experimental modeling application developed by Alec Rivers at CSAIL. Working with it is actually a hybrid process between drawing and modeling. After drawing a few views of a cartoon character from a few basic two dimensional shapes—front, side and top for example—the software tries its best generate all other views required to look at the character from any p.o.v. in three dimensions. An iterative process lets you refine the views that don’t look right, rearranging and deforming the original shapes, until you build a two dimensional character that can be looked in three dimensions from any angle. Hence the name of the project: 2.5D. I believe using this software can be significantly less confusing than my explanation. Alec and his collaborators are definitely more clear in the paper that was featured in Siggraph this Summer. If you visit Alec’s project webpage you can actually download the software and play with the models I made—or make your own—provided that you can run Windows 7 or Vista in your machine.

The character featured in the picture combines features from Disney’s Stitch and the little green aliens from the Toy Story series.

I am not sure if a version of this technique will ever become an industry standard. It all depends on how much smarter computers will become in the future, but it’s a good reminder that the creation of new digital tools is an open door to new forms of expression, even within the constraints of traditional forms like cartoon animation.

I just finished this poster illustration for Lucky Gallery’s closing event in Red Hook next weekend. I am sad the gallery is closing. I remember mentioning it was there to stay when I talked about it in this video, but I guess I was wrong.

Form follows function in this year’s National Design Triennial exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum. The densely populated show features a collection of design efforts that range from solar powered energy towers taller than more than two Empire State buildings, the iPhone, a new generation of eco-friendly coffins, Twitter and Etsy, to modular prosthetic limbs and fool-proof condoms. It’s impossible not to feel the futuristic pull while walking through the galleries of the Museum.

After graduating from the Media Lab in 2008, I worked for a year with Jhonatan Rotberg in the Next Billion Network that is featured in the Health section of the show. Along with some time full of wonderful experiences, working with Jhonatan got me inside the opening event of the National Design Triennial as a featured exhibitor last Thursday.

I believe the exhibition itself is the most eloquent answer to the question posed by its own title.

Julián Herbert and my cousin Mabel Garza from Saltillo recently invited me to participate in a collaboration experiment where artists would exchange instructions to produce a series of pieces, all of them measuring 8×10 centimeters.

These are the instructions I received from Orvar in Berlin:

1. No usar colores.
2. Dibújate en grafito con tu playera de Batman recordando cuando querías ser escritor. Well here is a colored version anyway.

I am still puzzled about how he figured out I once wanted to be a writer. Perhaps my cousin tipped him off.

And these are the instructions I sent to Adalberto Montes in Saltillo:

1. Materiales: Puedes usar los materiales que quieras siempre y cuando no haya color ni escalas de grises. Usarás sólamente lineas y plastas.
2. Proceso de simplificación del rostro o cabeza: Una cara se compone principalmente de un contenedor — o cara — de forma variable, en que se colocan los distintos elementos que distinguen un rostro del otro. Ojos, boca, orejas, nariz, etc. Inventar un sistema simplificado que permita dibujar rostros chiquititos conservando la mayor expresividad posible.
3. Diagramación: En la hoja de 8×10 cm caben ochenta cuadritos. Ochenta años. Dibujar una cara — muy simplificada — en cada cuadrito, siguiendo la progresión de la vida. La primera cara será un bebé recién nacido, y la última sea una calavera. Es importante que dibujes en chiquitito, a tamaño real.

I am very amused with the results, and can’t wait to see what all the other people did.

I think I created this post just to avoid letting a whole month go without updating this journal. Some subconscious sense of duty must have been triggered in the back of my mind a few hours before the month was over, and it was easy to find a topic when I discovered PictureXS just reached it’s picture number 20102. Something worth mentioning, I guess. Numerologists must acknowledge the significance of this number. Me, I’m just happy I can finally spell “acknowledge” without thinking about it.

I might close the site soon, and make it static. It has been fun, but I feel PictureXS has grown to be kind of dated, and there are a number of issues in relation to it that I would approach differently today. At the same time, I feel more inclined to start a new site rather than update it or fix it.

These are a few words that lead to some great picture collections: book, red, blue, pink, cat, snow, robot, face.

This fall I worked on a top secret CSAIL project, modeling toon characters with an experimental system that I can’t talk about until it goes public. This job has reminded me how much I love cartoons in general, and how I should be doing more of those, and less of other things.

Cartoons sit halfway between realism and typography, still kind of faithful to some aspects of realism, but conceding a lot to symbolic representation. It’s not that cartoons can’t represent things faithfully, cartoons choose not to do so in order to communicate things better.

Cartoon shapes and environments can’t be fully defined in terms of geometric systems and mathematical modeling, forcing the intervention of the human component that is the essence of many deep cognitive questions. Cartoons are Gestalt at its best, and they are also fun as hell.

Honey I shrunk the Red Hook on Radar