One week ago I was back in Cambridge for the Media in Transition conference at MIT. Returning to the constellation of cities that compose the metropolitan area of Boston is always great. I enjoy a lot the kind of conversations, encounters, and trajectories I can have there. It is an excellent place for net-weaving, for discovering, asking questions, and learning. It triggers my curiosity. During this visit I spent a few hours walking the underground system of tunnels that connects the buildings of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I took many pictures as in a photo essay style. Or more exactly, as in a film style because I took hundreds of pictures. I will share some of them in this post. But before I do that, let me introduce the underground system of tunnels with a map. This system, reflects the interdisciplinary of this school, the interconnections of areas of knowledge. The underground architecture indeed reflects the freedom of linking that one can experiment there. I miss such power of connectivity, networking, and flow of information.
Continue reading Under the Infinite Corridor
dadada
dada fruits of the spirit
growing pains
random number generator
fact monster
running shoes
entering scientific notation in quest
Continue reading DaDa Poetry and Autocomplete Search Box
Typecasting is a hybrid media format for publishing content on the web, especially in blogs. To typecast means to post an image of a text that has been written using a typewriter machine. The image could be scanned or photographed and appears embedded in a webpage as the body of text of a blog entry. Hence, the typecast is a combination of website with digital text such as title and time stamp, and a digital image of an analogue typed page. The sort of remediation that occurs in the practice of typecasting is curious and surprising. A growing community of typewriter machine collectors are engaging themselves in this kind of format and an emerging “typosphere” seems to be emerging. The content of the format is diverse. For instance, some of the typecasts just refer to the qualities of the machines, such as this text that appeared at the Manual Entry blog on April 21, 2013 and that talked about an Adler special machine:
Continue reading Typecasting Format
This morning, Maria Jose told us an story that was quite cartoonish and has the potential of becoming an urban legend. She said that yesterday, after having lunch in the house of one of his professors in the Hyde Park neighborhood, she found a raccoon inside the engine of his car. She said that she wanted to see why the engine of her car was making noises and decided to open the engine compartment. When she opened she found a raccoon next to the engine, she looked at the its eyes and both got scared. The raccoon hided on the back of the engine. She tried to scare the animal using a long stick and also spilled water over the engine. However, she couldn’t make it leave the compartment of the car and she had to drive with the raccoon inside.
Continue reading A Raccoon Inside a Car Engine
The development and popularization of the Global Positioning System (GPS), satellite navigation, and digital mapping, are transforming the way in which we imagine, encounter, and experience the city. Before we used to navigate with the aid of physical landmarks, paper maps and face-to-face advise from other citizens. Nowadays we can navigate with the help of GPS data, real time computations, digital visualizations, and signals broadcasted by space vehicles that orbit planet earth. As a result of using GPS technology we are being able to geographically locate things, places, and people, with exact geodetic coordinates and universal atomic timing, scientific and military precision. We are rarely getting lost and our trajectories in space can easily be visualized in maps and recorded in digital logs. As we become familiar with finding places and directions with the help of phones, computers, and personal navigation devices that speak to us with automated voices and show us interactive maps in their screens, our practices of mobility change. How is our experience of urban mobility changing? What are the implications of this kind of navigation for surveillance and control? What are the consequences for freedom and play?
Continue reading Urban Labyrinths, Ariadne’s Threads, and GPS Data
Two weeks ago I did a presentation at the Digital Media and Learning Conference (DML 2013 : Democratic Futures) in the format of an Ignite Talk. This format is challenging. You have 5 minutes to tell your story, explain you idea, and ignite the audience. You have also 20 slides that change every 15 seconds, automatically. The format is inspired by the Pecha Kucha presentation style. Although it was first popular among designers and technologists, it is increasingly becoming accepted in academic and professional conferences. In my talk, From Theory to Practice: Designing and Implementing a Connected Learning Experience, I told the story of DGZiN, a digital design summer camp I helped to create and run in 2012. I enjoyed very much performing this kind of presentation. Although it was a little bit scary, it was also rewarding. Lots of adrenaline happens when you are running against the clock and the changing slides. The pay off is that you get the experience of being on stage and talking to a big audience, and also have the opportunity to inspire other people with compelling words and images. As Mimi Ito said, after doing an Ignite Talk you are leveled up. It feels good to have done that. In this entry I share some tips about how I prepared this kind of presentation.
Continue reading Performing an Ignite Talk at DML 2013
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