The blasting sound of 8-bit sound waves is electrifying. Sounds crafted in retro waveform generators such as the one of the Comodore 64 and the Gameboy, can be quite beautiful, harmonic, noisy, and moving. The rhythms are fast, with a tempo usually higher than 180BPM. Melodies are simple and playful, made out with the rough…
Directly from the world of Caribbean delusion and after surviving the Guri-Guri Hurricane, the Marimonda pilot made it to Austin, TX, in time for the annual Danger Derby. Her vehicle, #35, a highly customized pinewood car featured a built-in anti-fire, water and gas attacks’ device, a turbo engine made out of pieces of an old…
Grafitti writing and street art have spread through the walls of Bogota and other Colombian cities during the last decade opening an important space of creative participation and expression for urban youth. Although political graffiti had been performed in public spaces since the 1960s around the country, the stylization of grafitti writing with all its…
Although the power of music to elicit emotions has been widely recognized, the capacity of music to produce laugher has been relatively unexplored. First of all, It is possible to create musical jokes? It is possible to address humor through music? It is possible to make people laugh with a piece of music?
Fragmentation and discontinuity are the major characteristics of not only Bogotanian contemporary literature, but also of the urban and cultural landscape of the city. As other highly populated and chaotically grown Latin-American metropolis, the capital of Colombia became in the 20th Century a heterogenous and multipolar place, a patchwork of different geographies. Such lack of…
A couple of weeks ago I was invited to contribute to the MediaCommons project by joining a survey on “How does gamification affect learning?” The idea of MediaCommons is to become a hub for scholarly conversation about born-digital scholarly processes for research, pedagogy, evaluation, publication, and community-building. The discussion about gamification and learning reveals some…
Walking the Broadway at Los Angeles downtown turns into an investigation about the ruins of the 20th century entertainment industry. Footprints of movie palaces still remain visible. Their structures have been reappropriated though. Immigrant communities have reclaimed most of these architectural spaces and have redesigned them, adapting them to their informal commerce practices. Former cinema,…