My dear ITP friend, Stefanie has left New York to work in Sweden. I’m sure she loves this exciting new chapter in her life but I can also imagine it being difficult. To cheer her up, I wanted to send her an interesting care package. I remember a while back I saw on the Makezine.com blog of a guy who made drawings using the postal service. I’m also inspired by Ray Johnson’s correspondence artwork and Tristan Perich’s drawing machine. So, I decided I wanted to make a drawing for Stefanie. A week later, she sent me a picture of the results.
Making this drawing machine reminded me of programming. each color pencil had a behavior that was dictated on it’s placement. A random variable of how the box was shaking created the random strokes. I’m pleasantly surprised with the final outcome. Originally I wanted to place another paper mask layer with a cut out so that when you remove the mask it would onlly show the markings within the cut out hole of the mask. I have a couple friends I want to send drawings to, so I will post the results.
I also made her a video of New York and Brooklyn. here is the video below.
September schedule is jammed with interesting projects, so it’s going to be a busy month. One of the projects I am working on was inspired by a conversation last winter. I was at a graduate student organization event with a few ITP classmates. I don’t remember how we got to this topic but Zeeshan and I were talking about a new way for programmer’s to interface with the computer. The typical stereotype of a programmer is the lack of physical movement since they spend much of their time behind the computer. This same stereotype is held true for video gamers, but Nintendo revolutionized the video gaming industry with the Wii controllers. At first Zeeshan and I were joking around with the idea of incorporating dance elements to programming syntax, but deep down I was intrigued with this concept. By pairing programming syntax with dance moves, programmers no longer need to be sitting in front of a keyboard to code. Late August, we met up again and I expressed my interested in actually attempting to make this happen. We are currently in the research/design phase and hopefully be ready for a beta version for next year’s Siggraph conference or at least that is the goal. Many thanks to Roy Vanegas for his support and motivation. More details to come.
So this is my second time visiting my friend Juan in New Jersey (West New York) and I can’t believe the amount of people in line for the port authority bus on a Sunday afternoon. If you come early enough you have a chance to sit in the surprisingly comfortable seats along with plenty leg room even for the tallest human. The commuters are also quite pleasant when I asked them which bus I should be taking (156 or 159 express).
For more than seven years of not losing any of my daily personal belongings, I finally lost my cell phone and I come to the realization that I am quite dependant to my mobile device. It wasn’t a flashy iphone or blackberry but a regular free phone I got for signing with AT&T. This will definitely be an inconvience, but I am not stressing too much. I backed up most, if not all my phone numbers online, so as soon as I get my new phone I will be able to call whoever I need to without sending the mass email of asking for friend’s numbers. The major inconvienence is that I don’t wear a watch, since my mobile phone was responsible for keeping track of the time, so I do find that annoying always asking people for the time. And since everyone has mobile phone, people are accustom of changing plans on the fly which is definitely unfair to someone without a phone, who made plans to meet at a location but finds out no one is there to meet them since everyone has already moved to another location. I don’t mind living without a phone for a week, but any longer and I would go nuts. I purchased a new iphone so I’ll be slave to my technological devices in no time. Until then, email me if you want to get a hold of me.
So I met up with some friends last night to show around a visitor from Turkey. We started in the Lower East Side for some food and drinks but eventually hiked back west to end the night. As we were in search of the next bar, we saw all these people with violins, banjos and guitars and decided to stop in. The waitress said it was a jam session. I was so impressed to see all these people jamming together for fun. I wish I could play the violin like that.
