We are excited to announce the 2008 Spring term Monday Nights@VAP entitled "Zones of Emergency" which bring together practitioners from a wide range of backgrounds and fields to examine the scale and complexity of catastrophe and disaster scenarios through lectures and panel discussions. Lectures and panel discussions will range from the philosophical and cultural understandings of the emergency to practical "on the ground" operating organizations to current use of networked technology examining its own breakdown. This lecture series is co-organized by Ute Meta Bauer (Director of the MIT Visual Arts Program), Jae Rhim Lee, and Amber Frid-Jimenez.

In tonight’s lecture, artist Alfredo Jaar will present a selection of works that focus on his practice in zones of emergency like Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship, and in Rwanda in the aftermath of the genocide (1994 -2000). Kayvan Zainabadi, former president of Amnesty International at MIT, will speak about his experience at MIT working with Amnesty on crisis in Darfur.

The lecture is open to the public, so if you’re in the Boston area feel free to drop by! If not, you can catch tonight’s lecture (and future lectures) on our video blog at http://www.zonesofemergency.net/ .

Last night I presented some highlights from Openstudio at Pecha Kucha Boston #3 . I had never been to a Pecha Kucha Night before, but really enjoyed the fast-paced format. Each speaker showed 20 slides at 20 seconds per slide, sharing their art/design work and/or philosophy. If you’re curious, here’s a PDF of my slides , and the organizers will be posting more pictures from the event in the Pecha Kucha Boston Flickr group .

Putting together the presentation for the slideshow made me a little nostalgic about being in the Openstudio community. It was fun to revisit the project and look at some of the creative things people did with it.

I’ve spent some time lately thinking about an idea that came out of a conversation with my adviser, John , at the beginning of last semester, but I had forgotten about until recently. We talked about what it meant to have a visualization that was "alive" in some way. I brought this up with Seth today and we spent some time trying to come up with some examples and define what "alive" means in a visualization context. We agreed to describe this type of a visualization as a "visual ecology" and he has a nice post on his blog summarizing some of our ideas. Hope I’ll have more to say about this soon.

My fabrication class built a 3D scanner and printer last week (it was our assignment)! I worked on the 3D printer, which we called Fabaroni, because it produces 3D pasta shapes. The Fabaroni website has all the details about how it works, so if you’re interested please have a look!

I wrote a script that uses text to draw a 2D image from a file. As I was developing and testing the script, I used an image of some orchids and repeated the same text for every pixel in the image:

Using the same text for every "pixel" created the uniform effect in the above image, but using a different string for every pixel made the texture a little more varied. To try this out, I used some strings generated from my del.icio.us bookmarks, although it wasn’t quite enough data to fill out the whole image:

And a view from inside the 3D image, where there’s lots of illegible text:

I know, there’s not really a relationship between the orchid picture and my del.icio.us links. I’ll probably try out a few more sketches that relate the image and data a little better, but this’ll probably end up just being a little aesthetic exercise.

They don’t do too much other than transmit "hello world" over a serial connection. Today I’ll be writing a little code to get the larger board to blink an LED and respond to button presses, exciting I know. We’re using an ATTiny45 processor which has a different instruction set than the chip we used in the microcontroller lab I took last year, but hopefully it won’t be too different.

My construction kit had 4 parts, seen below:

I used the laser cutter to make a bunch of these parts out of corrugated cardboard. The pieces "press fit" together, meaning they can be assembled using the slots cut into the pieces, without any adhesive (if you’re interested in the science of how this works, there is a paper you can read). I wasn’t sure what I’d be able to build with my curvy shapes, but I was pretty happy with the results. Here are some pictures of things I built: