kate hollenbach

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.

Happy New Year!

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!

It’s been a busy couple of weeks with class projects, but I’ve been spending a fair amount of time on E15, too. Last week Tak helped me finish up some of the navigation code for E15, so now we can move through the 3D environment with six degrees of freedom — and I can focus on more visual work.

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.

This was all over tech news headlines today, but Google is finally supporting IMAP for Gmail. I’m excited about this for a couple of reasons — first, it means that I can finally back up all the e-mail I’ve sent over the last couple years or so since I started using Gmail. I love Gmail, and I can’t imagine going back to an email client with less support for viewing e-mail threads, but I’ve always been a little uncomfortable with all that personal data living only on Google’s servers. The other reason I’m excited about this is that it opens up some new possibilities for me to play with visualizing e-mail again. When I was working on Emdash I used my MIT e-mail account for testing, so I was missing over a year’s worth of sent messages. Now that I can access those messages easily with an IMAP interface, I have some data I can use to start working on visualizing two-way e-mail communication. And I can use E15 to do it. I’m psyched.

Made using the Modela in the Media Lab machine shop, and of course a soldering iron:

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.

Last week we put up a blog for E15 , and today I wrote my first post about some work I’ve been doing with images from Wikipedia . I was struggling to come up with some interesting paths to use for laying out images & text, when I found a good Wikipedia page with a list of different types of curves. The page didn’t have any images, though, so I wrote a script to find the related images and lay them out in E15. The results look nice so far, and I’ll be playing more with the same data this week.

One of the classes I’m taking this term is MAS.863, "How to Make (almost) Anything," where I’m learning how to use a lot of the fabrication machinery at the Media Lab. There’s a website for the class where all the students are keeping a record of their work (myself included), but I also want to write about my projects here. About every week or so we’re taught how to use a new tool, and then assigned to make something with it. A couple weeks ago the "tool" was the laser cutter and the "assignment" was a 3D Construction Kit.

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:

The PLW presented E15 at Flashfoward last Friday. E15 is an OpenGL based programming environment with a Python scripting interface; right now we’re using it to visualize futuristic web interfaces. Screenshots and video of the project can be found at the E15 website , which will be updated as the project develops. Check back for more updates soon!