A partir de una fecha que ya quedó inscrita en la historia de Chile, el “estallido social” del 18 de octubre de 2019, comenzó un enorme movimiento social al que yo personalmente suelo referirme como “movimiento por la dignidad”, por ser ésta una palabra que se ha vuelto clave en la discusión pública. Desde entonces hemos tenido protestas masivas y violenta represión por parte del estado. Las razones de la protesta son muchas, pero decantan en el reconocimiento de que nos regula un sistema que favorece los intereses económicos de los grupos privilegiados por sobre los derechos, la seguridad social y el respeto al medio ambiente. Ya que el problema es sistémico, a partir de esto se instala la petición central de una nueva constitución, escrita en forma democrática, que reemplace a la escrita durante la dictadura de Pinochet. En pocos días será el plebiscito que decidirá el camino a la nueva constitución.
Desde los primeros días me involucré de distintas formas en el movimiento. Al principio fui a Plaza Ñuñoa a protestar, y después a la marcha en la más transversal ex Plaza Italia, hoy rebautizada como Plaza de la Dignidad por los manifestantes.
Después empecé a participar en una asamblea territorial que se reúne cerca de mi barrio. Hoy ya no sigo frecuentándome con ellos, pero el tiempo en que estuve involucrado me llevó a contribuir a la organización de diversas actividades más allá de las protestas, como charlas (en físico y en línea), campañas, y shows de música y teatro.
Tratando de darle uso a mis habilidades, improvisé logos y gráfica de difusión para proyecciones de películas, tocatas y otros tipos de evento; también gráfica informativa relativa a la pandemia del Covid-19, además de algo de desarrollo web y gestión de datos. En otras ocasiones me ví obligado a improvisar, como cuando actué como coordinador de un evento musical, que necesitó un considerable esfuerzo por parte de las cuatro organizaciones territoriales involucradas. Participaron tres actos musicales, incluídos los populares Santiago del Nuevo Extremo, que nos regalaron su presencia.
Fue un año que me trajo muchas oportunidades para aprender, tanto de las actividades en las que participé como de las muchas y diversas personas que tuve la suerte de conocer. Este mes se celebran el primer aniversario del “despertar de Chile” y un plebiscito que apunta a una nueva constitución, durante una primavera que devuelve al movimiento el calor que se llevó la pandemia. Los chilenos seguimos encontrando nuevas formas de luchar por nuestros derechos, y de participar en una ahora sí cada vez más digna democracia.
]]>A date that’s now been etched into Chilean history, the October 18, 2019 protests breakout marks the origin of what I personally refer to as the “dignity movement”, since dignity has become a keyword in the collective discourse. From that point on, massive protests and their corresponding violent suppresion by State agents have been daily occurrences. The reasons to protest are too many, but they all boil down to the realization that the overarching system of our society favors the economic interests of a small privileged group, while rights, social security and environment protection take the back seat. Given that the problem is deep-rooted and systemic, the central demand became the formulation of a new and democratic constitution, drafted to replace the one written during Pinochet’s dictatorship. In just a few days the referendum that decides the future for this constituent process will be held.
I have been involved in the movement from the early days in various ways. First I participated in the Ñuñoa Square protests, and later moved to the more central Italia Square—or Dignity Square as it is better known now by the protesters.
After that I started joining a territorial assembly that meets close to where I live. I have since largely parted ways with that group, however the time I was involved brought me to contribute to the organization of diverse activities beyond just protests, such as talks (both off and online), campaigns, and music and theater performances.
I tried contributing from my existing abilities. In this line, I whipped up logos, flyer designs for screenings, music and other kinds of events, and informative graphics to fight the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as doing some basic web design and data management. At other times, I was forced to improvise, such as when I acted as coordinator the day of that music event, which was actually a pretty big endeavor for the four territorial organizations involved. It featured three music acts, including the popular Santiago del Nuevo Extremo, who were gracious enough to offer their music for free.
The year brought for me many opportunities to learn, as much from the activities I partook in as from all the diverse people I was lucky enough to meet. This month marks both a year from the beginning of this movement and the celebration of the referendum for a new constitution, and with Spring thawing the spirits that an untimely pandemic had cooled off, the Chilean people are finding ever more ways to fight for their rights and participate in what can increasingly be called an actual “democracy”.
]]>It’s six months later and I finally did what I intended to do with the agj.cl front page. It’s the same barebones design, but programmed in Elm and with language switching. I’m happy with what I learned about Elm in the process, and I’ll definitely continue using the language in future projects. It’s a joy getting front-end stuff done in a functional way.
Oh, and it’s old news already, but the Valdivia Film Festival was really fun. My friend Kiyohara Yui from Tokyo U. of the Arts was there to show the film she made (Our house) as her graduation project in university. I also met another Japanese filmmaker, the super young Yamanaka Youko, who brought Amiko—a small but exhuberant made-with-friends indie film. I got acquainted with her actually because she and Yui knew eachother from other film festivals they ended up touring together, starting with the Japanese Pia. And as it turns out, in Valdivia they didn’t have an interpreter ready for their two Japanese guests, so I (on the two’s request) filled that role. It was tough but interesting.
]]>I kept the previous design (archived here,) it turns out, for a whole eight years. I modified it slightly over that time, changing the words, the links, and the colors. Its main conceit (the text getting increasingly obscured with time) never changed, and while cute, is not very helpful to the visitor. I decided to change it to be simpler and nicer. My website in general has always reflected my contrary attitude somewhat, but I guess the front page should just do its job of introducing who I am and link to some relevant places, to anyone nice enough to want to know. Yes, I am aware of how obvious the previous statement is.
The new page is a completely static HTML+CSS design optimized for mobile devices. My original plan was to give it a tiny bit of interactivity in the form of language selection, which I wanted to make my first Elm miniproject. But I ended up going to the Valdivia International Film Festival and had to hurry it up a bit, since I wanted something presentable in case anyone would take my card. (I might write about the festival later.)
Elm is a rather new language that compiles down into javascript, and which I’ve been learning recently. It’s been a pleasant and enlightening experience. I first considered learning the specific configuration of React plus whatever frameworks are needed to be able to develop for the web in a “fully” functional programming environment. But the overhead of learning all of that to, in the end, just having a sham of a functional environment, made me turn my attention to Elm, which was a language I’d been eyeing for some time. Basically, using just javascript, very little of any complexity can be made for the web, thus needing a bunch of libraries/frameworks of dubious compatibility and ease of use, laid on top of the shaky foundation that is the javascript standards. On the other hand, Elm has been made from the ground up to address the current landscape of the web, with a purely functional design. An easy tradeoff for me: I’d much rather learn a well-designed new functional language than be forced to hold my breath while navigating javascript’s murky waters.
]]>One of the cooler things I was involved in during my studies at Tokyo University of the Arts was the two-week virtual reality workshop in Seoul I was invited in, last February—the “VR Cubic Workshop.” Students from three universities corresponding to three countries (Korea National University of Arts, Communication University of China, and ours) studied the technology and created content for the HTC Vive using Unity. Teams were split according to university, and given the task of creating a VR space inspired by a historical figure representative of their country. In our case, we chose Sen no Rikyu, a master of the tea ceremony that cemented most of its traditions during the 16th century. We based our space on one of his designs, the Taian, a two-tatami-small tea room that embodies the rustic simplicity of wabi-cha. While the video above shows a demonstration of our project, The tea room, I also edited a video (below) with the closing presentation for the workshop, which was held in Seoul with all of the students and professors. In it you can see demonstrations of the whole three projects.
This was my first time doing anything in Unity beyond just exploring the user interface, and doing any VR work. I had tried the HTC Vive for the first time last year when a classmate used it for her university project. Before trying it I was skeptical, I considered it impractical and little more than technology for the sake of it. But after giving it a try I realized just how powerful of an experience it can be. The sense of presence, of just being in some virtual space is outstanding. From my experience developing for it I also understood the need for new interaction paradigms that fit the constraints. It’s easy to think of it as a sort of lo-fi alternative world, but given the limitations of the system, it requires a lot more thought to the design not to break the immersion—and even not to make the player sick. For instance, that you should be forbidden from going through walls was the generalized opinion in our team when we were discussing the interactions. And while it’s not part of the desired user experience to be able to wander beyond the walls like a ghost, apart from building physical walls that would match the location of the virtual ones in space, we lacked a means to stop the physical body of the player from going through. This means that the virtual location of the player would go out of sync from the physical one if, as if the avatar in a video game, it was suddenly stopped upon collision. The uncanny, disgusting feeling of bodily disconnection that is experienced when what you are seeing does not match your movement in actual space is a price too high to pay.
South Korea is the second Asian country I visit, and this occasion was my very first time somewhere I don’t speak the native tongue at all. When going out by myself I savored the freshness of the experience of not being able to verbally communicate with, say, the lady at the restaurant when ordering my food. While Korean is not a language I currently have any plans to learn, I’ve admired the hangul script since I learned about its conception a good few years ago, so I took this chance to study it. I am now able to (slowly) read it, which not only helped me when ordering food, but it has resulted in my gaining a new appreciation for scripts as phonemic code. Particularly in the case of the Korean language, which is all over the place when it comes to transliterations to Latin script, understanding the script that was custom made to fit the language gave me great insight into the very concept of a phoneme. A phoneme is that which is considered the same ‘sound’ to the ear of a speaker of any one language. Some sounds that are distinct to an English speaker sound or are thought of as ‘the same’ to a Korean, and thus comprise the same phoneme to them—but even then, which sound is used when depends on context. This becomes very clear when you examine the hangul characters, which are groupings of graphemes forming a syllable—the character 역 is composed of ㅇㅕㄱ. The graphemes are much like Latin script letters in that they each represent a vowel or consonant; however, the place in the character that these occupy describes how it should be pronounced. I guess that what I want to say is that I instinctively understood that phonemic accuracy is not the same as phonetic accuracy. In all, a valuable bonus lesson for my trip!
]]>My language is not really a language in most traditional senses, if you compare it to existing languages. It does not comprise a lexicon, nor does it have any inherent writing system, or phonetic system. It consists of just a set of rules, and they can be applied in many ways in any pertinent medium (written, oral, electric, etc.,) and is purposely unspecific about other things. It is, if you will, a framework for communication, or a protocol, more than a language as they’re most often thought about.
Programming languages have an explicit feature that is implicit in most human languages, which is that you define words in order to abstract information, to provide order, or to extend the functionality of the language, and this is a very basic part of pretty much any programming language. So I took this as a main theme, and decided that my language would basically only consist of the structure, and not define anything surrounding it—words need to be defined in order to use it. So what I ended up with is a series of conditions:
When I talk about concepts, I mean that the words and the concepts that they refer to are of course separate, and concepts are not necessarily representable in a single word. So after some transformation, a bunch of words may agglutinate into a single concept, and a predicate that follows it can take this resulting concept as an individual argument, despite it originally being formed by several separate words. Note that I make no assumptions on what results of the transformation, as it may be a single concept that combines the concepts that it receives as arguments, it may ignore its arguments entirely (effectively removing them), or it may return a new selection of words, out of which some may in turn be predicates that produce a chain reaction of transformations.
I also don’t specify a way to define words, which means the language by necessity has an early dependence on its context. (No language is ever independent of context, though, otherwise it would not be usable for communication; it needs grounding, knowledge that is shared between the involved parties.) But a predicate whose function is to define new words can be defined originally, along with words that represent elementary concepts, and a selection of predicates that combine them so that new words can be formed from then on within the language itself. This turns it into a self-depending language with metalinguistic capabilities, like any natural language.
Let’s demonstrate the use of this language with a concrete example. We’re going to use emoji to write words, and a period as a sentence-end marker. Let’s start by first defining a few nouns:
Now let’s define a few predicates that will combine these:
Using these, let’s try writing some sentences.
❤️ .
✊ ⚽️ ⏰ .
Going step by step, let’s translate this into English. Starting with the first sentence:
- ❤️ .
↳❤️ means interest. takes interest and turns it into a property. Therefore…- (Interesting) .
↳ means language. makes language the target of interesting. Therefore…- (Interesting language → Language is interesting) .
And the second sentence:
- ✊ ⚽️ ⏰ .
↳✊ means use (noun). turns use into a verb. Therefore…- (Use [verb]) ⚽️ ⏰ .
↳ means language. makes language the target of use. Therefore…- (Use language) ⚽️ ⏰ .
↳⚽️ means play (noun). turns play into a verb. Therefore…- (Use language) (play [verb]) ⏰ .
↳ ⏰ means that use language and play occur simultaneously. Therefore…- (Use language while playing → Play with language) .
Creating this language means that I have a framework devoid of ambiguities, as the rules are very simple to follow and perform (of course not necessarily quickly graspable,) but with full freedom to explore linguistic expressivity, by means of the creation of predicates. Predicates are the elementary part of the grammar of this language, and them being a ‘soft’ element means that the language is mouldable to fit any pattern. Smart use of predicates means that we can even create different syntaxes, via the swapping around of elements.
Astute readers might realize that, despite what I described earlier, what I’ve laid out is in fact not enough to build a reflecting, meta-capable language, because there’s no way to “quote” words in order to manipulate them literally as language entities, without them being interpreted instead for what they mean. This is something I will later think on how to best express, when I start playing with combinatory logic in the context of my language. To be specific, I’ve been heavily influenced particularly by the Joy programming language, and combinatory theory as applied to it (Brent Kerby).
I still have a lot of research to do, as I’m by no stretch of the imagination at all knowledgeable in linguistics, so I intend to continue deepening my understanding by investigating predicate theory as it applies to linguistics, and linguistics in general. The language doesn’t even have a name, because my focus is more on the way I use it. I’ll be sharing that stuff in the future.
]]>I was invited by the center I formerly studied Japanese at (Ceija, here in Santiago) to give a short workshop. It was an open invitation, as I could suggest what the theme for it would be. I decided long ago that I’m no good as a teacher, so I almost rejected the request, but finally decided to propose a non-traditional program in which I would not be a teacher but just someone who’s been studying longer (a senpai, as a Japanese person would put it,) and turn the classroom into a more level place for discussion and discovery. The themes to discuss would be the Japanese kanji writing system, and self-study. I called it kanji metaclass, loosely using the ‘meta’ prefix the same way it’s used in the word ‘metadata’: that is, to suggest recursiveness, learning about learning.
Although I haven’t found the teacher in me, I do think about education a great deal. I’ve been teaching myself lots of things since I can remember. I am largely frustrated by the way in which education has been institutionalized. And I work developing ludo-educational software.
I strongly believe in intrinsic motivation as key to learning. Extrinsic motivation would be grades, rewards and punishments; that is, how most schools nowadays work. Intrinsic motivation would be doing something because it is its own reward, or because it leads naturally to our reward. Put another way, I think that mainstream education teaches us to hate study and learning, by making those the hurdles we need to hop over to get to the carrot they put in front of us instead (or to get away from the whip behind.) But, of course, there’s no better stimulus to learning than just wanting to know.
So this class I’m about to finish offering this week reflects my views on education at large, and experimental as the format is (for someone inexperienced like me,) it’s been, from my point of view, a great success. My main priority was to make everyone curious, invested, and in charge of their own learning. I got everyone enjoyably (even excitedly) discussing varied subtopics, once they got comfortable enough with me and one another (that is, by the second session.) The flow of each session is almost entirely freeform, it leading wherever the discussion takes us. I prepared beforehand a long document full of little packets of (largely personal, even anecdotal) information, though, which I use as a resource to plant new ideas and questions. It still remains to see how this influence impacts their learning, but first I just felt the need to impact their mentality.
So that is one of the things I’ve been up to. And to end this post, here’s a little bullet-point manifesto I wrote for myself, to keep me focused on my goals for this workshop:
Fui invitado por el centro en el que estudié originalmente japonés (Ceija, aquí en Santiago) a dar un taller breve. Era una invitación abierta, lo que significa que dependía de mí proponer el tema. Decidí hace tiempo que no soy un buen profesor, así que casi rechacé el ofrecimiento, pero finalmente decidí proponer un programa no tradicional que me posicionaría no como un profesor, sino como un estudiante con más experiencia (un senpai, como diría un japonés), y convertir la sala de clases en un espacio más horizontal para la discusión y la experimentación. Los temas a discutir serían el sistema de escritura japonesa kanji, y la autoenseñanza. Lo llamé metaclase de kanji, usando ligeramente el prefijo ‘meta’ de la misma forma en que se usa en la palabra ‘metainformación’; o sea para sugerir recursividad: aprender sobre el aprender.
Aunque no me veo como profesor, sí pienso bastante en la educación. He sido mi propio profesor en muchas cosas desde que tengo memoria. Me frustra en gran medida la manera en que la educación ha sido institucionalizada. Y trabajo desarrollando software ludoeducativo.
Creo fuertemente en la motivación intrínseca como clave del aprendizaje. La motivación extrínseca correspondería a las notas, los premios y los castigos; es decir, la forma en que la mayoría de las escuelas funcionan hoy en día. La motivación intrínseca sería que el hacer algo es un premio en sí mismo, o que hacerlo conlleva naturalmente al premio. Puesto de otra forma, creo que la educación que impera hoy nos enseña a odiar el estudiar y el aprender, haciendo de ellos los obstáculos que debemos sortear para alcanzar la zanahoria que nos cuelgan (o huir del látigo con que nos azotan). Pero, por supuesto, no hay mejor estímulo del aprendizaje que el simplemente querer saber.
Así que esta clase que estoy a punto de terminar de ofrecer esta semana refleja mi visión sobre la educación en términos generales, y aunque es todo un experimento para alguien inexperto como yo, ha resultado, en mi opinión, todo un éxito. Mi primera prioridad era volverlos a todos curiosos, interesados y a cargo de su propio aprendizaje. Logré que todos discutan diversos subtemas con actitud entretenida y a ratos encendida, una vez que se sintieron cómodos conmigo y con unos y otros (es decir, desde la segunda sesión). El flujo de cada sesión es casi completamente libre, desplazándose hacia donde sea que nos conduzca la discusión. Preparé de antemano, eso sí, un documento largo lleno de pequeñas cápsulas de información (en gran medida personal, incluso anecdótica), que uso como recurso para instalar nuevas ideas y preguntas. Queda aún la interrogante de cuál va a ser el impacto en su aprendizaje, pero primero que nada sentí la necesidad de hacer un impacto en su mentalidad.
Y eso es una de las cosas que me han tenido ocupado. Para terminar este post, cierro con un pequeño manifiesto en formato de lista, que escribí para mantenerme enfocado en mis metas para este taller:
I just came back from Japan, after spending six months improving my Japanese there at a language school and generally enjoying being in such a culturally interesting environment. I made tons of friends, Japanese and from countless other countries; it was extremely stimulating.
The place I lived at was a small city called Ueda, located in a valley in the mountainous Nagano prefecture. If you asked someone from one of the bigger cities in Japan, they’d say where I lived was what they call inaka, the countryside. But would you ask the people who had lived there their whole lives, or in one of the surrounding, smaller cities and towns, they would say no, that’s not inaka. Of course, me coming from a pretty large city, the place was small and cozy; refreshingly so. I started using Vine —the short video recording app— during this trip, so here are some of the best ‘moving photos’ I captured from those places.
I originally wrote a super egomaniacal rambling here, but I’ve opted to save you the eye-rolling.
]]>