Posted on by David Drucker

A Walk on the Beach and A Strange Sign in Front of MIT

A Cold but Sun­ny Stroll
We took a walk on Kit­si­lano Beach today. After all, we could­n’t let this sun­shine go to waste. How­ev­er, the wind had oth­er ideas. It was very chilly, remind­ing us that despite the fact that it is spring and all of the trees are bloom­ing (and the city is show­ing some of its most gor­geous aspects), it’s still ear­ly spring, and we are, after all, in Cana­da, not Fort Laud­erdale or Puer­to Val­lar­ta. I did bring the cam­era, though, and we even doc­u­ment­ed anoth­er brush with a Bald Eagle. The large bird even roost­ed for quite a while on a boat (called ‘Free to Roam’, of all things) in the False Creek Mari­na, where crows seemed to treat it with no respect whatsoever.

Inter­est­ing Items Back on Mass. Ave.
I some­times read the blog infos­thet­ics (mean­ing Infor­ma­tion Aes­thet­ics) for my oth­er blog, drucker.ca, because I often deal with some of the same issues and sub­jects (visu­al­iza­tion, infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture, info­graph­ics, etc.)

A cou­ple of days ago, how­ev­er, they made note of a very odd piece of per­for­mance art that’s locat­ed at a spot that I often went by for about 15 years. It seems in front of MIT Build­ing 1 (the one with the columns out front), on Mass Ave. in Cam­bridge, an artist named Leonar­do Bonan­ni post­ed some­thing that looked like a bus sched­ule. Except it’s not a bus sched­ule: It’s a “framed piece of paper list­ing the lat­est results on untime­ly deaths/suicides at MIT university.”

It looks like Mr. Bonan­ni has been busy. He’s a 1st Year PhD Stu­dent in the Tan­gi­ble Media Group at the Media Lab, and was recent­ly a final­ist for the Kendall Square Inter­ac­tive Design Com­pe­ti­tion, which appears to have been spon­sored by Lyme Prop­er­ties, the devel­op­er who build many of the Biotech Pow­er­hous­es that now dom­i­nate so much of East Cambridge. 

Here’s a video of his proposal.

Kind of cool. Looks like the receiv­er of the very pub­lic cell phone text mes­sage on a huge text crawl was in a room at the Mar­riot, as far as I can tell from the ani­ma­tion. Many oth­er projects of his are host­ed by the Media Lab’s site.

It’s too bad that our paths nev­er crossed while I was liv­ing so close by. I would have liked to met him.