This semester I am going to be working on front and back-end design for an application being build in the CITRIS Invention Lab. The application enables bottom-up collaboration and version-control for local-level political proposals. I will update this post as the semester progresses.

I have written a 15 page article detailing a general model for the US legal and economic system. This model is incredibly simple but really clarifies the current Gilded Age we are in as well as how to remedy its excessive privilege and inequality. I will post a copy of the article after I finish/publish it.

I have completed about 40 pages of this story, which is about an amazing woman I met in Spain, while backpacking. The story is more broadly about the nature of memory, how every memory is actually a memory of a memory and how we are constantly in the process of reinterpreting our past, for good and for bad. The story is completely autobiographical and about how we can control the process of reinterpretation so that our pasts can become the way we so desperately want them to be, and in my case, one in which I find Anahi again. The story is a kind of meta-story, a story about a story, a memory of a memory, where a reality of losing Anahi becomes a reality of finding her.

I am currently in the process of learning how to use software and hardware involved in automated laser-cutting. In the Berkeley art department there is a laser-cutter but no one has learned how to use it. So that is where I am coming in! Bwuahaha. I have several metal designs that I have been planning to make for a while, so this seemed like a perfect opportunity to make them.

As you can see, a work in progress! I will post all the design work I did working up to this stage, when I have a little bit more time!

But to give some background. I started the summer not knowing anything about web design and I finished the summer with a nearly finished website written in html, css, js, jquery, and php. I learned a tremendous amount and I have moved onto learning Ruby on Rails, SQL, and angular.js this semester!

When I was a senior in high school I was thinking about becoming an architect and I produced quite of few 3-d models on google sketchup (these can be found under my modeling section). Recently I gained access to one of the student engineering labs in Cory and have been printing out my designs and they have come out quite well. I will attach images when I have a bit more time.

I noticed at career fairs that every single CS applicant looked exactly the same. While they are wonderful and talented folks, at the fair they looked like cookie-cutter human beings, with the same majors, with the same interests, identical resumes, utterly unmemorable. I decided that I needed to stand out, so I made my resume uber arty. The odds of the coordinator remembering my name is about 0. But the odds that they would remember our conversation and remember that my resume was artsy were much higher, and what I needed them to do was to connect our conversation to the resume. Then I would be memorable. So I invested quite a bit of time in my resume looking beautiful. I will post some close-ups, but you can also check it out under my resume section!

Last year a friend and I worked on a wearables interface project for a competition. While we did not end up submitting the project (because of academic time constraints), we still came up with some rather cool ideas that I will post here if/when I find them and when I have more time.

I produced about a half-dozen t-shirt designs from my art and decided to print some t-shirts and sell em. I will post the designs when I have some more time.

A very special thing about sculpture classes in CA is the potential of using Redwood. So in my sculpture class (fall 2013) students had the opportunity to use Redwood. But unfortunately, after class I would find huge pieces discarded into the trash, which was a tragedy. So I asked Teresa, the awesome studio attendant, if I could use the discarded pieces to make gifts for family and friends. She was sympathetic and encouraged my project. So in the last two weeks of the course I worked on my ribcage sculpture and I made 38 sculptures from Redwood, all of which I gave to family and friends (in retrospect I wish I had kept one!). I will post photos of them when I have two. The two largest ones, which I gave to my parents, are in the wood section.

These sculptures are based on limestone karst formations (hence the name). I used a sander to make angular cuts into the wood, which makes it look like extreme erosion of the elements has cut the wood. I wanted to communicate temporality and the gradual influence of time.