The MIT campus paper I wrote for as an undergrad, The Tech, is re-doing its website, so I thought it was a good time to revisit and compile my articles from back in the day. I wrote quite a bit as a staff writer and Arts Editor (and now I miss having a press pass to cultural events!). Next academic year I'm hoping to do some freelance arts writing for other publications; if anyone has ideas, please let me know. Meanwhile, feel free to browse the archive below.

Thanks Council for the Arts at MIT for making the experience so great. Most are surprised to see MIT ranked as the world's second-best school for art and design (QS Rankings). 

With the popular hastag #ILookLikeAnEngineer, it was a sweet surprise to see my sister Isabel's article (below). When I began in robotics, there were no girls involved at my school. Studies now show having role models in science and engineering that shatter stereotypes can be powerful for young girls who may be thinking about math, science, and engineering.  

BEST OF OCEANS AT MIT/ Best of Oceans at MIT, Featured Stories
OCEANS AT MIT/ Slow-Motion Science and the Art of Capturing Marine Life
THE SCUTTLEFISH/ An Exhibit of Undersea Phenomena in Ultra-Slow Motion
DIVE INFO/ New MIT Exhibit Features High-Speed Underwater Photography
BOSTON.COM/ Art-Science Underwater Photography Exhibit Opening
BIG RED & SHINY/ Unique Slow-Motion Underwater Photography Exhibit 
@ARTSATMIT TWITTER/ Join @mitmeche alumna Grace Young this Friday
BOSTON ARTISTS BLOG/ Undersea Phenomena in Ultra-Slow Motion
SCOOP (REPOSTED) / Slow-Motion Science and the Art of Capturing Marine Life 

Event listed at Boston.com:  http://www.boston.com/entertainment/events?p1=menu_entertainment_more_events_hp#/event/3727057?location=02108-boston&sections=all&date=today

Reception Sponsors: 

(Waggoner Chocolates is catering!)

"Thanks to a couple of engineers at MIT, we were able to use a prototype camera called the Edgertronic to capture slow-motion video... And that particular camera gives us an insight into what fairly common animals do but we can't even see it in the blink of an eye. ... It gives us an insight into some of the animals that we were sitting right next to for 31 days and never normally would have paid attention to, such as hermit crabs."

"Using a cutting-edge piece of technology that's not really meant for the oceans is not always easy. We sometimes had to put the camera upside down, cordon it back to the lab, and actually man the trigger from the lab itself. But what this gives us is the foresight to look at and analyze in scientific and engineering terms some of the most amazing behavior that the human eye just can't pick up, such as this manta shrimp trying to catch its prey, within about .3 seconds. That punch is as strong as a .22 caliber bullet, and if you ever try to catch a bullet in mid-flight with your eye, impossible. But now we can see things such as these Christmas tree worms pulling in and fanning out in a way that the eye just can't capture, or in this case, a fish throwing up grains of sand. This is an actual sailfin goby, and if you look at it in real time, it actually doesn't even show its fanning motion because it's so quick."

Fabien summarizes the mission's goals and accomplishments, and stresses the need for further exploration of the oceans. 

For more info, check out my previous posts about working with the Edgertronic. 

I'm also excited to say my KickStarter campaign to fund an exhibit of the underwater slow motion photography we shot on the Edgertronic from Mission 31 was a great success! Those near Boston are welcome to attend the opening on the evening of January 4th in MIT's Wiesner Art Gallery. Just shoot me a message for the details. 

I just launched a KickStarter campaign to help fund an exhibit of underwater high speed photography from Mission 31 and continued work. It'll be at the MIT Wiesner Art Gallery all of January if the campaign is successfully funded! 

Check it out (link here), and please consider attending the exhibit! 

What are currently doing on Mission 31? Here's a behind-the-scenes video diary of some of our work. We are using cutting edge technology to view ocean life like never before.  We need to be fully saturated to capture these images at this depth because of the length of time required for set-up and filming in the ocean.  Living at the same atmospheric pressure as the surrounding sea is a huge advantage that allows us to spend unlimited time working in the ocean. So, the research we're doing this month would take months or even years to accomplish with surface dives. That's one reason Mission 31 is so important and unique.

Read more at:

• The Underwater World Through Doc Edgerton's Eye's about this amazing camera and its capabilities.
  
• Edgertronic High-Speed Camera Testing:  In May at MIT, I was working both on exams and the Edgertronic testing for Mission 31 at the same time!

The Edgertronic high-speed camera we are using on Mission 31 has never been used underwater. It just came out five weeks ago, and the underwater housing that Sexton Corporation customized for us (for the camera) arrived the eve of Liz and my Aquarius splashdown. 

On land, MIT's "Doc" Edgerton revolutionized how we view motion. His iconic image of a milk drop, for example, shows the coronet-shaped structure formed the instant a drop hits liquid. It's fascinating that we “see” this seemly mundane phenomenon daily, yet its true majesty is never visible to the naked eye without the incredible speed of a camera to take images at fractions of a second. 

Back in the 1950s, Jacques Cousteau and Doc Edgerton ("Papa Flash," as Cousteau called him) were fast friends. Jacques was the intrepid explorer and Edgerton the MIT tech whiz who developed special technologies that helped locate, capture and convey the glory of Jacques’ underwater discoveries. Now in 2014, the 50th anniversary of Jacques Cousteau’s Conshelf II underwater habitat expidition, the legacies of these two great pioneers are united once again on Mission 31 to hopefully convey some of the wonders we're still discovering undersea by testing the limits of new underwater imaging technology. 

Our work with the Edgertronic camera on Mission 31 is capturing motion previously observed, but never fully visible, similar to the milk drop coronet phenomenon. Depending on the chosen resolution, this camera is capable of 500 frames per second at high resolution, and 18,000 (eighteen thousand!) frames per second at its lowest resolution. We're attempting to capture behaviors of undersea life with this incredible technology, and hope to ultimately capture the unique feeding behavior of the Goliath grouper (video not captured with Edgertronic).

The camera is tricky to use underwater. Adequate lighting is critical for the camera because the shutter is only open for fractions of a second, and good lighting is scarce to nonexistent undersea. In addition, setup takes about a half hour of sea time, and then another of hour of shooting time with someone providing computerized feedback from the dry habitat. (Liz wrote a blog post about the set-up process required.) We could really use more time!

The videos we are capturing are amazing. We are seeing the super-fast movements of sea creatures on a whole new time scale, movements that are impossible to comprehend with the naked eye. It’s mind-blowing to me to see nature working at this level. Several days ago I posted a short video of a yellow-headed jawfish and Liz posted a video of a manits shrimp striking a goby. Hopefully we'll post more in the coming days. Someday, I'd love to frame these images and put them with the videos in a museum: The Underwater World through Edgerton's Eyes.

Update 6/28/14: Here's a video from Mission 31 about our work with the camera underwater.

More blog at: 

• What's Mission 31 About? This is Worth the Watch and 
  
• Stunning Views of  Life in the Sea, which shows some behind the scenes photos of setting up work with the Edgertronic camera. 
  

With the Edgertronic ultra high-speed camera, we can see things that happen in the blink of an eye in slow motion. It's like seeing the world at a different time-warp. It lets us see the underwater world, and it's creatures, a whole new way. Today we spend 6 hours total in the water, and we focused on exploring with the Edgertronic camera. We captured some stunning footage. Here's a video of bubbles coming from Liz's helmet, captured at 1000 frames per second. 

It's just amazing what you can discover, spending six hours in the water! Who knew bubbles moved so strangely like that? We also captured many videos of sea life, including coral cups feeding, crabs dancing (what are they doing?!), a sergeant major fanning it's eggs, and even a little zooplankton narrowly avoiding being eaten by a coral polyp. The other videos need some post-processing, but I'll distribute as soon as they're out.  (And I'll post this video in a more accessible format when the internet is stronger tomorrow.)

While Fabien and Ryan re-configured the camera for us inside the habitat, we had some time to play in the water. Here I'm performing some ballet (a grand pas de chat).  Matt (second photo) did a handstand. 

Fellow aquanaut Matt Ferraro, a filmmaker with over 15 years in film production, has some more great footage of us working today, but you'll have to wait for that to come out in the documentary film!  

I wish I had time to process (and finish downloading) the footage now to post, but I need to sleep. Tomorrow is another early morning dive. We'll spend most of the day collecting plankton samples, identifying sponges for the Ocean Genome Project, and welcoming former aquanauts Mark Patterson and Steven Price back into Aquarius.