Just some updates
Hi friends, I forget to send emails with what I’m up to in my life. I send these out between once a year up to 4 times a year. You are always welcomed to write me back with your own news, or a “hello”, or a great recipe or music you are listening to.
My current projects are always on my now page on my website. I also post occasionally to instagram and special.fish.
Professional news
I received tenure! Thanks to my many mentors: my undergrad professors Robin Dash and David Cunningham; my colleagues at Purchase and beyond; and my friends, collaborators, and mentors elsewhere. Many of my friends and family have also helped inform how I teach. I learn a ton from my students as well, and I feel really lucky to be working at Purchase. Thank you.
In other news: I am the Co-”P.I.” on a $500,000 4-year grant from the Sherman Fairchild Foundation at my school, that we just won. To be clear, I don’t personally get that money in my own bank account, but I was on the small team that researched, wrote and received the grant, and it does impact my own teaching, my students, and the entire school. SUNY Purchase is an underfunded public school. This grant will go a long way to supporting us.
New website
After serving my needs for about 6 years I finally re-designed my personal website and added recent projects. I've made it very simple, designed to be expanded and to host a growing collection of work. To be honest, I will be adding a wiki and some additional pages (links, teaching resources, programming notes, etc) but I am happy with the minimal modular system I've built. For web nerds, I wrote it with only semantic html/css.
Art, Music, Game News
I am in the Flux Factory exhibition Spiritual Machines, curated by Amelia Marzec and Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow with the work Borscht Belt System, a further experiment built from a body of work I began several years ago.
My sci-fi experimental narrative Exocolony (published earlier in the year on Oral Pub received an Honorable Mention by the Electronic Literature Organization this summer.
I am working on two video games: Rough Consensus is a (humorous) command line economic sim in the style of the Oregon Trail - based on Occupy/non-hierarchical group decision-making process. Do these words make sense to you? Email me and I will send you a build so you can test it out and give me feedback! I am also building a turn-based roguelike where you write programs for robots, in the style of the board game RoboRally. I also wrote a number of other simple arcade games for my upcoming class Programming Games, that I'll be teaching with Pico-8 and Love2d this coming semester.
In music news, I have been working with Daniel Fishkin (from Flux Factory), and Fame and Kengchakaj (of ele-khle-kha อีเหละเขละขละ ) on Daniel's open source hardware project Solar Sounders with Flying Fish hardware boards. These are "ambient" hardware devices Daniel has built that can be left out, powered by the sun, and creating their own music. I implemented a Turing Machine to generate slowly changing music and rhythms. I have been enjoying working and experimenting with these. Keng and Fame are modifying the default tuning system with other tunings. Other experiments we are working on are using the temperature detector to change the generated sounds.
Podcast
We completed broadcasting season 3 of Artists and Hackers in the spring. We have about 2000 listeners per episode, which exceeds my expectations! I took a break over the summer, and am excited to work on more episodes this fall.
Errata
I am still biking a ton, camping, playing music, taking walks, enjoying books from the little free libraries in my neighborhood, and drinking tea, playing frisbee, walking around Prospect Park, taking the ferry to Governor's Island, dancing, reading in bed late at night, skateboarding, drinking seltzer, etc.
Warmly,
Lee