Hi friends, I wanted to send an email newsletter out monthly or semi-monthly, but it’s been a year I think!
Now
I’ve been trying to rest a few months, recovering from a serious concussion in February and another medical issue that I’ll have surgery to correct sometime this summer. But overall feeling good about summer weather, friends, family, romance and creating art with friends.
I try to maintain an always-up-to-date text page with my current projects here: now.
Event: Aleatoric Audio for an Infinite Island
Tomorrow! Saturday May 28 on Governor’s Island. Bldng 404.
1pm - 4:30pm
I’m a resident artist with collective Flux Factory, my forever art family, in our summer homebase residency at Governor’s Island in New York. I organized Aleatoric Audio for an Infinite Island.
Aleatoric Audio for an Infinite Island is an experimental sound art event featuring performances and sound installations by artists and musicians from the NYC area working in sound art, generative art-making practices, livecoding, homemade instruments, art and code, experimental voice, modular synth and more. Presented as part of Flux Saturdays by Flux Factory, building 404 on Governor’s Island. This event is held in conjunction with Drone Day, an annual celebration of drone, community, and experimental sounds. Performances will be held outside. Sound installations will be presented indoors and outdoors. In conjunction with artwork presented as part of Parade of the Species, curated by Sally Beauty Twin.
Free. Rain or shine.
Big Projects
Artists and Hackers
Artists and Hackers podcast is about a year and a half old. We have about 500 listeners per episode. I’m really proud of it! I host. The audio engineer Max Ludlow is incredible. Caleb Stone does our design. I love working with them.
This year I’ve been lucky to be a Fellow at the NYU Engelberg Center for Law and Innovation. They’re supporting me and the second season of the podcast - and those episodes will be coming out in a month.
And Caleb and I have a new Tools portal that will appear on the website soon as well.
Experimental Archive Space
I’m on “Junior Leave” (a sabbatical, essentially) for one semester, to work on a project. My concussion in February really set me back though. I’m creating a toolkit for DIY artist-run spaces to archive and share their work. Specifically, I’m creating and educating on resources for spaces to download documentation of their events, by scraping social media and websites, even and especially when platforms don’t normally allow you to do this. I also conduct oral history interviews. In February I visited Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, and have been meeting with various partners.
Last summer NEW INC and Knight Arts Foundation supported a prototype, the Experimental Archive Space, a pilot project (working again with Caleb Stone!) to build an archive and generative zine-maker with photos and oral history for Space 1026. I scraped 15,000 (not a typo!) photos off the internet for them, did interviews, and worked with Caleb to produce this site. It’s already come in use several times as members reached out looking for documentation from specific events that happened 14 years ago! The next steps are to take lessons from this pilot project, build out the tool for more spaces to use, and to create learning resources (tutorials, video workshops), and find a partner institution who’d be willing to ‘caretake’ for these created archives. –>link to in-progress research and code.
Mini Projects
I code, make music, write or make other art pretty much every day, non-stop.
Code Sketching
Most of my daily code sketching ends up here. I stopped uploading a bit after the concussion but will start again.
I posted a few dozen projects in December and January, completed while in residency at Laura Splan’s Plexus Projects, where I worked on small generative art and sound pieces in the browser using PuzzleScript. For example of these mini test projects, see this or this or this.
Drone-strument: Drone Collector
I participated in Drone Jam, organized by Marie-Claire Flanagan this year and built a drone-strument called the Drone Collector. My first coding since I hit my head 3 months ago. It uses machine learning (CGAN) generated tiles by Everest Pipkin and others, and my own Pix2pix generated characters.
It’s a procedurally generated mini apocalypic landscape in 2.5d. Walk around and creato changing ambient drones. I’ll present it during the Aleatoric Audio for an Infinite Island event.
Internet Yama-ichi with Mark Ramos
I participated in the Internet Yama-ichi with Mark Ramos in April. I was still going through more extensive concussion therapy and Mark pulled more weight than me. Thank you Mark! We created the Screensaver Adoption Agency. I revived ASCII acquarium software and Mark coded an interactive p5 acquarium with a catch-the-fish game. Attendees bought receipt-printed fish after they caught virtual fish with a physical net (yes, 3 mediums). Need to get this onto my website!
Bookmobile software
I love reading articles from the Internet, but I don’t like reading my laptop in bed. I have a 10-year old e-book reader that is perfect. So a few months ago I wrote software to pull articles off the internet and render them to epub format for e-readers. It’s called bookmobile, it’s command line software, and I use it every week.
Also
I went to commencement at Purchase College last week, where I’m assistant professor of New Media and Computer Science. It’s my fourth year teaching there, I still love it, and it was great to see my students graduate!
Next
My birthday is in a few weeks and I’m turning 40! Will have a picnic with friends, probably in Prospect Park! You’re welcome to join.
I’m speaking this summer at Narrascope conference for Interactive Fiction about experimental text adventure games in operating systems, forms, spreadsheets and file systems. This will be streamed online.
My autobiographical Sleeping In the Pandemic was exhibited in Public Access Memories for the Wrong Biennial recently and will be shown this summer at Console-ing Passions 2022, to be held at the University of Central Florida, organized by a team of feminist media scholars coordinated by Mel Stanfill and Anastasia Salter.
I’ll be going to Denmark again for a residency with Flux Factory at ARoS Public in August. Last year I partnered with Winnie Soon and Anders Visti, Cantina Space and other partners on a workshop on Open Source Tools for artists.
I still miss my friend Alaska who passed away abruptly last year and I think about her often.
<3, Lee