New and old projects
Hi, just a short check-in email on what I'm up to, as requested by Rob Dubbin and someone else (Max?) when I was at No Quarter games showcase on Saturday. I will send one more email in December, which will be my end of year review of every book I've read this year. Get ready.
At school since getting tenure they're trying to get me on a bunch of committees! I'm working on helping to kickstart a new animation major, in addition to supporting my New Media and Math/Computer Science departments.
I rebuilt my website this summer, thank god. It had been 5 years. Now it's modular and easy to add new pages.
I put up a bunch of new and old projects on my website.
Quilt Poems
This is my most recent project, and started and completed very quickly over 3 days.
Every year for the past decade November has meant the month of NaNoGenMo for computational artists and poets. NaNoGenMo, or National Novel Generating Month, is a month where folks dedicate time to writing software that generates a “novel.” Originally the event was started as a joke, when ringleader, programmer, artist Darius Kazemi noticed that NaNoWriMo, the much more well-known National Novel Writing Month, specified the definition of a novel minimally as consisting of at least 50,000 words. And with a rallying tweet, dozens of computational artists tried their hand at writing code to generate a novel or at least 50,000 words of text.
Last Thursday evening I attended the monthly decade-long WordHack event, where there was a release party for the new MIT Press book OUTPUT: an anthology of computer-generated text, 1953 - 2023, edited by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Nick Montfort. Several of those presented in the book read their work at the WordHack event, and Nick published a small pamphlet of new works in conjunction with the release of OUTPUT, that I read on the trainride home. That cozy ride home on the train, where I read the software as well as the output gave me the kick to begin planning my own generative poetry. And the next day I quickly got the idea to produce “quilt poems.”
Quilt poems were not actually a thing prevously, I don’t think. Or if they were, I re-invented them. My idea was that I’d map out the patterns of various formal and informal quilt styles, like Log Cabin, Amish bars quilts, and the like. Then I’d generate visual poems that would place words in the same pattern of a particular quilt style.
Here’s an example of a “housetop” pattern for example. The numbers are a recipe that correspond to parts of different strips or blocks in a quilt. The language is Lua (thus the double comma comment line).
{ --housetop
{7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7},
{7,6,6,6,6,6,6,8},
{7,6,5,5,5,5,1,8},
{7,6,5,4,4,4,1,8},
{7,6,5,4,2,3,1,8},
{7,6,5,4,3,3,1,8},
{7,6,1,1,1,1,1,8},
{7,8,8,8,8,8,8,8}
}
Here's some example quilt poems generated. I am embedding a photo because the text needs to be set in monospace and I can't guarantee that.
=> You can read a PDF book output of quilt poems
=> Blog post with more details on the quilt poems
Radio Free Aarhus
From 2022. An audio mixtape I recorded in Denmark with other members of Flux Factory, on a tiny handheld microcassette recorder that was damaged. It's analog tape, featuring singing, canons, recordings of babies, crowds, trains, museums, phone calls, and other "field recordings." I think it came out well.
Not because I think you'll be impressed or because it's popular but simply because it's how I work: I mixed in an improvised studio I set up with a 15-year old defunct Windows machine that wouldn't run, flashed Lubuntu Linux onto it, and downloaded some software and away I went. This was at the ARoS Museum in Denmark, with the rest of the Flux crew in residency together. It's a nice listen on the subway, in the car, when washing the dishes, or programming.
=> Radio Free Aarhus project page and audio player
Studio Visit
An oldie but a goodie! I should do more of these. From 2018 and that old hilarious studio I had with Brandon and Yuehao: Universal Research Group (Brandon, the URL expired! Please pay the bill or I can do it!) above Pho 87 in Chinatown, LA.
Redhook
An oldie from 2023. A web-based work featuring dithered images I shot in Redhook along Valentino pier, created during a HTML Energy freewrite meetup last summer. I actually walked around photographing and wrote the code by pen in a notebook first, then translated it to code in the Terminal on my phone and uploaded to my server. Kind of a funny process, but it's fun to work on my artwork outside and this is as okay a method as any.
BLAHG
Yes, I have a blog. Do you have one? Send me the link or the RSS feed link.
Speaking of RSS. Are you a nerd that writes code of some type? A bunch of us participate in this new nerd thing called December Adventure where we write a little code each day, working on our projects, and keep a log.
Okay, My next email is a million reviews of books I read this year from speculative fiction to riot grrl history to anarchist organizing to radical pedagogy
Get ready.