Hi friends, here’s one of my very occasional “what I’m up to” emails. I hope you are all well.
New Rules: Conversations with New Media Artists, this Friday in NYC
For the past year and change I’ve been working on the podcast Artists and Hackers. This winter I’ve partnered with the New Media Caucus for a live event and series of episodes.
New Rules: Conversations with New Media Artists is this coming Friday 2/17 from 7:30pm-9pm in NYC. I’ll be speaking live and recording a special episode with the New Media artists KT Duffy, Rashin Fahandej, Sue Huang, and Chelsea Thompto about their work. It’s free to attend (and includes an informal dinner). RSVP by Tuesday to confirm your attendance, and to receive the location address in Long Island City.
New Rules is made possible with funding from the National Endowment for Arts. This allows me to continue to pay our great audio engineer Max Ludlow.
Some exciting episodes are in the works and coming soon.
Archiving Artist-Run Spaces
I’ve worked with DIY artist-run spaces for almost 2 decades. For the last two years I’ve been working on a project I’m calling Archiving Artist Spaces in an effort to help DIY and artist-run spaces document their own activities - preserving texts, websites, media, and conducting oral history interviews. I am working on a number of these projects now, that will be made public this spring, as well as creating useful materials (zines, a website and training) so that DIY spaces have access to tools, information and other resources to share their ongoing activities, culture and legacy. I’m also getting legal assistance from NYU Engelberg Center for Law and Innovation, where I was also a fellow last year.
If this project is of interest to you, get in touch! I am working with Caleb Stone (also the designer for the podcast’s identity and site) on an archive and partnership we are excited to imminently present.
I recently organized a workshop at the Digital Literature for Social Good Unconference, hosted by Bournemouth University (UK) in partnership with the Electronic Literature Organization and the British Library January 17 and 18 where I led a first version of the tools, training and ideas from this project. This spring I’ll also be presenting a workshop and exhibition of archives at the HASTAC conference at Pratt.
Other things
I post lots of little projects often to the hidden “everyday” part of my website. Lately I’ve been making little sites, code things, tools, and trying some small machine learning experiments. For example..
Amelia Marzec and I collaborated on a piece for Public Domain Day: Distances, created with newly public domain videos, Processing code, and modular synth. We also performed a concert together recently at Persona. Book us to play together again!
I created a little collaborative site project with a new friend that I met at HTML Energy‘s Freewrite at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens.
I created a few small tools recently: purch.us link shortener for Purchase College, a tool to make it easier to read Wikipedia articles without all the distracting links, and Pulldown (not yet published), part of my family of tools created to archive and make readable and usable text files and articles from the Internet, including archived copies of websites from the Wayback Machine.
I put the season clock back online for when you need a moment to chill and reflect on the current moment.
After admiring Rivendell bikes for the past 15 years I bought my own. My first new bike since 2008 or so. It’s rather unique. I’ve been doing a lot of mountain biking and good old street riding around the city. I met up with an old college friend Dave Glick in San Francisco (I was in town to visit the Internet Archive), who got me deep into mountain biking and riding with a posse about 20 years ago. We visited a fortune cookie factory in Chinatown and the Musee Mecanique to play 50 - 100 year old mechanical automata, nickelodeons and games. I also visited with my friend and collaborator Sholeh (and her cat Yazi). And Amelia and I took a 2 week trip to New Orleans which was a relaxing and (music-filled) vacation from the winter in the northeast.
I spent a large part of the past year recovering from a concussion and I had some other surgeries this year, most recently Friday, but am hoping that’s mostly in the past for now.
I hope you are all well and we get to meet up in the year ahead.
Warmly, Lee