Hi friends, this is my (semi) monthly email of projects I'm working on.
If you want updates even more often (!), you can follow along with my semi-daily updated log page.
Heading to Berlin soon for sabbatical work
I am leaving soon for Berlin in early July, hopefully with visa in hand as I'm staying a bit longer than 3 months! If you have friends in that city, or live there yourself, let's meet up. I'm looking to meet other artists, perform music, and exhibit my work. The last time I had a break was when I had my concussion and went through concussion therapy for many months and even more recovery time, so I'm excited to have an actual sabbatical this time.
I'll be an artist-in-resident at ZK/U, which I'm excited about.
Performance Saturday June 28
ZERO//THE BIRTH OF VENIS
A New Performance by Jemila MacEwan with Live Music by ExquisiteCorp
JUNE 28//5PM
Hunter’s Point South Park Boat Launch, Long Island City, NY
Commission by the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York and Flux Factory
Part of the exhibit Shared Grounds 3-8P.
I am playing a new score to accompany Jemila's performance. I wrote the music on my modular synth, my first time creating music to accompany dance. Part of the performance uses live vocals from Jemila, wirelessly sent through her new headset microphone, that I am processing live in the synth. I am excited about our performance, which is happening live on the new boat launch in Long Island City, just a hundred feet or so from the new Flux IV gallery space, and part of the overall exhibition festivities happening that day 3 - 8pm at the new Flux Factory building.
New music website
I built a website for my performance project ExquisiteCorp and put up some new music. This month I am a Flux Rhodes Scholar using the new music rehearsal and recording studio at Flux Factory and I recorded this 20-minute ambient track there. I'm excited about performing more gigs and working with dancers and other performers.
New zine
I created the new Quilt Poems chapbook zine, the latest iteration of my quilt poems project where I encoded North American patchwork quilt patterns in a data format I came up with, then used those patterns as a basis for forms of new visual poetry generatively created and using a corpus of text data (that I have I contributed to in the past).
Another iteration of quilt patterns
I've been using the quilt patterns as recipes for other projects. Here's a minimal implementation using Pico-8.
You can run the program in a browser to generate new quilts.
Sharing syllabi
I wrapped the spring semester at Purchase College. I basically create a web-based textbook for all of my classes, and share these online for free, generally with creative commons licenses so that others may learn from them or adapt them for teaching.
- Programming Games is my new course for teaching programming through making games, with Pico-8 and Love2d
- Drawing, Moving and Seeing with Code
- Creating User Interfaces
Game stuff
I am part of the online community Merveilles, a a community of artisan engineers. This year we hosted a flickjam to create simple point and click games with the Flickgame game-maker. I made Chezz Simulator, a silly game that plays as if you are playing chezz. You can play it online.
A month later I created a minimal roguelike-esque dungeon crawler game of sorts called Lil Dungeon for TweetTweetJam 10. This game jam required that a game use no more than 500 characters in total. I created Lil Dungeon in Pico-8, and it was difficult to make a small compelling roguelike style game this way but I figured it out and received some help along the way. You can play the game online.
Speaking of the genre of Roguelikes, I was a guest judge for the 7DRL game jam, a jam where participants create a complete roguelike game in 7 days. Most of the submitted games can be played online.
Open Source Tools for Artists site moved
With the impending shutdown of teaching tool and online playground Glitch.com I had to move some of my 350+ sites off Glitch hosting. As part of this I moved Open Source Tools for Artists, a mini site with resources and notes that was created as part of a workshop and collaboration in Aarhus, Denmark several years ago with Flux Factory, Art && Code[] Aarhus, and CANTINA art space while Flux was in residence at ARoS Museum.
Coming up
I am working on some other projects, including wrapping up my Hyphenated project, after receiving great feedback from some studio visits.
And I'm currently working on an Archive page for out of print and collected zines, videos, interviews and etc that are in danger of disappearing from the web and that I enjoy reading, teach with, or want to share further. These are items I've been hosting on the Internet Archive so far, but I'm excited to make my own collection page. I've been programming this site using what I've gleaned from building my panblog static site generator and past winter's December Adventure as I worked on coding projects.
This is just a mockup right now, and I don't love the name but consider this a work-in-progress screenshot.
Hello
That's it I believe. Feel free to write back with your own links, notes, hello's, music, etc.
Cheers, Lee