Blog

The Idea I want to be able to enter or log or document a project at multiple levels (brainstorming, research, etc) and keep it in a place that I find easy to revisit and search, but I also want large custom-category pages for each thing I do (like leather, photography, cirque, etc). I’m not sure if it’s possible for me to make multiple index pages, for example, that have different formatting and rules? It also wouldn’t be terrible if it worked the way wordpress did now; however I think what’s lacking there is this idea of “featured project” customization. ...

How does one reconcile making work in so many mediums? This is a topic I’ve thought about a lot, about which I hope to come to a conclusion by writing about it more. Being mixed-race, I learned early what it was like to be seen as uncategorizable. Summarized in a few lines: I had in-group access to both spaces, but was othered in both spaces. The ambiguity of my appearance was not something I really thought about1, though it became clear that others did. The unparseability of my identity by others contributed (among other things) to an internal uncertainty about my identity2}. An incomplete list of examples: ...

laser cutter log in the shop with charlotte for octohedron -> hexahedron framing cut for mabon 3aw sculpture material ((muslin, scrim, gauze) x (plain, flour-dredged)) evaluation we had a lot of issues with understanding the laser’s behavior: when initially trying to frame the cut, the frame would only extend for X and not Y
- probably (though i can’t confirm) the size of the printed area exceeded the bed size, so it refused to frame? when manually jogging or attempting to navigate to “move to position” to a coordinate such as (300,300), the head would only move in x and not in y - once we were trying to go to origin or smth and the head tried to go off bed and made a bad noise and i hit the emergency stop :0 we arbitrarily resized the piece so that it was about half size (6” instead of 12”), and it would frame correctly when we were at y = ~300, but not when y ~= 0 (job origin was either top left or top right, so it shouldn’t have been attempting to go up) not really sure how we resolved this tbh… could have been that restart w/ the emergency stop (though i had restarted 2x already), but at some point the manual coordinate navigation began to work again. ...

This year I went to Movement in Detroit with the desire to be more intentional about what events to go to. My gf was working 4 nights in a row (Fri, Sat, Sun, Mon), and I wanted to be available and alert to support her (i.e., not going to the maximum number of events). I don’t find a ton of appeal in the marathon/endurance dancing that a lot of my peers subscribe to during this multi-day event, because when I’m simply on the dance floor for endurance’s sake, I don’t feel like I am intentionally dancing to the music. ...

I worked on exporting a p5/hydra effect to Touchdesigner. I found this to be a much more productive way of learning how to use it than following a tutorial, which is how I’ve previously implemented Touchdesigner ideas. I wanted to replicate this sketch that I often use as a building block for visuals. td chain example I built an audio spectrum chain, then first used a torus instead of a circle to generate the base, and then with C.’s help realized I could be using a 2D equivalent. ...

Was excited to be asked to do visuals for Night School + Phillip Otterbach at the Crown <3 Documenting this was also my push to get hydra canvas rendering working in my toolchain (see below!), which is a lot easier to document than videos. However I learned that audio isn’t loading in examples (mb by design? I opened a PR), so I can’t show these demos with audio reactivity. For Night School’s set, I wanted to play with these trios of soft blobs, and gradually overlay them with a moiré effect. ...

Process for block printing onto lino My first attempts at laser-cutting a linoleum block of an original illustration last year didn’t go well. However after a lot of time spent (and test paper wasted :0) I’ve found a few things that improved the print process over 4 iterations: Linoleum size and treatment I tested on earlier different versions but finally bought 9"x12" linoleum. It’s hard to find this pre-mounted but it’s important that it’s mounted to a block and flattened so that it doesn’t curl, for a few obvious reasons (the laser has a focus field of < a few mm, and printing also would suffer if it wasn’t flat). ...

I often have conversations about this topic (how old is too old to start dance? to keep dancing? what does it do to us to use our age as the reason that we opt out of movement or feel bad?) with others, usually either amateurs or professionals in dance, or dancers at parties who don’t consider themselves dancers, but was thinking about it more in earnest today. Some background: I started training aerial disciplines and contortion in my twenties, with poor physical fitness and no prior movement background. I was fortunate to be near a training center that had affordable and frequent training for adults. Even though it was quite cheap (~$100 for unlimited classes!), I had not had disposable income for this at any prior point in my life. ...

i last-minute* mocked up some background visuals for a party featuring ambient music. (i kept them running all night (12 hours) on a backlit screen near the dj booth and never really had to tune them. they were interesting enough to be entertaining while focused on, but didn’t dominate the space). i took a simple existing function from the hydra library and added a few lines for audioreactivity (color and distortion); black background was key to keep this looking more subdued and adding some forgiveness to the projected edges. ...

i finally finished merging all my wordpress content with the hugo site. after a week or so of going over the dev site with the merged content, i changed the dns to point to the hugo deployment today. i used lonekorean’s export to markdown, which was agnostic of hugo and mostly worked except that (1) it didn’t export videos (2) where i had image names that were the same in wordpress (i.e. wordpress allows me to have unique posts with unique images with identical names like “image1.png”, these were overwritten during the export and had to be manually retrieved). ...