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. ...

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). ...

the thing about visualization is: it doesn’t just show results, it can also affect your behavior (see also: damage meters in MMOs) thinking about how to represent the work that i do and how it’s connected (sparsely or not, in ways i don’t quite understand) let’s say a graph/connective-node visualization in 5d where 4d are the categories in this blog and the 5th d is time. would my practice change or would the shape of that graph change as i tried to modify its appearance as a whole? ...

i had about 12 hours to make a skirt for f.’s set. i wanted to make a simple piece (her prompts: “femme, weird, dark”) that was low/no-sew for her performance at this local lesbian club night. we had a piece of large scrap in the leather pile and this required one piece of asymmetrical leather. it felt a bit irresponsible to not pattern this and instead attempt to prototype in the piece of leather itself, but this kind of shortcut is frequently how i overcome the inertia to make something quickly despite the risk. ...

as leeann’s been publishing a bit more, i mentioned i wanted to do some updated author photos (since i did her first author photos awhile ago, when i was a much more novice photographer, and wanted to update them). tried to do some projection work here; i think the flatness of the projector was not very flattering to the subject’s face (or maybe it has to be pointed at just the right way, to get shadows to fall in just the right way). ...