In starting to make some kind of something that talks I wanted to emulate one of my favorite browser games (is it a game?) ClickClickClick. But I found that I didn’t know enough about “The DOM” to get much of my foot in the door without a bunch of research time. So instead I went an easier route, dipping into the familiar warmth of P5. I took a project that I had given a bit of a start to before, a little game about waiting around.…

My first thought walking up to the Central Park West was “I hate this goddamn statue”. Teddy Roosevelt, the magnanimous colonizer, leading the Othered literal lower-thans toward civilization, away from inhumanity. The statue recontextualizes a history of violence, slavery, and cultural erasure into one of progress, benevolence, and grace. This was my first time seeing it in person and it feels like a visceral affront, hard to look at, hard to stomach.…

You can download the slides here Some Useful Command Line Commands man - opens the manual for a command pwd - prints the working directory, i.e. shows you where you are ls - lists the files and directories in a given directory. default is working directory cd - changes directory cat - prints the contents of a file echo - prints exactly what you give it ssh - secure shell, creates a secure shell connection to another machine touch - creates a file mkdir - makes a new directory rm - deletes a file (remove), or a directory when given the flag -r mv - moves a file to another directory, can be used to rename a file cp - copies a file nano - default command line text editor | - pipes the results of one command to another In this exercise you will mostly be using ssh, ls, cat, and cd…

https://vimeo.com/289321256 That a light bulb turns on is a horrendous miracle. Each and every electron that passes through the bulb has to be generated at almost the exact same second as the bulb is turned on, and if too many or too few electrons are created and pushed out through the electric grid the whole system can fail. The reliability of the entire system is founded on the bedrock of federal regulation, the prime directive of which is that THE LIGHTS MUST REMAIN ON.…

https://vimeo.com/289321256 That a light bulb turns on is a horrendous miracle. Each and every electron that passes through the bulb has to be generated at almost the exact same second as the bulb is turned on, and if too many or too few electrons are created and pushed out through the electric grid the whole system can fail. The reliability of the entire system is founded on the bedrock of federal regulation, the prime directive of which is that THE LIGHTS MUST REMAIN ON.…

Part of my interest in digital avatars stems from their existence for me as a place of identity building and actualization. Being able to create and visualize new images of myself has been empowering and intoxicating force (additionally for several years, until I was banned, I [consciously and intentionally, rather than through workaday self-curation] treated my Facebook as a sandbox identity separate from my physical meat body, which I think made me both alluring and confusing to acquaintances).…

I really like gesture controls, nothing makes me feel more like a technopagan completing a ritual than controlling something on my screen just by waving my hands around, so I decided that I wanted to control the paddle in just such a manner. Initially in order to make some kind of gestural control system I wanted to put a camera on a raspberry pi and train it to recognize particular hand shapes, but that sounded like overkill and I missed the Arduino IDE too much not to take advantage of the opportunity to use it again.…

I have been thinking about a completely automated conference talk since I saw Hito Steyerl and Wendy Chun give a talk at The Guggenheim for Hito’s book launch in January. Much of the content of their conversation had to do with economies of labor in art, economies of presence in art, and of the demands on artists and their time and of the place of the ‘artist talk’ within the art labor economy.…

For this assignment I fell off the generative text pathway and onto the well worn path of the media artist: bad generative music compositions with shiny new tools. On my Github feed I noticed that Rebecca Fiebrink had recently created a new repository called word2vec2osc and I realized that I could use word vectors plugged into Wekinator to train a bunch of sine wave generators to turn bodies of text into musical compositions.…

I don’t like working over long breaks because - well - instead of making one finished project I have three projects that are halfway done. The first is the most complete but also the simplest, with Cambridge Analytica so in the news I couldn’t resist doing something with one of my all time favorite videos, their talk at the Concordia Summit in 2016. I’m surprised it took so long for their story to break.…