computation + me

I love projects that make visible experiences, emotions, and/or relationships that are normally opaque from the outside! I love experiences that reorient their audience to what they think commonplace channels of sharing information like a browser or a theatre are, and what those channels are capable of (and are themselves thoughtfully engaging those channels’ strengths + limitations!). I love work that asks big questions it can’t answer without audience-participants’ input. I love tools and art and educational experiences that leave me more curious about the world and myself and the people around me than when I began.

I’m curious about building tools that increase friction instead of eliminating it — I’m interested in exploring inefficiencies that I think are actually beneficial to being human, and my own needs around spatializing and seeking/creating differentiating “textures” in order to best process new information as someone with ADHD. I love working with narrative storytelling, playful approaches to education, poetic language, and song, and am curious about exploring these modes of expression through code. Overall I want to make work that slows people down to a human pace, that encourages imagination (especially for adults), and that facilitates audience-participants connecting more deeply with themselves and/or their world(s).

The “waiting room” for anonymous animal by Everest Pipkin, a meditative experience about presence and connection that takes place off & online every hour, and was intentionally built using tech that’s slowly breaking down.

Max Bittker’s visual connection engine *River,* a search experience that feels to me like sifting through a thrift store for the perfect find, or going to the beach and coming home with a bucket full of cool rocks

YOUARENOWHERE by Andrew Schneider is one of the most arresting, moving things I’ve ever seen; I knew I was in a black box theatre, and I also would have believed a hole had been ripped in the space-time continuum. I think I saw this show 11 times in total — incidentally also how I learned about ITP for the first time!

An in-progress snapshot of Franny Choi’s Cuttings from Midst Press, an online poetry journal that publishes timelapses of each poem’s drafting process.

A screenshot from *Citizen Sleeper,* one of my favorite games/story experiences of all time — definitely built with software! But at its core a series of simple systems combined complexly: probability, branching, text, and an evocative, relatively simple visual design that intentionally leaves a lot of big, interesting space for player imagination to fill in.

portrait sketch

Me, more or less :)

Working on the sketch was really fun! The instant feedback from the web editor was so enjoyable for trial-and-error-ing my way through the different functions we focused on this week:

• I started out guesstimating all of the coordinates and dimensions for my shapes (fun, helpful only to a point), but the longer I worked on it, the more it felt better to actually start mathing out the relationships between different shapes (less fun, more satisfying!).
• I noticed myself forming practices around how to fine tune my shapes when they didn’t draw how I wanted them to, or my ideas for them changed: changing individual arguments by large amounts to confirm how it affected the output, and then modifying the appropriate arguments by smaller and smaller increments until I hit what I was looking for.
• Making several of the same images in different sizes was a fun challenge, and it also made me realize that choosing easily divisible coordinates and ratios could be a huge help (as opposed to following my instinct to divide everything into quarters/increments of 25 — intuitive, but a little cumbersome if I wanted to increase or decrease size by other %).
• It took a long time to internalize 255 as the maximum amount for color, opacity, etc.; I kept inputting “90” for opacity of fill(); and then being confused when it was so much more transparent than 100% (aka 255) opacity.
• Adding & subtracting distance correctly from X and Y coordinates to move the location of different shapes was also tricky; internalizing how Y works is going to take some practice.
• ARCS! Radians were not at all intuitive for me! Slowing down the drafting process really helped; I turned the auto-refresh off in the web editor and started testing myself, changing arguments one at a time and taking the time to predict what was going to happen. It still doesn’t feel intuitive yet, but taking the time to play really helped me progress here.

Really enjoyed playing with transparency in the early stages of this assignment, which only semi-survived into my final portrait.

Also had fun with the relationship to the edge of the canvas, and my own assumptions about where shapes “should” go or what a portrait “should” look like.

Best error message I got all week — oops!