On October 3,
REALITY ORP performed live over
video chat for the
Internet Archive's ongoing series, titled:
Essential Music: Concerts from Home. This series
began during the pandemic in 2020, and the idea was to kick
off each virtual staff meeting with a short live performance
by a different artist. Due to extreme popularity among the
staff, the series has continued through to today.
You can check out a recording of our set below, and eventually
it will also be on the
Internet Archive's collection of past installments of the
series. And they are also looking for more artists to join, so if
you'd be interested in doing a short set for them over Zoom,
consider responding to their
open call!
I am a big fan of the Internet Archive. I did a small
volunteer project for them a while ago and know some of the
people who work there, and have visited both their main
office, and one of their warehouses, which was pretty wild to
see. (We even randomly accidentally attended their in-person
staff luncheon two years ago...)
They are a non-profit and have done some great work, including
making it possible to
play old video games in the browser. It was a pleasure to get to perform for some very nice
people. Many thanks to
Kevin
for the invitation!
Last Thursday, Andrei and I performed again as
REALITY ORP at another
Weird Music Night
event. This one was New Haven, which is where we live and also
where that event series normally takes place.
Ely Center
is moving locations soon, so this will be the last Weird Music
Night in their current space, an ornate, crumbling mansion
with carved banisters. I am glad that we got to play in that
space before they moved. Because there are so many rooms,
everyone usually gets to set up in their own area and then the
audience just moves from one room to the next when another act
begins. Compared to hasty set changes in cramped spaces in
Brooklyn where everyone has to move their tables around or
break down gear right after playing, it is quite luxurious,
and makes for a fun experience as each new space becomes
activated.
Our friend
Kit Young
also performed as New Haven Noise Machine, a collaborative
project with his friend Tryx. They live-scored a bunch of
video portraits that Kit shot at the
Video Sync
event last month in Portland, OR (which Andrei helped
organize!)
Some local friends came out, as well as a couple who came from
neighboring towns in Connecticut. I was given a CBD seltzer
and a slice of very diversely topped pizza. Many thanks to
John O'Donnell
for hosting and organizing again, and to Merlin and the
amazing crew of Ely Center elves for all their work and
energy.
Below, you can find some artifacts, including a video
recording of (most of) our set, and some images. I actually
remembered to snap a few photos, possibly mostly because I
wanted to show off my outfit in which I dressed as much as
possible like my own visuals.
This past Saturday, Andrei and I performed as
REALITY ORP on an outdoor stage
at the
ChaNorth
Residency Space in Upstate NY. As part of Upstate Arts Week,
ChaNorth held an edition of
Weird Music Night, a usually-New-Haven-based showcase, organized and hosted by
John O'Donnell. At this edition, there were eight total acts running
throughout the evening, including Hudson-based artist duo
Spyrodon. On the same site, there were also open studios for the
current artists in residence at ChaNorth, and a sculpture
exhibition in the surrounding woods curated by
Paradice Palace
featuring a cool
sculpture
by our friend Jonathan Sims.
We had a great time performing and hanging out with friends in
the field as the sun went down. It was the sweet kind of
summer show where people are sitting on blankets and there are
random dogs running around among the audience. We were
requested to park our van in the grass right next to the stage
for Aesthetic Reasons.
Below is a short edit of some highlights from our set (or
check out the full-length video recording on
Youtube
or
Peertube!)
We played after dark, and with the lack of outdoor lighting
most of our photos were unsalvageable, but we did get this pic
of John as a ghost in front of our van:
This past Friday, Andrei and I drove down to Greenpoint to
perform an audiovisual set as REALITY ORP at a DIY venue
called Light and Sound Design. The show was organized
by
Ka Baird, and featured fellow audiovisual artist duo
MSHR.
The show went extremely well, and lots of friends came. The
people who ran the venue were super nice, and the space was
very well set up, with lots of comfortable seating and even a
few foam pads and cushions in the very front for people to
watch the show while lying down.
Our friend Alec
was running the quadrophonic sound setup.
After we performed, with Andrei on music (electronics, synths,
percussion, and processed vocals) and me on video (modular
synth, feedback, oscillators, cameras, etc.), I lay down in
the front row to experience MSHR's set. They are currently
touring with two sets: a hardware-based music set, which we
saw them perform in New Haven last week, and an audiovisual
set, which they performed at this show, so we got to see both.
Their performance was really great — though I don't have much
documentation to share here, you can view a past version of
the same set on their Peertube:
MSHR - Network Entity
Thanks to
Jonathan's camerawork, we have a full recording of our set. Watch it
below:
In February and March, I did a six-week programming retreat at
Recurse Center. The way I've described this to people is that it's like an
artist residency, but for coding (although you can also make
code-based art!) Recurse Center, a.k.a. RC, has a revolving
roster of participants who join a "batch" for six or
twelve weeks. Every six weeks, some people start a batch,
others finish one, and yet others continue on for another six
weeks. One can participate in-person in Downtown Brooklyn, or
remotely — or any combination of the two. (I did a combination
so I could spend some time at home in New Haven, and some
staying with friends in NYC).
Inspired by the open-ended learning methods of
Unschooling, there is no formal curriculum. Instead, participants
self-organize and pursue personal goals, while being
encouraged to collaborate and discuss their projects. Everyone
who joins a batch already has some programming experience, so
it's up to you how you want to spend your time: you might
focus on developing new skills or strengthening existing ones,
or build a project that is useful or whimsical. I had
interesting conversations every day with very excited and
thoughtful people, which I think is one of the best ways to
learn.
During my batch, I worked on two main projects:
The Lab - a new, text-adventure themed
section of my website that houses various web-based
experiments. I built it with Eleventy (the same static site
generator I used to make this site!), and it includes an
assortment of animations and interactive elements made with
P5.js, Three.js, and fragment shaders.
This project was really an excuse to just experiment and play
with web-based media and see what happened. I included some
elements that I created in pair programming sessions. I'm
interested in playing around more with web-based animations
and the <canvas> element; as experiment
more in the future, I'll add more "rooms."
Subtle Cards - a web app for pulling virtual
tarot card spreads. It's a full-stack app with a React
frontend (deployed on Netlify), Tailwind CSS, a Flask API
(deployed on Heroku), and Supabase as the database. I
batch-edited the tarot card images with
Imagemagick
(one of my favorite tools), created card animations with
framer-motion, and used
Random.org's true-random number API to randomize the tarot card pulls.
Each spread of cards has a unique URL. There are also dynamic
moon-phase icons (using
SunCalc).
Building Subtle Cards was the largest project of my
batch. I love building static websites, but I wanted to push
myself to build a more dynamic web app with modern standard
frontend tools. It took me longer than expected (I thought I
could finish it in one week), but I was proud of the result,
and happy that I finished in time to share the project in the
final presentations session of my batch. I'm
particularly proud of the way the cards animate on screen,
simulating that moment of pause in a real tarot card pull. For
page transitions, I used the new browser standard
view transition API, which is not yet implemented in Firefox, but provides a
nice progressive enhancement for Chrome and Safari.
I learned a lot while working on this, and I am now very ready
to move on to new projects (and to try other frameworks
besides React), but there are two things I'd like to add at
some point: an animation for the background of the splash
page, and the ability to pull cards from additional tarot
decks. (I deliberately built the backend with this in mind,
and I plan to add some decks of my own design when they are
finished!)
Of course, working on my own projects was only one aspect of
my Recurse Center experience. I also participated in lots of
group events, coffee chats, pairing sessions, and general
banter. I joked with someone that RC is basically a bunch of
people who enjoy explaining things to each other.
Since I had my video equipment with me in the city (to play
the shows I wrote about in my last post!) during my final week
of batch, I brought it in to show it to people during Demo
Palooza, an event where people set up interactive projects to
show each other.
Conveniently, there was already a CRT monitor in RC's retro
computing corner, so I brought in my modular synth and my
custom-mapped controller for Resolume, and spent a fun
afternoon demo-ing video synthesis as people rotated through
my station. After over an hour of this, I finally also got the
chance to walk around and check out everyone else's projects.
(There were far too many to list here, but seeing and
discussing what other people were working on was one of the
most fascinating and inspiring aspects of the retreat.)
(Note: the retro computers visible in the background were not
part of my setup — though they certainly contributed to the
vibe.)
As I mentioned, many events at RC are organized by the
participants. During the first weeks of my batch, I frequently
heard people mention their use of AI coding tools, but I
noticed a lack of critical conversation around how to engage
with these tools in a thoughtful and ethical way. The internet
is brimming with articles and discourse on the topic, but much
of it is almost pure fluff, serving either to overhype the
technologies, or to proclaim them as the source of our doom as
a species (another side of the same coin). Because of my
irritation with the popular conversation around AI, I had
previously avoided the topic, but during my batch, I felt it
was time to start engaging with it in a more deliberate way.
This led me to organize a weekly meeting called
Critical AI Discussion Group.
These meetings provided a space to voice our concerns, share
anecdotes and experiences related to AI (in the workplace,
classroom, etc.), and discuss practical matters — such as the
tech debt accrued by using large swaths of generated code —
and philosophical matters — such as the nature of creativity
and authorship of one's own work. I facilitated four meetings
before stepping down at the end of my batch. However, other
members of RC have jumped in to continue the meetings, with a
rotating facilitator each week, so I've continued to attend as
an alum.
Overall, I had an amazing time during my six weeks at Recurse
Center. I think their open-ended approach to learning was
perfect for me, since I'm very self-motivated. I really did
feel like I became a "dramatically better
programmer," which is one of RC's stated goals. Now that
I've built my first full-stack web app from scratch, I feel
much more confident as a developer. I feel empowered to
continue programming, to really commit to it as my main
profession, and to continue building interesting personal
projects. And last but not least, I met a lot of cool,
curious, creative people. I look forward to continuing to
participate in the RC alumni community, and hopefully doing
another batch at some point when I have time.
