Paloma Kop

2023 Year in Review

December 31, 2023

Portrait of me in front of a scenic overlook

I've never done this sort of post before, but so much has happened this year that I feel a need to take one last look over my shoulder before 2023 is over. This year, I made twice the average number of posts in the "news" section of my website, because this year has been full of activities. Here are some of them:

  • Made myself a new artist website (this very place you're visiting now!) with hand-coded HTML and CSS; it took a long time but it was very fun and I learned a lot

  • Helped start Polyphase Portal, a cooperatively-run online educational space with our own self-hosted infrastructure (running open-source software for our website, video classrooms, chat, and wiki)

  • Attended my third vipassana meditation retreat, and finished a seven month, 200-hour yoga teacher training, which not only prepared me to teach others but also helped me evolve my own yoga practice

  • Left my corporate software development job of the last 5 years, and managed to scrape by for 8 months thus far without a "day job"

  • Side note: despite being part of a mass media conglomerate, my team there was small and scrappy, and we did some cool stuff together. Hats off to the great folks I worked with.

  • Left Brooklyn, where I've lived off and on for much of my adult life, and wrapped up Phase Space, which was run out of the basement of our apartment there

  • Bought a 1988 Chevy van with Andrei and spent 5 months traveling across the US together

  • Did 3 audiovisual performances and 2 artist residencies

  • Co-led 12 in-person video art workshops and demonstrations across the country

  • Camped in many national parks and other public lands, experienced many different biomes and landscapes; learned to identify a bunch of new plants

  • Returned to Catskill Mountains of upstate NY, where I grew up and then left 12 years ago, with a new appreciation for its vibrant forests

  • Started — and am still starting — a small business: Moon Ark Studio (with 4 clients so far and counting)

This year has been alternately fun, exciting, hectic, exhausting, and immensely fulfilling in a way I have not quite experienced before. And the way things are going, it seems there will be many more adventures in store in the coming year. Thanks for following along, and I wish you a happy old year, in the last moments before a new one begins.