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A few months ago, a
friend
forwarded me an email of an open call to
Diagram Your Practice. It was published by
ILSSA, which stands for Impractical Labor in Service of the
Speculative Arts. Well, I don't need much of an excuse to make
a diagram, so of course I decided to participate.
I was also excited to learn of the existence of ILSSA, which
describes itself as a union for reflective creative practice,
focusing on the immaterial working conditions of
their members. All are welcome to join, which involves
subscribing to their
listserv
and mailing them a physical letter. They are based not too far
from me in Connecticut, and the
printed materials
they publish are very beautiful, mainly created with
letterpress and risograph. It's no surprise that the main
operators are a book artist and a professor of graphic design.
(Also, their website is a testament to the elegance of minimal
CSS.)
In their open call to submit diagrams, they invite us to:
Diagram your creative practice. Consider practices,
processes, methods, spaces, tools, materials, sources,
influences, histories, places, contexts, communities,
resources... the result may be simple or complex.
Diagram your practice as it currently is. If it is
helpful, consider also speculating on how you would like
it to be.
The end is in the means: what will you discover about your
practice & your process through diagramming it?
The original deadline for the diagrams has passed, but it is
porous and currently extended to March 15, if anyone is
interested in participating. You can view the full open call
here.
For my submission, I drew a diagram in fine-tip marker on an
acrylic-painted sheet of 8 * 12 inch, 3/32" thickness
lauan plywood. I started with the main nodes:
Making art
Documentation
Collaboration
Contemplation
Administration
...And then worked my way out from them / between them. Using
a piece of material with a limited size kept me from going too
far with this, but I could imagine continuing to explode this
diagram until it was the size of a wall, over a longer time
span.
I think the most interesting part that came out of this is the
Venn diagram describing tools made by me vs.
tools made by others. Making tools is a big part of
my art practice, but that can mean a lot of things; most tools
are made with (or within) other tools. I want to write more
about this at some point.
Anyway, my diagram and member letter are in the mail now, and
I hope they arrive safely. I look forward to seeing what
future open calls ILSSA will send out in the future.
I've been meaning to write a year-in-review blog post for 2025
since before the new year. Now, it's 18 days into 2026. That
is approximately 1/20th of a year. In other words, 20 of these
makes 1 year. That feels weird to think about!
I think that I put off writing this until now because,
subconsciously, a part of me did not want to review this past
year. Some things happened that were very tough, both in my
own life and in the world in general. I won't go into detail
about political or economic situations in the United States in
2025, because you either are already aware of them, or can
find out from many other sources. But some of them did affect
me personally in various ways.
Meanwhile, in the comparatively microscopic scale of my own
life, I moved to a new city and executed a job search in a
less-than-ideal market. Then, in the fall, I experienced the
death of a friend, a week of incapacitating illness, and the
engine failure of a vehicle, all within a very short span of
time. While these things were difficult for me, I don't lead
with them to lament, but rather, to acknowledge what happened
and to hold myself with extra gentleness, and appreciate that
I am still here, enjoying life and creating things every day.
Even though I procrastinated this blog post for weeks, a part
of me also knew that it would be helpful to look back and
recall the things that went well over the past year. So I'll
write a bit about those things below.
At the beginning of the year, I spent six weeks doing a
coding retreat at
Recurse Center, where I took time to further develop my programming
skills, met lots of really nice and smart people, and built
a
virtual tarot card app
as well as a variety of little experimental things.
Later in the year, coasting on the high of my programming
work at Recurse Center, I built myself a custom minimalist
journaling app, which runs on a tiny raspberry pi server on
my desk.
I delved further into self-hosting, as well as home
automation, with some more projects that I definitely spent
way too much time on:
Repurposed an e-ink reader as a wall-mounted clock and
live calendar/weather display, through the power of
linux and python.
Started running home assistant, a very powerful open
source home automation app, on a "server" (old
computer) in my home.
Established direct local control of various cheap and
miscellaneous wifi-controlled light bulbs throughout our
home. (No more relying on random companies' cloud
servers and abandonware.)
Set up a network of small battery-powered buttons and
switches, running on the Zigbee radio protocol, which
are linked into Home Assistant to control things in our
home.
Started a new job working at an
art studio, where I learned about (and helped develop) unique
processes for creating mathematical patterns and translating
things between the physical and the digital. Also improved
my skills with woodworking, which I brought into my home
life by making some nice furniture.
The people I work for adopted a puppy named Thor, and I
watch him all the time, so I consider him a little bit my
dog too. I love him and it's so cool to watch him grow up.
Settled into our new home base of New Haven, Connecticut,
met some lovely new people, and set up a home studio that I
really enjoy working in.
Did 4 collaborative performances as
Reality Orp with my partner (in both life and the
band) Andrei. I also did one solo audiovisual performance
and one in collaboration with fellow artist
Lee Tusman. So I played 6 shows in total.
I also did 3 talks/workshops, and had one of my video art
pieces screened in Croatia.
Read 17 books in total. 6 of them were from
The Expanse series by James S. A. Corey, which I
ravenously demolished all of starting in late 2024. And 3
were from the Divine Cities trilogy by Robert
Jackson Bennett.
Watched 90 movies. Um... Wow. Andrei and I have been on a
kick of watching tons of movies together over the past year.
It's a lot of fun.
Started a membership at my local makerspace, where I used
the laser cutter, wood shop, and printmaking studio.
Made and sent out 5 editions of Mystery Objects for
zine club. I also made several
e-zines.
Built some new pages for this website, including
my links page and a new section called
notes.
Moved one of my main email addresses off of Google, and
migrated to a custom email domain, to avoid future lock-in.
It was a lot of work but I finally took the time to do it.
Made a deck of cards of
my creative ideas. This
project straddled the new year, but I'm including it anyway!
Started a biweekly music collaboration project with a
friend, for which I've made 3 songs so far.
Spent time with people I love.
Sometimes, what we say no to can be just as important, or even
more important, than what we do. Whether it's to take time to
rest, or to make more time to work on things I care about,
not doing things is a skill I am learning to value
more and more. So while I'm proud of the things I've done, I
also want to recognize, and even appreciate, the blank spaces
in this list that only I can see: things I chose not to do at
all. I want to be intentional about how I spend my time, and
make sure it aligns with my values. And I think that, over
time, I'm moving in the right direction in that regard.
OK, that's enough reviewing for now. Time to come back to the
present, and see what comes next. Onward!
This past Tuesday,
Andrei
and I made what is becoming a yearly pilgrimmage to Hamilton
College in upstate New York, to give a workshop in analog
video for our friend
Anna Oxygen's class, TV Club. Anna is a wonderful, wacky
performance artist and teaches realtime digital art with
weekly livestreams created and performed by the students. For
their final week of class, we brought in a variety of analog
video synths and effects and demonstrated them live on stream,
then handed them over to the students and embraced the chaos
that ensued.
Our trip home the next day was delayed by a blizzard that
swept across the region, forcing us to take refuge at Crazy
Otto's Diner in Herkimer, NY. Thankfully, we eventually made
it home unscathed later that day.
Find some stills from our live analog video explorations with
the students below.
Since I launched my Zine Club project
in spring of 2024, I've mailed out a total of over 200 Mystery
Object packages to people in 8 countries. It's been a fun (and
sometimes challenging) project that helps keep me creating
weird art and brainstorming new ideas regularly.
The whole point of the Mystery Objects is that no one who
subscribes to them knows what the next one will be until they
open their bimonthly package. Last November, after sending out
the first few Objects of the project, I made a
reveal post
where I shared everything that had been sent so far. Well,
it's been almost a year since then, so I am sharing another
batch of Objects that I've made since then... Here is the
reveal!
Support Weird Art is the official slogan of Zine
Club. So of course I had to make something to let people
spread the word. These holographic stickers seemed pretty
effective, and they have the bonus of being kind of weird
themselves.
Interdependence is a card from my
tarot of subtle forms
deck. For this Object, I laser-cut and engraved the design
into wood. This was my first time using the laser cutter at my
local makerspace, and I was quite happy with the results.
I love silkscreen because it allows for printing with light
ink on a dark background (a difficult task for most other
print methods). However, before moving to New Haven and
joining the makerspace, it had been a long time since I'd had
access to screen printing equipment. This is the first print I
made after gaining access to the print shop there, and I am
super excited to do more with it soon. The design of this
print is a still from some footage I recorded of ferrofluids,
and it's titled Magnetic Maze.
This is a fridge magnet! The abstract design is based on a
very weird analog video feedback recording called
Morphogenesis I, which is part of my
Experiments in Public
series. I'll embed it below so you can see the origins:
Lastly, I made this small print on textured gray cardstock,
with an insert of diffraction grating in the cutout of the
eye. That is the kind of thin plastic film that splits apart
wavelengths of light and makes everything look like rainbows!
(Miniature Venus de Milo statue not included.)
To current members of Zine Club, I appreciate your support and
participation and, occasionally, patience. Thanks to you, Zine
Club has existed for 20 months and continues to be a source of
fun and mystery to both the members and the maker!
If getting strange, mysterious packages at regular intervals
sounds up your alley, check out the zine club webpage for more
info: palomakop.tv/zine-club. I'm
currently working very hard to bring you the next mystery
object in a few weeks, so it's a good time to get on board!
And even if you don't sign up right now, you can find out what
the next batch of mystery objects were in... *checks watch* a
year! Assuming that the pattern of these reveals continues.
Thanks for reading, and remember, however you choose to do
so... be sure to SUPPORT WEIRD ART!
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!
