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.
November 20th was the release of Elmet Brae, a
community compilation of soundscapes/ambient/noise/drone from
Merveilles Town
members and friends. It includes an ambient piece I recorded
while traveling in the national forests of the northwestern US,
titled
Artemisia Grove.
The online community of Merveilles Town has been a calm,
creative haven for me on the internet, and a place of mutual
inspiration and encouragement, since I joined the mastodon
server in 2022. It has been lovely to listen to everyone's
musical contributions to this compilation and appreciate the
town's unique personality and atmosphere.
Shout outs to
Orllewin
for organizing the project,
Bad Diode
for mastering,
Rostiger
for the visual artwork, and to all the sonic artists and
musicians who contributed.
During the last week of October,
Andrei
and I did an artist residency at
Coaxial Arts
in Los Angeles as
Phase Shift Collective. During our our time there, we created an
installation/environment which also served as our stage and
setup for a live performance, titled Synthetic Forest.
The concept was inspired by the time we spent camping in
national forests during our five-month road trip across the US.
Throughout our travels, we made video and sound recordings in
nature, which we sampled and remixed in the performance. We
wanted to create an environment which combined materials from
the natural landscape with the synthetic elements of our
electronic sound and video processing techniques. In our
installation, we used real and synthetic plants and moss, chalk
on the floor, overhead projectors, CRT screens, and a fog
machine.
Andrei performed live video using a combination of liquid light
show techniques, camera feedback, footage from our walks in the
forest, and
gravity_waaaves, a video processor/frame buffer device they created.
I performed quadraphonic sound with field recording samples, a
foley box containing dried leaves, bells, a kalimba and an AM
radio, synths, and granular and spatial processing. It was my
first time performing music in quad, so it was exciting to
create an immersive sonic landscape with Coaxial's multichannel
speaker setup.
I've known about Coaxial for a long time, and it was really cool
to finally get to be there in person. Many thanks to KA, Chloe,
Eva, and Brock for their help and hospitality. We look forward
to visiting again in the future!
On October 23, we did a
Phase Shift
artist talk/workshop at
California Institute for the Arts
in Santa Clarita, CA. We visited a class called Creative
Technology Forum with professor Josephine Shetty.
Andrei
and I took turns showing some of our individual artwork and
collaborations, and then the students tried out some of our
video feedback setups in an interactive demo at the end.
I was excited to see that the students in this class were very
engaged with their own unique projects and art practices. They
asked insightful questions which showed that what we were doing
was relevant to their own work. I was impressed with the level
of initiative and self-direction of the students, and the level
of creative cross-pollination that seemed to be taking place
within the class.
Many thanks to Josephine for having us in her class and to
Michael Bailey, audiovisual artist and CalArts student, for
inviting us!
On October 19, we led a
Phase Shift
workshop and artist talk at
Indexical
in Santa Cruz, with special guests
Allen Riley
and
Denise Gallant. It was wonderful to see Allen, who is a good friend and
former Brooklyn neighbor, now working on his PhD at UC Santa
Cruz. It was also my first time meeting Denise, who has been
working with video synthesis since the 1970s!
Michael Masaru Flora, my former classmate at Alfred and fellow audiovisual artist,
helped us set up the event. He's now the Executive Director at
Indexical! I'd heard lots of good things about this venue, so it
was cool to finally get to be there in person.
We had a great turnout. Most of the folks who came were somehow
associated with UC Santa Cruz. We had a record number of video
game developers. The event was a combination of an artist talk
and a workshop, beginning with each of us sharing about our art
practice and demonstrating some techniques, and ending with an
interactive opportunity to explore our tools.
Much gratitude to Allen, Denise, and Michael. We look forward to
visiting Santa Cruz again!
