REALITY ORP Performance at Ely Center

September 17, 2025 | Permalink

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.

REALITY ORP Performance at ChaNorth

July 22, 2025 | Permalink

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:

REALITY ORP Performance in Brooklyn

June 8, 2025 | Permalink

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:

Coding Retreat at Recurse Center

April 13, 2025 | Permalink

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.

🌐 Visit this link to explore it: https://lab.palomakop.tv

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).

🌐 Visit this link to try it: https://subtle.cards

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.

March Shows in NYC

April 1, 2025 | Permalink

I played two shows in NYC in March!

The first one was on March 23 at The Living Gallery in Brooklyn, where I performed visuals in an A/V collaboration with Lee Tusman. The show was organized by Proto, a.k.a. Imaginary Prisons from Worcester, MA (and a friend from the fediverse!) All the sets besides ours were by Massachusetts-based experimental/noise folks, and they were a lot of fun. (My favorite moment was when Proto played the spoons.)

The second show I played was on March 31 at Union Docs in Ridgewood, where I performed a solo AV set. The event was part of a series called Women Innovating Sound Experiences, which highlights women/non-binary artists working in experimental sound & media arts, and is curated by fellow artist Jenn Grossman.

This installment of the series was themed around Audiovisual Alchemy, with performances by Maria Takeuchi and Melissa F. Clarke, and a screening by Rachel Efruss. After the main event, we all sat down together for a Q&A with the audience about our processes, and I talked a little about my system for live generative visuals.

I really enjoyed playing alongside these wonderful artists, and the crowd was great, with lots of familiar faces. Big thanks to Jenn Grossman, Mike Clemow, and Jacob McCoy for shooting lots of photos and videos.

"How did you make those visuals?"

Since a few people were curious about my current live video performance setup, I made a flowchart of the process I used for both of these shows. I've been noodling around with it for a while (since I started using Resolume last year), and I keep finding new tricks and smoothing out quirks. I feel like I am able to make the most of both my analog and digital tools while also avoiding the pitfalls of either. Also, it's compact enough for me to carry everything at once — at least for short distances.

Footage I have pre-recorded includes:

• Footage I shot while walking around
• Water, ferrofluid and other liquids
• Slit-scan processed imagery
• Video feedback created with cameras and analog video mixers

Digital effects I use on all layers:

• Brightness
• Contrast
• Blur (amount & distance)
• Saturation

I use these effects specifically for the framebuffer feedback:

• Time delay
• X and Y displacement
• Invert
• Sharpen (used in conjuntion with blur to create Turing/reaction diffusion patterns)
• Hue rotation