Drawing Club

I’ve met some amazing people as a result of my fifth year at the UR. I think that the fifth year was really my best year in terms of learning and growth. But right now, I want to talk about one particular individual I met in January who has made a big impression on me: Cary Peppermint.

A brief introduction:

Possibly most important to the next year that I plan to spend in Rochester, NY, I am Cary's Senior Studio Assistant and Developer, and have the opportunity to work with him and his art collective, ecoarttech. We spent April and May putting together an installation for 319 Scholes, which was part of the Bushwick Open Studios festival in Brooklyn, NY. We put on a show there called BASECAMP.EXE + Indeterminate Hikes, during which I learned a lot and made a few valuable contacts. (More on this event soon.)

More recently, I had the pleasure to join Cary and a group of artists, musicians, and friends for a vegan potluck and drawing party, where we ate, drank wine, and talked on a big blanket in Cary's backyard. As the evening bugs started to emerge, we collected in the living room and Cary improvised a few subjects for us to draw: a plant and logs, his dog, and, eventually, two members of the group.

I've been interested in learning more about drawing for a long time, but never felt like I had the skill to start. However, this party made me realize that I just need to practice. By the time we finished the last drawing, I was actually feeling somewhat proud of my work, and I'd like to share it with you. This is Genevieve, the last subject of the night.

After this, I got excited to spend time practicing and learning. Once I feel a little more comfortable, I want to learn about digital painting and drawing. And maybe once I start to get a hold on that, I want to start tackling the video game pipe dream I've been cooking up.

And, I apologize, but more about that later as well. :)

Printmaking; Experience and Truth

I just started taking a Printmaking class this semester, and it's amazing. As a person who spends a good deal of his energy using computers, writing code, and working in virtual spaces, it's really great to create something tangible. And printmaking is exceptionally tangible, because, as the creator, I am involved completely from start to finish (except for creating the paper, that is). You have to create the composition, transfer the image (in color stages) to your printing material, realize the transferred portion on your material (carve, trace, etc), create a color, ink your material, print, repeat! It's hands-on, and wonderfully relaxing. Class is just shy of three hours, but it speeds by.

We worked first with linoleum mounted on wood, which both of the prints pictured here were created from. Neither of these camera phone photos are great quality, and I'll post better ones once I finally get them back, but it gives a good idea.

Both of these pieces are about experience and perception. In fact, that's what a lot of the work I'm doing right now centers around, whether printmaking, digital, or music. In the last year or so, I've become really interested in consciousness and experience in particular. My personal experience used to be completely hinged on some kind of absolute truth, something scientific and exact. I understood that human perception is subjective, but felt that, behind it all, there must be something absolutely right that we could discover through science. Over the past few years, I've been letting go of that—not necessarily because I'm less interested in science or because I think there's no way to find truth in it—because I don't think it really matters. That view point has only caused arguments, misunderstandings, and judgements. It's not doing me any good, especially when my truth doesn't mesh with another person's: because we've both got stock in our own truths, there's no point in trying to push mine on another person. Let it go; there must be something more important here.

I've always been amazed (now in a positive way) at how differently people can look at, assess, identify with, or otherwise perceive a situation. A very simple example (and a relevant one for Rochester, NY) is how people feel about and deal with the cold. Some hate it, some love it, some are indifferent, a few even seem to ignore it, wearing clothing that seems completely out of place by most people's standards. And that's just barely scratching the surface, because you could probably find someone somewhere that would have a completely different view for just about everything you perceive.

So, building on this theme, for my second project I wanted to have a piece with no right-side-up. It's not quite finished in this picture, but both of the shorter ends could be considered the top: one is an ocean scene and the other a mountain scene, both abstract and non-literal enough for the illusion of two tops to work. It's a reminder that everyone will see things differently, and that that's awesome. One person may see the mountains as the top, another might see the ocean as the top, and maybe somebody else will see something I didn't even intend.

End of Days String Band

I am currently the Production Manger at the student-run radio station, WRUR, which means that I'm in charge of the recording studio there, and for running live events, like any concerts we put on (most notably, ArtAwake). We do training events for all of the incoming members, and last semester, I brought in my good friends, Nawa Lanzilotti, Anna Dumont, and Michael Melnick, who make up the End of Days String Band, and they recorded seven songs with our new members. We're now in the process of mixing these tracks, and we're going to hear everyone's progress next Wednesday.

In the past week I've been mixing a few songs as a demo for the band and for their submission to ArtAwake, which has been really exciting. The new people did a good job recording for their first time, and I think that they came out pretty well. Here is my favorite of the whole bunch, a cover of The Supremes' Where Did Our Love Go.

Other Music

I'm also happy to say that I'm writing music again, and that I'm planning to be in the studio sometime over the next few weeks (probably mostly over spring break) to record! I have a few older songs that I'm almost done arranging and polishing that I'm planning to record, and a few newer songs that may get at least a nice demo done during these sessions. More to come in the following weeks.

Twenty Twelve

Again with the writing ...

School / Key

School! It's almost done! And my Key project is coming to a close too. So far, I've prototyped a web app for funding and distribution, and I'm in the process of documenting that. In the remaining weeks, I'll also be researching and potentially prototyping another application to facilitate open source remixes. The idea here is that songs are uploaded in entirety and as stems (individual instrument tracks) so that others can mix and remix. I'm hoping to look at what would be required to maintain relationships between all of this music so that we could see a (hopefully) interesting graph of remixes. I'm looking at ccMixter and Opsound to find out more about what others are doing in this space.

Music

I've written, scrawled notes about, performed, and recorded phone or laptop demos of the music I've written over the last five years, but I've yet to record and produce something actually polished. I want to do that before I leave school, and before I leave WRUR, in particular. I have a studio there with the tools to record and mix everything, so I just need to do it. And I need to do it before June.

I actually got a decent start on this over the winter break, recording a few acoustic guitar takes for two songs. I need to go over all of that work and finish recording the rest of the guitars and vocals, but it's started. I'm going to try and post updates about this throughout the semester.

Hacking

I never really thought of myself as much of a hacker, no matter how much interest or respect I had for the culture. But I am starting to feel like I might belong. If anyone reading is thinking that I am warming up to identity theft and cracking into bank accounts, that's not what I'm talking about. Being a hacker is about tinkering, exploring, using technology in unusual or unintended ways, and finding unexpected solutions to interesting problems. See the Wikipedia article for Hackers, or to put it in the context of one of my classes:

Hackers ... toy with, or augment expectations of, the normal operating procedure of current systems [and environments]. ... They disrupt the mechanisms of everyday life, repurpose consumer technology, and unravel the nature of digitality.
Subvert! from New Art/Science Affinities, Oct 2011

My first real adventure as a hacker was (still is) creating BbQuick, an open source Chrome extension that makes using the University of Rochester's Blackboard Learn (the online course software) much, much faster and simpler. The normal application is a huge bloated mess, full of frames, and all of the content you actually want and need is buried in or obscured by garbage. So for my final project for Jeff Bigham's Human Computer Interaction (Fall 2011), I started developing this extension with a small group.

It's a really exciting project because I don't have to worry about a lot of things: I'm building a third party application on top of another piece of software, so I don't have to worry about making sure a huge web application works. I just get to collect a few things and display and organize them in a way that actually makes sense. The entire point of this project is to take Blackboard and make it better. I get fix things that aren't good enough. Awesome.

Of course, that doesn't mean it's a walk in the park, and BbQuick has its own quirks and bugs. But it's free and open source software, so if I don't get to something by the time I leave Rochester, I hope someone else will! I'm planning to release it on the Chrome Web Store within a few weeks, and I'll try to get some real student users and feedback.

Employment / Summer

The summer is intimidating. I've been applying for web development jobs on and off, but nothing has gone that well. I still have a handful of companies I want to apply to, but I wanted to get more practice at other companies before applying to the ones I'm really interested in. Unfortunately, all of these attempts have ended with "we're not interested." So I don't know where I'm headed, exactly. Recently, I started thinking more seriously about how to become involved in the arts. I don't know exactly how, whether it's hacking for some digital art projects, working in theater, making music, or something else entirely. I'm still to find that out, but I'm keeping an open mind, and looking forward to whatever it is. I think it will be interesting to see where I'm at in August, after the dust has settled and I (probably? hopefully?) have some real direction.

Writing

Lastly, I want to start writing more for real. So, I hope to put something up here about once a week, about whatever is going on, be it music or hacking or a job (!).