TODEPOND PONDCAST: Stitch

Hello, it's me. And this is yet another weekly episode of the...

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What's new this week?

Stitch

This week, I’ve been working on the first exhibition for Torn Leaf, my silly online gallery. The submissions have been truly wonderful. There’s a nice mix now, but there’s still room for some last minute entries. Submit now, or later, if you want to get involved.

My job has been deciding how to order the different pieces of the exhibition. I’m picking what goes first, and what goes last, and which ones to group together. It’s been really nice to think through what goes with what, and what clashes in an enjoyable way. I’m trying to make every piece shine and sing for what it is.

In preparation for the exhibition, I’ve been setting up and testing some infrastructure for being able to stream long videos — some of the pieces are quite long, and can be played on a loop. Some videos are locked to the global time, so that every visitor is watching the same part at the same time. Some videos can be played manually, and should be watched from start to finish. And of course, many submissions are not videos themselves — some are image-based, some are coded, and one piece is a single very very short sound.

I’m also setting it up so that… if you click a submitter’s photo (ie: their face), then they talk to you. It’ll play their pre-recorded message.

I am slightly feeling the pressure to make this into something good, but I’m liking the feeling of where it’s going. And I want to get the ball rolling on Torn Leaf… to lead the way into further exhibitions, where I hope I can get more people involved in the organising of it.

Seet or Arroost

I’ve been writing more of my Seet write-up (it’s a bit of research I did on being able to see the program that you’re coding). However… I’ve paused work on it. It’s more important that I work on my Arroost submission for LIVE / SPLASH, and I don’t want to rush out the Seet stuff. It’s worth doing properly, I think.

Besides, it’s been long enough since I started work on Arroost now. I’ve been riffing on the submission title a little bit… It’s gone through various iterations like “Creativity The Hard Way”, “The Long Way”, “Creating Creativity”, “Unblocking Creativity” and I like none of them. They’re all really cheesy, and don’t really capture any intrigue. I did have “Normalise Sharing Scrappy Fiddles” but that’s more suitable for an artistic presentation of Arroost, and I already did that.

I’ve been trying to figure out what order to present things in (in the submission). I want to give the historical context of musical tools, and the creative tools out there that inspired me. And I do need to show how it’s all linked to live programming, because that’s what the conference is actually about. To me, it clearly is, but sometimes are people funny with creative tools. Because they’re boring.

Miniature Lab

I’m also devising my presentation about the tadi web, which will demonstrate some of my lab experiments.

Again, I’m figuring out how to introduce the project— how to explain the tadi web, which has so far just been an odd thing that I sometimes talk about on mastodon. But in this case, I think it’s ok to keep it simple and mysterious. I think that I can just show the demos, and let people wonder what it’s all about, similar to the Normalise Sharing Scrappy Fiddles presentation.

I think the most entertaining parts of the demo could be the Tool one and the Polar one and also the Fish one. And I think they could contrast quite well with some of the more texty ones, including the recent Locker and Leave experiments, which saw quite a lot of users!

Magritte

I gave a mini art history lesson in the middle of most recent Elephant episode of the future of code podcast. This week, I’ve been converting it into video format, adding images, and symbols, and stuff… to match the audio. I think it’ll turn into a fun mini-bonus-episode, and I hope it can get put on the future of coding youtube channel or something.

Conditional

Our submission for Onward Essays got CONDITIONALLY ACCEPTED, which is really nice. As always with my work, feedback was mixed, and none of the reviewers really understood it. They did all say that they enjoyed reading it, and it even kept one of them up at night. But the third reviewer was overally quite negative about the thing, and so we now have to make some edits based on what they said.

A ‘shepherd’ has volunteered to help us with next steps! And we got a friendly email from them. It’s the person who was up at night thinking about the essay! So it can’t be that bad.

I’ve been speaking with Dave about our next steps (by steps).

Sand sand sand sand sand

Meanwhile, I’m also working on the next video… Top 99 Ways To Make Sand. And I’m doing more writing and figuring out on how it leads into the following video — which will be the first video after the Sleeping Tode Trilogy — the start of the next series. I hope you appreciate how many spoilers I’m keeping to myself. It’s one of the things that motivates me on — I want to get them out.

Hey hey, thank you very much for continuing to support me and my projects! (all of them)! And welcome to all the new people this week. Welcome to the pond! I hope you’re all doing well… wherever you are in the world… whatever you’re doing… I hope you have a great week.

Days since tode fell asleep: 520
Days since bot went missing: 485
Days since berd flew away: 148
Torn Leaf teaser art by zhenya shur

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