wowowow it’s nice to feel like I’m making progress on my own work again! I’ve been stacking up my schedule with lots of time to work on learning new (and refreshing some old) skills this month, hopefully in time to have some prototypes to share while I’m traveling in the US later this fall.
on that note, I’m going to be in NYC, Baltimore, Richmond, and Detroit over the span of October 29 to November 18. a lot of that will be family and friend time (starting with a wedding!), but please feel free to HMU if you want to sync up for a little artist’s guide to computation meetup. I’ll be noting in the newsletter over the next few weeks some art & tech events I’ll be attending, and I’d love to see what you’re working on and show you some of my own work too.
resource roundup!
Sass modules! they’re great! I mostly use them with client work rather than creative stuff, but they are super useful for organizing your styles when you’re working on something big. here’s a pretty solid overview of how you can use them, including built-in ones like sass:math and sass:string that are great for doing tricky stuff.
Rachel Curioso has been working on a great series on writing clean code. even if you’re just working on a solo side project, making sure that your code is legible and easy to understand is a huge favor to yourself! you know how sometimes life happens and you can’t touch that side project for a couple of months? well, being able to jump back into it without wasting a ton of time trying to figure out what the flip you were doing can be the thing that keeps that side project from gathering dust forever. I 100% recommend digging in on part 1 and part 2, and I can’t wait for part 3.
TUTORIALDB is a lil Heroku search engine for programming and dev tutorials. it looks like a nice alternative to the nightmare that searching on Google can be! give it a try!
here’s a neat little video on bird flight for animators that serves as a little science lesson on the mechanics of flight with reference to the difference between different types of birds:
I found this one via keyframes, a Twitter account that shares a lot of great references for animation.
this tutorial is super useful for mobile accessibility- sometimes it’s important for the clickable area of a button to be larger than the button itself! I’ve found this to come up often when I’m working with clients who insists on minimal designs- ok, I get it, you really want your close button to be the tiniest little x for aesthetic reasons, but people still need to be able to click on it!
Humble Bundle has a deal for the next few weeks on O’Reilly Linux & Unix books. you can pay up to $15 for up to 15 books! check it out here.
ok, I take umbrage with the use of “hand-painted” here (I have literally actually hand-painted 3D assets on actual paper with actual paint so), but this tutorial is a nice guide to using traditional painting techniques for modeling a figure to create a texture for a UVmap using software like Photoshop, Gimp, or Corel Painter.
? upcoming events!
Oct 8-9! Camden People’s Theatre! London UK: Beta Public is back for their 10th event with 2 nights of theater and video games in London. I hear good things about this series, so if you’re in the area I’d check it out! you can learn more and get tickets here.
Oct 23 – Dec 23! Centre Georges Pompidou! Paris, France: Cosmopolis is back with it’s second edition of residencies, exhibitions, discursive programs, and publications. this edition’s theme is “rethinking the human,” and focuses on works around technological diversity, relationships between place and scale and the affirmation of alternative ontologies. there’s a full calendar of events running through the end of the year that you can check out here! ok, how can I make up an excuse to dip back to Paris before this one ends???
Wednesday, Oct 23! Merz Akademie! Stuttgart, Germany: Olia Lialina, net artist, vernacular web researcher, and keeper of the GeoCities Research Institute archive, will be giving a workshop:
Participants will be tasked with examining a particular collection of the archive, to find answers to an open question. There will be some hours to research and document the findings; and! to immerse in the material, resurfacing with more questions. The goal is to resist distant reading, abstraction, and algorithmic excavation; to rely instead on human time and memory, interpretation and serendipity.
you can learn more about the workshop and how to apply to attend here. there are also 3 additional dates across Europe. Lialina’s work is amazing, so check this one out if you are in the area!
Saturday, Nov 9! ITP NYU! NYC, New York USA: the computer mouse conference centers around the idea of re-imagine the mouse as an object.
What in its shape and its material determine how a person uses it? How can thinking through the mouse help to re-evaluate our understanding of computing and the complex relationships between bodies and computers?
the conference will feature 8 artists, 6 speakers, and 3 panelists presenting work on this theme- looks rad and unique! you can learn more and RSVP here!
opportunities!
UCLA Game Lab is hiring for tenure-track assistant or associate professor of games and VR/AR/XR/animation! the deadline for applications is October 20. you can learn more and apply here.
the Internet Yami-Ichi is back, this time as part of the TENTACULAR Festival 2019 in Madrid. participation is free of charge, and you can apply to sell your internet-like things here by November 3. this is always a super fun event and highly recommended!
Arts Catalyst has an open call for artists based in Yorkshire for 2020. over 4 weeks in Jan/Feb, you’ll be invited to take over their instagram with a research-focused project that explores the collection and archive of Museums Sheffield. you can learn more and apply here by November 1!
a bunch of these wrong biennial open calls are still, well, open, so take a look if it feels like something you’d be into! a few that looked particularly interesting to me: netart ICU, squatted.online, MEGALITH.
the Queerness and Games Conference (QGCON) has an open call for speakers and games for May 2020! submit your proposal by October 15 to be considered for either opportunity. you can learn more about the open call for speakers here and for games here.
CICA Museum invites new media artists worldwide to participate in the 6th International Exhibition and Publication on New Media Art. you can learn more and apply by October 11 here.
Olin College of Engineering is seeking applicants for its creative residency program, an initiative that’s part of Sketch Model. you can learn more and apply by November 15 here.
the European Media Art Platform has an open call for media artists in the fields of digital media with applications due by December 2. you can learn more here.
Rhizome has a rolling open call for their 2019-2020 microgrants! you can learn more & apply here!
just for lulz!
here I am thinking my little Blender pyramid above is hot shit and then I stumble upon this ?:
*~housekeeping~*
if you have anything in the works that you are excited about (an event, a workshop, a new project), please send me all the details. the next newsletter will cover the week of October 14 – 20, but I’m happy to promote events further in the future as well and keep them on the calendar.
keep an eye out for a special Halloween spooktacular issue too!
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