is time feeling totally slippery for anyone else these days? we haven’t had daylight savings yet where I live so I’m totally in a haze w/r/t any and all appointments I have with people in the US. at least the newsletter isn’t late this week!
it’s funny how little can be truly asynchronous, even in a very digital age when everyone is also kind of stuck at home for…. other reasons. I can take a dance class thru my dance class app at any time, except that I have neighbors and don’t want to be that asshole who is stomping around to BLACKPINK at 6am. maybe it takes living in a hermetic bubble to actually live an asynchronous life, a life I wouldn’t want!
I’d really rather go to an in-person dance class, and make new friends, and get some sunshine on the walk over, but there has to be something about asynchronicity that can feel like a thrill rather than a poor substitute! I suspect that part of it might be that we still need boundaries on our time. we are meatwads who need to poop and pee, and I need to actually block time on my calendar for my virtual dance class or I’ll never do it.
anyway give yourself some slack this week (no pun intended) to be a little less asynchronous maybe.
resources!
did you miss the Kickstarter for Endgame Sequences, the zine about death, dying, and grief in games of all kinds? you can still grab a digital copy of the zine or a print one while supplies last here! the world needs more of this kind of thoughtful investigation into how games relate to the human experience.
the last time I updated the links section on my website I lost a precious hour of my limited human lifespan because I had forgotten exactly how to run a local server for my Jekyll build. after I updated the link, I added a README that literally just had the few bits of command line usage I needed to run it the next time. today I updated my site and did not lose another precious hour of my life! README’s don’t have to be all that elaborate, but here’s a nice primer on the kind of stuff that will help make them useful to others and to your own forgetful self.
CSS blend modes are really fun and can be 100% actually useful, but it’s easy to get lost in what the different blend modes actually mean, especially if you don’t already have a background in using blend modes in tools like Photoshop. here’s a nice explainer about difference and exclusion that will give you a bit more context the next time you are futzing with mix-blend-mode.
I love a Susan Kare icon almost as much as I love a behind-the-scenes peek of a creative process:
Found some vintage AppleLink-era icon studies. : n ) pic.twitter.com/dVW2KP1gub
— Susan Kare (@SusanKare) March 21, 2021
educational opportunities!
new media artist, maker, and creative technologist LaJuné McMillian will be leading a free 6-part workshop on Understanding, Transforming, and Preserving Movement in Digital Spaces starting on March 24. learn more and register here.
CUNA has a number of Spanish-language courses that are still open this month, and they are offering packets of courses if you can’t resist picking just one. you can learn more here! I also highly recommend signing up for their newsletter if you’re interested in their courses – coupon codes abound!
Gray Area’s Creative Code Immersive for spring 2021 is open for applications! this is 12-week course on creative code and interactive art that covers a foundation of core techniques while creating an environment for collaboration and exploration. the session begins on April 6 and applications are due by March 31. learn more and apply here.
open calls!
submissions are open for A MAZE./Berlin 2021 until April 30! they’re looking for games and playful media based on meaning, story, expression, change, interdisciplinarity, social/cultural/political impact, aesthetics and fun. fully finished works, demos, experiments, and prototypes are all welcome so no excuses that you haven’t quite perfected that thing you’re making yet. learn more here.
the Queer Games Bundle is an initiative to collaboratively support as many queer indie/micro/art devs and makers as possible! entries are open until May 3, and the bundle will run during the month of June for Pride. learn more about the bundle here.
the Ars Electronica Festival 2021 has an open call for Chilean artists living in Chile or abroad to propose innovative projects at the nexus of art, science, and technology until April 19. this can include interactive art, digital music and sound art, computer animation, film and visual effects, digital communities and social media, hybrid art, bio art, digital design, etc. etc., you get the vibe. the festival will be from September 8-12, so let’s all keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best. you can learn more about the open call here.
Phoenix, an independent cinema and art center in Leicester, UK, are inviting proposals to create an art game that responds to ecological themes and the Anthropocene. learn more here and apply by March 28.
CultureHub has an open call for yearlong residencies tethered in either NYC or LA that will include a $2500 stipend, access to a studio, equipment, and technical support, and assistance with documentation and promotion, among other nice benefits. learn more and apply by April 18 here.
upcoming events!
literally now! as part of the New Art City Festival, check out the opening of Peter Basma-Lord‘s Looking Out // Looking Over, a document of their mother’s formative years living between Sierra Leone, Lebanon, and England. you can check out the work here!
Weds, March 24! 8PM UTC-5! shameless self promotion! this week I’m hosting a free casual happy hour workshop about gender and interface design via Hyperlink Academy. we’ll be playfully examining some of the biases and tropes about gender that influence software design, even when we’re totally sure that we’re making things totally absolutely gender neutral (as if). learn more and sign up here!
Sun, March 28! 4PM UTC-1! Rachel Uwa of School of Machines, Making, & Make-Believe will be in conversation with Ela Kagel about strategic approaches, online tools, facilitation methods and cultural aspects of self-organization as part of MoneyLab Berlin. you can learn more and register here.
Mon, March 29! 9PM UTC-5! artist Rachel Rossin, whose practice spans VR, installation, painting, and sculpture, will be giving a virtual talk on Monday in conjunction with her participation in “World on a Wire.” she’ll be speaking with Michael Connor, artistic director of Rhizome, about the interplay between the body, reality, and simulation in her work. learn more and register here.
April 2-4! Uncommon Hacks is a hackathon for university and high school students to come together and build innovative, zany, and entirely uncommon technical projects. learn more and register here.
Sun, April 4! 3PM UTC-5! the next Babycastles Academy will be a workshop with composer Gavin Gamboa on how to set up your own personal wiki as a digital garden for non-linear research. this sounds 1000% up the alley of many of you loyal readers, I just know it. tix are sliding scale and available here.
April 29-30! the 2021 Computer Mouse Conference will feature lectures, video performances, panel discussions, writing, a live zine, and an actual mouse tear-down workshop. learn more and get tix here.
just for lulz!
mind blown:
"As a Gamer, I demand that all assets in all video games are made from scratch. No game can ever be good if all that lazy devs do is just copy and paste asse-" https://t.co/RgSRsP8IJ9 pic.twitter.com/bH2fq0TUs7
— Phil B. (@philcsf) March 22, 2021
* ~ 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. if I didn’t respond to your email or did and nothing happened, I totally forgot and you can feel free to bug me again. if you wanna share links or chat, there is now a Discord server that you can use here.
I also still literally cannot delete my old Substack despite many emails to their support address so if you are getting weird emails from them, just ignore!
