Log

This is a page for ongoing tiny updates on my projects and research.

2024-01-18

Published initial version of my class website for Creating User Interfaces, built with my panblog static site builder. I came across the Reasonable Colors system for creating accessible color palletes and tried it for the first time to ensure I had met minimum color contrast ratios.

I tried out the latest v1.2 version of Lichen-Markdown by @abekonge, @soapdog, and @notplants, a fork of the original Lichen by @sensorstation. I had previously suggested they build in locally-running php-only support, and tried out this new feature. It’s a big improvement since you can then just publish static pages afterwards. I sent some suggestions on additional beginner-friendly improvements: wysywig buttons for adding the main markdown things (headings, links, code, images), and a suggested fix for adding image titles with spaces in the name.

2024-01-17

Added a mini fish script to complement adding simple entries directly to CAROUSEL (by Rachel Simone Weil) notetaking program without having to launch DOSBOX.

#!/usr/bin/env fish
#place in /usr/local/bin

set filename (date +%Y%m%d).MD
nvim ~/dosprogs/CAROUSEL/ENTRIES/JOURNAL/$filename

The site I built for Sara and Michael’s exhibit is online now. Its full title is Is there an after-taste of life in these graves? And in the flowers’ mouths do bees find the hint of a word refusing speech? O flowers, prisoners of our instincts toward happiness, do you return to us with our dead in your veins? Flowers, how can you escape our grip? How can you not be our flowers? Does the rose really use all its petals to fly away from us? Does it want to be only a rose, nothing but a rose? No one’s sleep beneath so many eyelids?

The site works like a 24 hour film. I programmed it to run like an extremely slow flipbook animation. Here’s a screenshot of the site at the moment about halfway through the minute at 2:13pm. Due to the fires in LA the exhibit opening was postponed and now is going to open this coming saturday at Timeshare gallery.

2024-01-16

Published online the first pages of the Drawing, Moving and Seeing with Code class site, built with my Panblog static site generator that I created in December. It’s really easy to use, and to publish with GitHub pages from a docs directory is simple. I also programmed a little fun wandering bee for the landing page using the DOM function calls (formerly p5dom) in not many lines of p5.js code, using perlin noise. I tested the site on Firefox, Falkon, Dillo, Netsurf, and w3m.

Screenshot of initial build of Drawing, Moving and Seeing with Code website. This is a still, the bee is animated through p5.js.

Last month I built a web-based artwork in the form of a 24-hour movie/animation presented on a custom website. This was work-for-hire for artist friends as part of an exhibit of their work opening at a gallery in LA this month. Today it was deployed and I tested on several browsers and phone.

2024-01-15

I’m back in NYC. The past few days I did some course prep for my course Drawing, Moving and Seeing with Code. I’m excited for the class. On my laptop I installed Moby open source thesaurus and created a simple command line function alias.

2024-01-12

Yesterday Yuehao and I visited MOLAA the Museum of Latin American Art and saw ARTEÔNICA: Art, Science, and Technology in Latin America Today, which I had been recommended to see by Katherine Moriwaki and Jonah Brucker-Cohen only last week. I’m so thankful for the recommendation as this was an incredible survey exhibition of work from decades past to today. This is a well-curated exhibition, directed by Gabriala Urtiaga. I loved many of the works and took lots of photos and notes. I’m going to include teaching about these artists in my Drawing, Moving and Seeing with Code course next semester.

I spent time researching a number of the artists from the show. Francesco Mariotti has a great website documenting his portfolio of works over the years since 1964! I downloaded photos and a PDF from his website on Chullachaqui Intelligencia Artifical, a series of “AI” projects influenced by Tristan Tzara’s dada experiments to modern software arts. He worked with programmers who wrote software in BASIC on the Commodore64 to produce audio and text animals for performances and interactive installations over many years. There was an interview in the PDF and I used Google Translate to translate to English.

I am still in LA. Two flights on two separate days already cancelled on me! Hoping I can fly home tonight.

2024-01-09

Studio visit with Yuehao Jiang and Matt Doyle. We showed each other our recent projects. Yuehao gave some great feedback on my interview art piece currently titled Hyphenated. One suggestion was to simplify the background to make the speakers the focus, and to add subtitles. I tried out a ‘basic primitives’ version and a wilder one in my typical style. Still need to add the subtitles and some other improvements when I’m back in NYC.

2024-01-08

Added a page on Lua to my Programming Notes page. I also started working on building a basic theme template system for the note pages.

I continued work on my Forth-like language.

2024-01-05

I’m kicking off this tinylog today. I’m not 100% sure I’ll stick with it, but I enjoyed participating in the December Adventure last month and thought I should have a spot to plop down further thoughts as I build projects or do research or what-have-you. I think anything that isn’t quite a blog post or a project page could go here.

The past couple days I’ve been reviewing NTTP’s tutorial More About Tiny Scripting Languages and trying to wade into continuing work on my 3th (Forth language). I am having trouble implementing nesting and delimiters.

I went back into the ExquisiteCorp site I prototyped for my music website, but I’m still not sure what domain to register for it and whether the graphics I mocked up really fit with the kind of music I’m making.

Hmmm. Not sure that works. In any case, I’ve been recording music lately and need a place to plop it!