aya (web-based, not yet available)

vj/dj tool and visual creative environment. prototyped intermittently between april and july this year. oriented towards immediate gratification – there’s a web-based version so it’s quick to jump in and start playing around, and you can stream in audio and video from youtube, a mic, or any file to get up and running right away. (it even works on phones!)

browser tech is pretty amazing – it’s easy to forget that the thing you use to read facebook is also a synthesizer, a 3d renderer, a midi interface, and has a ton of other rich, weird affordances to boot. i’ve been thinking a lot about how lots of folks are carrying this kit of rich creative tools in their pockets, and how it would just take a bit of plumbing to make the lot of them accessible. there’s a lot of directions aya could go, so it’s at times been helpful for me to think of it in this way while prototyping – just a bit of plumbing to make low-hanging fruit a little bit easier to reach.

i care a lot about this project and want to see it through, but i put it on hiatus for the latter part of this year while i tried to find a way to keep working on it sustainably. it’s a bit too big in scope for me to get my head into while i’m just struggling to get by; the last few months of my life have been swallowed up by an exhausting day job, or at best by tiny one-off creative projects that i could wrangle in an evening or weekend. fingers crossed i’ll have time to get back to it in the new year.

heathbot (twitter, mastodon, plus slack and discord as a module for bort)

last year some friends got me into heathcliff, the inane, inoffensive, dad-jokey, strangely charming single-panel syndicated newpaper comic. i was pretty struck by its formal consistency – almost every gag is based on a single speaker in the frame commenting on the action with a quip of a line or two.

it seemed ripe for proceduralizing, so i knocked out a janky remixer in a few hours in november 2016. all it does is pick a comic from the archive at random, slice it a few pixels above the bottom of the image, and paste it on top of another random comic. there’s usually a weird seam because of the indiscriminate paste job, but it’s maybe a testament to how formulaic (or nonsensical) heathcliff is that some folks who saw the remixed versions didn’t notice much of a difference at first between them and the original comics.

like catbot, this started as a module for my slack/discord chatbot bort. i’ve found that implementing prototypes as chatbot modules is a nice way to get immediate feedback from folks (and to avoid having to perform long setup dances or confront weird api issues like i regularly do with twitter bots.)

i finally split it off as a standalone bot just before the holidays this year. it’s not perfect, but i’d say the effort-to-entertainment ratio on this was pretty good.

you can find the source here. (again, it’s not especially well-commented, but please feel free to hit me up with questions if you have any!)

is this thing still on? been a while. here’s some stuff i did this year (and last year, too!) in no particular order:

catbot (twitter, mastodon, slack and discord as part of bort)

done in november as a module to my chatbot bort – it originally built the cats out of a grid of custom emoji (with “palettes” customizable by any user.) the twitter/mastodon port was done in december in a day or two, and creates images out of sprites.

some process shots:

the first attempt got a lot wrong.

collision worked from the beginning, but the original strategy didn’t reserve space for the head, which always faced up (so if the cat ran out of space to move, it’d move up one tile to place the head regardless of whether there was something in that tile already.)

adding crossover tiles made compositions a lot richer. allowing heads to point in any direction meant i didn’t have to solve the trickier problem of finding space for an upwards-facing head (and i think lends a bit more personality anyway.)

all the generation parameters are tweakable, allowing for some fun variations.

the chat version allows anyone to set custom tile types, including rare head variants.

source on github. not well-commented, but feel free to shoot me any questions if you’re wondering how anything works!

a machined stage play for {0-3} humans and {0-3} robots

an adaptation of georg büchner‘s unfinished stage play woyzeck for the TAG/ZU-UK DRIFT workshop, june 2016. riffing on the play’s themes of medical ethics and the working class, i processed the script into a machine-readable format and inserted a new character – ELIZA, a computer program with a complex legacy (itself named after a character in george bernard shaw’s pygmalion!) ELIZA responds to woyzeck, poking and prodding at his motives and acting as a personal therapist. will ELIZA’s interventions change the reading of the text? the performance? the outcome of the narrative?

franz & eliza can be performed as a regular (albeit proceduralized) stage play, an autonomous installation where all parts are read via voice synthesis, or anything in between.

available online here. voice synthesis may only work in chrome and/or firefox.

I contributed a couple of (well-hidden!) music tracks and did some playtesting on Nifflas’ huge, lovely Knytt Underground. Nifflas recently put the full soundtrack up for download for free! Grab it right here.

You can try/buy the game Nifflas’ site or on PSN for PS3 and Vita (and vote it up on Greenlight should you feel so inclined!) Knytt Underground was Greenlit! Grab it on Steam here!

i’m working on finishing a game that i’ve had sitting around for several years. it’s called QED and it is going to be at Fantastic Arcade so you can play it there. you will be able to download it for free from the internet soon after that.

it’s been a while. i hope you are well.