I love mixing digitally created media with a very analog and physical output. This takes many forms and has manifested in both my personal artistic practice and professionally as a digital fabricator/instructor. There is not one single method I stick with, but rather blending different physical mediums (3D printing, ceramics, textiles, etc.) with software (blender, Touchdesigner, Rhino); anything else a client may want to work with. The backbone of a lot of the software I use revolves around creating and editing code. This tends to cap my abilities in some of the software I work with, as I am a beginner level coder. My hope with ICM is that I will come out of it with a good enough foundation to start learning things like Python for TouchDesigner, Grasshopper for Rhino, or have more confidence to dive into ways to use the many software programs I dabble in on a deeper level. Additionally, I would love to be able to build a nice looking website without using a template.

I am also highly interested in creating some interactive, fully digital projects, something I have yet to try. One project that I found really inspiring, and had the privilege of being involved with was Carrie Wang’s performance version of Lost and Found. At the core of the piece is an interesting breakdown of communication of deeply personal confessions between a performer and google translate. I like how mechanical the piece feels, as well as the transitions from spoken word to garbled text, then back to spoken word.

Creating my self portrait was a fairly smooth process that deepened my understanding of using the 2D shapes within the library. The web-editor itself felt extremely responsive, slick, and was by far the easiest environment I have ever tried coding in. This is largely because it felt very forgiving, an aspect that was touched on in our previous class. Highlighting errors and giving a reasonably detailed message to troubleshoot the situation goes a long way for me. The trickiest part of the self portrait was using the ‘arc’ function, and I still do not fully understand where the start and end angles are based. There were occasions where I changed the start angle by 1, and the difference was extreme.