a curious / somatic / playful approach to creating things and connecting to the world around us
Watch my talk from the MIT Media Lab. New year, new habits. Drawing Party!
Join in with what I’m building and learning in creative AI ⚡ Here’s what I’ll cover today:
🍿 My MIT Media Lab talk is live! Watch it here.
💪 New year, new habits! How do they affect my mind?
⚡ Drawing Party Speed Exercise — a new format I’ve been playing with
Feeling good about the start of the year! Let’s get into it 👇
🍿 MIT Media Lab Talk: Drawing the New Possible
If you’re interested in the methods and thinking behind my AI prototyping, you’ll enjoy this talk. It connects the thread from my creative practice from 2017 to the present — starting from drawing and zine-making, into creative coding dailies with visuals and audio, to most recently my AI prototyping.
To get a rough overview, the talk is divided into these sections:
Drawing + Feeling + Drawing Feeling
Software + Awe
AI + Play
In the last section you can see some of my recent prototypes during my creative technology residency at Google Labs. Super excited to share these!
And here’s the final slide, which is a map of the whole approach. The talk goes deeper into each part with a bunch of examples. It’s kind of like a curious / somatic / playful approach to creating things and connecting to the world around us. Let me know what you think of the talk!
💪 New year, new habits! Sleeping, meditating, reading.
I’ll start with a high level feeling. Spending more time with my wellness practices gives me less free time. But while there is less time, these practices give me higher quality free time. And I’ll note: I didn’t set these as resolutions, they kind of naturally arrived.
With a desire to improve my memory and recall, I read that ensuring a good nights sleep improves brain function and general well being. I imagine anyone who reads “Why We Sleep” will begin sleeping more, the same way the Huberman episode on booze will get people to stop drinking (at least for a moment). Like anything you can imagine can improve with sleep. Where I used to stay up late working on projects, I now recognize the cost the next day. I feel terrible, my mood is off, and my general will and strength is weaker which can lead to a bunch of terrible habits, like scrolling feeds online.
Right now Twitter is great for AI projects but it also has a ton of terrible toxic ways of thinking. I wanted to spend less time on it and Instagram too jfc, so what if instead of spending so much time scrolling feeds I’d spend time reading. What if I spent more time with words that have been revised and edited and printed.
I was in Glen Park at the beginning of the year so I swung by the library because I’m obsessed with libraries and I’d never been to this one before. I had a few books I started a couple weeks earlier and they both felt like work. Maybe something about reading non-fiction. I considered the way non-fiction is known by what it is not. And it also occupies a much smaller space in the library, so I turned to the fiction section.
I love the ways certain books can be featured, sometimes just turning the cover out on the shelf, sometimes a note, sometimes a bookmark of an award. I pick up three books and bring them home. Before bed I’d leave my phone in the other room and I’d read. I’d look forward to getting to bed early for this reading time.
Okay also there’s another reason for the reading too, I’ll be honest. I was in the Palm Springs library with Helen over the holidays (yes, I love libraries, and this one is stunning — there’s a koi pond!) and during that hour there she read half a book and I was blown away like I want to read that fast too.
Earlier this month I went to Sunday Sangha with Will a few times, and got back on my hourly meditation practice. I haven’t done this for years. If you’re in the Bay Area and go to meditate there, let me know!
Each habit seems to encourage the others. Getting enough sleep gives me the strength to avoid internet vortexes. Avoiding the feeds and going to bed early makes room for reading. More reading calms me down to help me sleep. Somehow these also motivate me to meditate. And then the meditation seems to help these others. I can focus enough to read. I can calm myself down to sleep. I noticed I don’t feel like drinking anymore.
So the thing I wonder is… can I keep this going in February too? How will this affect the way I think and my general feeling of being? I wonder how the quality of my time will feel.
⚡ Drawing Party Speed Exercise
I went to New York in the fall for a workshop and at the start we needed a quick creative exercise. I made this one up and found it so fulfilling that I did it again with a bunch of friends at at Wonderville, and have since done it numerous times.
Here’s what you do. Get some sticky notes and pens, and give everyone a sticky note and pen. Gather everyone in a circle.
30 seconds to draw whatever you want
Pass your sticky note to the right
30 seconds to add whatever you want to the sticky note, and then pass it to the right.
Continue step 3 until you get the original drawing you started.
From there you can put all the sticky notes up, and just talk about it. How did that feel? What did you notice? Often what comes up is that people feel a bit tense at first, what do I add? Is this good? But as you do it more and more it feels better, you feel less pressure, and things flow. It’s awesome. Try it out, and let me know what you think! Since doing this I just keep some pens and sticky notes with me for easy spontaneous drawing. I’ve done it at parties, before a meal, at an opening — wherever! It’s a fun quick creative thing to play together.
Thanks for reading
Thanks again for reading, for the responses, and the unoffice hours calls. They’re always so motivating! And it keeps me writing consistently 💖
🙌 Follow what I’m up to by subscribing here and see my AI projects here. If you know anyone that would find this post interesting, I’d really appreciate it if you forward it to them! And if you’d like to jam more on any of this, you can reply here or on twitter.
📞 Book an unoffice hours conversation: We could talk about something you’re working on, jam on possibilities for collaboration, share past experiences and stories, draw together / make a zine, or meditate.