Developing play as a practice 🪁

and tips on communicating creative tech projects

Join in with what I’m building and learning in creative AI ⚡ Here’s what I’ll cover today:

• 🎤 Upcoming keynote! Sign up free for virtual Creative Coding Fest

• 🪁 Developing play as a practice

• 🤯 Communicating creative technology projects

photo credit: stebs

In February I celebrated 39! For my birthday I wanted to explore how we may direct our energies together to make space that’s creative, safe, spontaneous, expressive - truly alive! I set up creative stations all around for people to make things and collaborate together. My bday is on 2/22, so then we did collective mouthsounds — my most fav collective creative activity — at 2:22 for 22 seconds, 3:33 for 33 seconds, 4:44 for 44 seconds, and 5:55 for 55 seconds. You can watch the video recap here:

whichlight

A post shared by @whichlight

I also joined a creative open mic earlier in the month. I put a synth on a phone and invited a room to play it together. It was so much fun:

And the recent art tech meetup, tiat.place, was wonderful! For creative tech people in the bay area I highly recommend it. See clips of each of the talks here. SF art+tech is thriving!

Now let’s get into it 👇

🎤 Upcoming talks and workshops

I’m giving a public virtual talk next week at Creative Coding Fest. You can find more info and register here. Very excited to see the speakers and workshops!

CC Fest is a free and friendly event for anyone curious about creative code.
Come spend a few hours with us! Make interactive and engaging digital art, animation, and games, work with AI or hardware, and explore many other options. Hear from our keynote speakers on important and timely topics related to creative coding.

For this talk I’m interested in not only sharing prototypes, but also discussing the importance of creative technologists to explore opportunities and possible futures with emerging technologies. What kinds of topics would you like to see me get into more? What are you curious about based on my work? Please reply with ideas 🙏!

🪁 Developing play as a practice

My recent talk at the MIT Media Lab: Drawing the New Possible, sparked many follow up discussions around play. In one convo,

Jihii Jolly

asked me about balancing play and practicality. When it comes to AI tools, there’s still a lot to discover in how we can use them, especially in more niche and personal use cases. Part of the discovery process involves following threads of what-ifs. But if you have a problem to solve, and you don’t have a bunch of time to spend on it, how might you still invite play? What does this look like?

I love the idea of articulating the process and making it more accessible. To an extent I may not even be aware of parts of this process because it’s such a habit — I want to find words to describe it so I can understand the approach (and myself!) better.

I like this quality of speed, improv, and riffing on one another. To make something to share with other people, it becomes a relational thing, and there’s the possibility of delightful surprises. You can make something that gives you a structure to further build on.

What I’m most interested in though is going beyond making things all together, to whatever it is that’s the mindset that motivates this work. My hunch is it’s a way of seeing and being in the world. Sometimes I get questions around my art practice — what have you been making lately? Or what’s your medium? And for the past year or so I’ve personally phrased it as creative expansive moments. I’ve found that there can be these relational moments together that feel expansive, wondrous, creative, surprising, full of agency. That in each moment to moment we can be infinite and that’s so easy to overlook. But in these moments I feel it and it’s delightful. How do I articulate this beyond specific cases? How do I cultivate it? I have a feeling now that it might be through this inquiry on play, and that what I’m really working towards is building a practice around play as being.

🤯 Communicating creative tech projects

When I first started building and sharing creative tech projects, I would spend a bunch of time figuring out how to build and deploy them, and then I’d share a link. Folks would play with it, or I bring it to a show. And that would be it. The outcome left much to be desired.

Then I started sharing my work at conferences and meetups, and figuring out little stories about them to share. Usually it would be what I noticed with the works, what they told me about how people interact, or about creative possibilities. I found this gave the works new life. A piece could be a decade old, but if someone hadn’t seen it before, the story would be the avenue. Note that the video I shared earlier in this newsletter is of bloopdance. The video is from a couple weeks ago, and bloopdance is from 2014.

One recent story of a piece I love is for One Million Checkboxes. The piece itself went viral, but to me what made it all the more meaningful was Nolen’s follow up story about it. From his tweet:

At the height of One Million Checkboxes's popularity I thought I'd been hacked. A few hours later I was tearing up, extraordinarily proud of some brilliant teens. A thread about my favorite story from running OMCB....

I won’t summarize it here, I recommend reading the thread or watching the video version of it. It’s kind of profound.

I remember this feeling when making art pieces like they should stand on their own. But I think also highlighting the things that get you excited about it and finding stories with it are really powerful in conveying the value of what you make. What’s the spark that led to the idea? What are the different parts of the piece? What did you notice after making it? All of these can be part of the compelling story to share about the work.

In recent issues of this newsletter I’ve shared insights around being a creative technologist in a professional context. What’s of interest for product is how features work, the capabilities, and what they feel like. Part of prototyping is to quickly discover new opportunities. Where is there signal to explore more? What I’ve found is that similar to before, it’s not just the prototype, it’s the story you share about it that helps build momentum around the idea.

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.

🍿 Check out my talk at the MIT Media Lab. 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.

📞 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.