In order of heaviness on my heart.
Legibility and learning to work
I was interviewed for the first time in my life! on my creative work and this might have been the hardest thing I’ve had to do so far, to try to tie my work together and narrativize myself… a person who has thought very much about the work she wants to do and very little about how to talk about it. It is also important work, to propose versions of yourself and feel them in your hands. The exhibition1 that followed this interview happened at the tail end of a 36 hour coding and debugging marathon for a user study.
A friend once described the way I work as very sprinty.
Work has always been something that has felt like it happened to me2, rather than something that I could do at will, but bouncing from academic to creative work has been a good way to have options for racetracks to be on. Bored of one, hop to the other. But two new people, back to back, left me feeling a bit heartbroken about my current state. Seeing a researcher jumping on ideas, piling them higher and higher. Meeting an artist with that same energy, living, breathing their mode of creation. I’d describe it as being hungry, in an unsatisfiable way. And I see in myself a hesitancy to jump fully, my time always split in half. One thing that I’d like to try for a while these next few months is to alternate immersions: instead of splitting my days, to split my months.
To content or not to content, that is the question
The other result of facing my lack of sharing work legibly was a feeling that I wasn’t doing my work justice by letting it fade into the background. I post minimally, with shirking my responsibilities with the descriptions. A month was spent convinced I desperately needed to start making social media content, then obsessively imagining all the different videos I could possibly make, all the different projects that could possibly be the focus and all the ways to promote them. I had one hypothetical hammer, and was using it extremely liberally, to the point where the majority of my daily experiences were imagined ones. Everyone that has ever made content about their art has told me that the making of content takes longer than making the art. Devastating.
To finish off a dangling item from my 2025 bingo, I tried making a tiny flower press. Portable. A cute idea for a cute process video, but the process very quickly became NOT CUTE. But the making of the video, which took about 2 hours to film and 3 hours to edit for a 2 minute clip, brought me back to elementary school days of playing with WordArt and Powerpoint, of almost giddy joy at putting memes on a screen. I forgot that the making of a video is in itself, a creative act. There were very specific faces that I was talking to in my captions, the ability to share for a tiny and specific audience of friends being the redeeming quality here. For some, there is an inherent compulsion to document and archive -- I think of that as an orientation towards wanting proof of life, of existence. To say that I was here and my time was spent. I don’t want to just show, I want you to laugh and cry with me: proof of internal process. I’m going to keep making videos, ideally with less polish: if you are reading this, I am probably talking directly to you in my videos :) I’ve also decided to combine everything under one instagram (@alicia.process) where I previously separated out the code and physical experiments… this is to manifest a year where that separation no longer easily applies. I’m back at @patchwork.letters (reason forthcoming.)
Light & leaves
On that note I did start another daily practice instagram (@littlelightleaves) because I believe in treating all of your whims to the same space as your more serious endeavors. I have, at this point, probably more than 10 instagram accounts to my name. This one was birthed by the beautiful textures of sun on leaf and shadow on ground in a summer Toronto. Where the previous year I spent my time painting the sky and the clouds and the light in the sky, now I am the receiver of light on the ground. Being in Seattle, instead of how I imagined myself walking outside everyday under sunny summer days, I am a gremlin of the night, running towards shadows and shapes in the dark. I spend time with street lamps and headlights more than I see the sun.
Coming up… (to hold myself…)
Especially as I’m writing out my artist goals for the next year, one thread that comes up is collaborating more and creating within a community. I miss having people to text project updates to and realized that I rarely work with friends (probably why I love signing up for classes, which has that community & container built in). I’d love to find ways to collaborate with friends, or at the very least, send more unhinged-middle-of-the-process rants.
There are also a few projects I want to try coming up more immediately that have been sitting in my head for over years now:
Polarizer animations - this one is my white whale. Four years ago I did these experiments with a grad student I was working with and dreamed up a dress. Now I’ve reduced my hopes to just a top. But I do want to play more with polarizers again.
Training on my old work / journals / sky paintings - I have access to a gpu now (feels like I should put him to work), all local which is super important to me, and overall I want to experiment with personal tiny models :)
Things I saw that made me want to make art (also known as, my time in China)
Following in the footsteps of Rama Duwaji (what a queen). I’ve taken to annotating my photos directly through caption metadata.
shared
🎀 Creative Project Index 2025 🎀 at the end of every year I try to document everything so I don’t forget, and also so I can see where my creative energy has gone. It’s humbling to see the numbers of individual items go down but also I think that is correct because I am spending more time on research.
We just submitted my summer internship paper to arxiv -- I was really proud of this one though it is definitely not yet in its final form (results from a conference we submitted to also come out today 🥴 we shall see!! (edit: it was accepted!) but I’d still love to share this work in the meantime. On that note…how do people share academic work…)
wip
I’m taking a 6 session poetry class! I love being given prompts.
Also signed up for dance classes with a friend 🕺
One paper in progress, one paper to send off, and one project to get going
I’ll be in NY end of feb/beginning of march and in SF all of May-Aug. In case anyone wants to be friends :D
The exhibition was the printer poem thing again. I’d love to find a permanent place for this work.
I really enjoyed Virginia Valian’s articles on work.
i love everything in this
but 1. let’s hang when you’re in sf and 2. making content is a whole ass job in of itself and sometimes that’s fulfilling and sometimes that’s work and 3. I ADORE those polarizer animations, i did something very lightly in that vein and I want to keep playing with that >>
I'll be around NYC the end of feb! Let's hang out! I also am very sprint-y as well with my work I feel like I have bursts of energy to focus and then get burnt out...