Process Notes
year one celebrations
For every good small thing that happens, A always responds with “let’s celebrate!” for when we see each other again. We pin these in our chat to come back to. It’s a small gesture that warms my heart so, to see myself from the eyes of someone else because it’s all too easy to lose track of my wins in the surrounding normal. I’m learning that when a good thing happens, it doesn’t need to be immediately folded into the ordinary. I can sing and dance a little before moving onto the next thing though the followup act of celebration rarely happens - there always seems to be something new to focus on, a new project to do. These wins of ours accumulated for over a year until last month, when sitting at a mall sushi restaurant, we finally scavenged and collected them into a list and proceeded to celebrate all of it in one glorious afternoon at the Santa Cruz boardwalk--overpriced amusement park food, roller coasters, and scouring Google maps for the exact Us filming locations to recreate. Decadent.
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I haven’t talked much about my first year of my PhD program 1) because it’s been slow going with my scattered focuses and trying to settle in and 2) putting unfinished opinions out in the world in plain text not through the vessel of art is scary. The permanence of the internet for changing thoughts and the lack of guaranteed context is terrifying. My first project looked into why creative writers would use AI and how they navigate its use. In all of my computational work, AI never appealed to me too much, for both the surrounding concerns and complexity. I feel a lot of anxiety around the data hunger, the environmental impact, the effects on creative labor - the things that can’t be separated from the technology, but I am curious. Is there a way to use AI as an artist / writer and feel good about it? I feel lucky that my job allows me the space to sit with these thoughts and after talking with and observing the workflows of a few creative writers, I’m somewhat heartened. I think there is still good yet to be lived here, moving forward in the line of locally run community models.
The other lovely bit of doing these interviews: how often do you get to be a fly on the wall to someone else’s creative process? It’s so incredibly intimate and revealing. This how of these pieces coming into being is so important to me. In my other computational work, the how is built into the technology: it is transparent in the code, understood in the rules and algorithms that I follow. The technology is the process. With AI, it becomes much more muddled. The new processes that poets and artists are creating are what I want to see. I LOVE a good process video and the subsequent delusional confidence that I, too, can create a whole dining table set after watching a weeks-long process condensed into a two minute clip despite having used a table saw only twice in my life. The revealing of the steps behind the magic makes me feel like I too, can practice magic. I’m interested in this process of how things become and want to test a new section of this substack called Process Notes for smaller updates of things that are happening, because the process is something I want to share. Some things will still remain close to my chest to give them room to grow and breathe unwitnessed, but for other projects this might be the only way I remember to share.
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Whilst preparing this woven poem piece with my collaborators for exhibition (in the short span of four days), we found ourselves up at 6am on the last night. All throughout the night as we were painstakingly stamping individual letters to make words on fabric we joked about how earnest we all were for the way we were undertaking this project so seriously. By midnight the proposition was to only stamp one side for the sake of time, but in all of us there was quiet yearning to keep stamping, to fill out the vision, to believe that we could do it all. You could feel the unhinged resolve in the air. There is perfectionism, there is fear, but also a feeling of painful earnestness, to this piece, and to this paper I tried to write, trying to do justice to the writers who trusted me with their processes, but also to the potential harms. There are things that are done for fun, and things that make me quiver.
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The sky is still gray most days in the winter. I feel more comfortable in my program. I look at the reflection I wrote for 2023 that I was too shy to share here (enough time has now passed). So many of the concerns I had about settling for less-than-great ended up being non-issues. So many of the goals I had I’m just starting to feel capable of attempting. Funny how you just do get used to things with time, and how that’s not always a bad thing.
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tldr. Process Notes is a new section I’m going to test out for lower stakes updates. It’ll be both research updates and art updates because my advisor was so right in saying there needn’t be such a strong line between academic and art. This is all my life. (I think I added everyone by default but you can unsubscribe from that particular section :P)
my half of the celebration list!! 🥳 updates that make me feel so incredibly lucky
ran a workshop on creating infinite poems with If, Then (recording)
gave a talks at Causal Islands, !!Con (video link), and XOXO and will probably wrap these up into one large post later!
Before I Forget in Cursor Issue #5
Today, Tomorrow, and Yesteryear in Graywolf Lab
ran first workshop/discussion around collaborative writing at Dweb Camp
got a plotter! attended a plotter plotathon! showed work for Capitol Hill Artwalk (ig post)
Woven Poem with Bernice, Josh, and Sophia (I only have a google drive timelapse vid to offer you for now)
spoke on a panel at Lit Crawl SF called “The Algorithm That Moves: Uncanny Possibilities for AI Poetry.” reception to this was more positive than I expected -- a lot of writers are curious and worried and grounding AI in the line of other computational technologies seemed to help
exhibited To Be Endless in a gallery show and a pop-up show -- the digital to physical setup was really fun
hosted html day in SF with Ivan <3 and then tried it in Seattle too (one person showed up and we had a great time) but showing a need to get Seattle Poetic Tech? (open to suggestions for names) up and running to find my people
It’s been an era of commit first, think later which is how I managed the courage to do some of these things. The next phase feels more slow -- I want to take my time with my projects again, unrushed by deadlines. I am also finding myself making an abundance of teacups & random pottery pieces & I would love to gift you one!
woo !!! the woven poem exhibition pics are SO BEAUTIFUL!!