oh I haven’t done one of these in a long time.
This was a full year in grad school. There were a lot of moments when I felt like I was actually doing the thing, and the thing was pretty cool.
Errorcamp and ICLC was a big highlight. I finally got to meet a lot of livecode folks I saw online, and share my work and performance. I personally thinks it makes it a lot easier to chat with folks online, since I’ll know what they are like.
I reached bird species number 300 on my life list. I still maintain that the Canada Warbler was number 300, even though various species changes has rearranged my list.
New cities I visited were Buffalo (the Buffalo AKG to see Electric Op) and Portland, Maine (because it is the other Portland and is not far from Boston), and Karlsruhe, Germany. The time at a hotel on an island near Portland and the Karlsruhe days were especially rejuvinating. I visited the Buffalo AKG and ZKM and Mass MoCA and the Portland Art Museum as well as the Portland Museum of Art.
In January, I did my third year of Genuary, which was painful to complete, but it is nice to look back at a few of my favorite pieces of the year.
I performed in Boston, NYC, Ossingen, London, and Barcelona. I also played my first synth show (poorly) with the MIT Laptop Ensemble (which is more hardware than laptops). I had work shown in Cambridge and South Korea. The year finished with a large print of computational wallpaper based on the cells of a retina.
I also met up with old friends in SF and London and Edinburgh and Berlin and Brooklyn. I spent some nice time with my family, including our first family trip in many years, where we drove up to Victoria, BC.
I saw a great Modest Mouse show where they played the Moon and Antarctica. Some other highlights were Destroyer, Autechre, and Of Montreal. My favorite show was probably a Switch Angel/lo.fi.sci.fi show at ErrorCamp.
My friend Coco taught me how to do monoprints with a press, and my dad helped me make my first stained glass. I tried screen printing too, and I wish I could spend more time on it. The year ended with bringing out watercolors again, as well as trying gouache.
I got back into strength training, now with a belt! Unlike my previous attempts, I haven’t irritated my lower back yet. I beat my old squat PR and am getting pretty close to my old deadlift PR.
2026 will start off wonderfully with a month-long residency Shenzhen, China with a group of 40 hackers/makers/artists.
I’m having fun exploring the ideas of my thesis about Birdwatching and Creative Coding (e.g. observation and attention in creative practice). If all goes well, I’ll finish my master’s at the MIT Media Lab, and then hope to travel and make art and start to explore some possibilities of making a living.