i ran the gauntlet with my headphones on.

Week three is halfway through here at Carnegie Mellon University; we’ve been wading through snow and ice for at least a week and a half, and I think my feet have become irrevocably attached to my snow boots. The first week and a half was one hell of a gauntlet; between running documentation for the openFrameworks lecture series , getting in way over my head with Golan Levin’s advanced studio Interactive Art, Computational Design, getting back into drawing with Clayton Merrell, learning how to fabricate artwork digitally with Greg Witt, dissecting Contemporary Visual Culture with Melissa Ragona, and taking a critical look at German Film & History with Stephen Brockmann, things this semester have been and will continue to be hectic as hell.

Still, my classes are more engaging than they’ve been in a long time, and I feel like I’m in a good place to begin gearing up for senior year and the inevitable exodus out of our sheltered little world. I feel like I’m playing last semester in reverse; my stress levels started out at an all-time high, but as the semester goes on I’m beginning to balance out and hit an equilibrium that works for me. I’m still a little frazzled, but what Junior-level college kid isn’t? (I know I talk about school stress a lot in this blog, but I think it has a lot of weight in terms of my working process, what I make, and how I make it :: also, if anyone reading this is contemplating going to Carnegie Mellon, you’ve got yourself a first-hand account right here. You are going to loose sleep, you are going to be miserable, and you are going to sleep on the floor under the computers in the Mac cluster at least once a semester- it’s all a part of the process. But don’t worry; you’ll be doing it with friends. <3)

::Current projects::

- information visualization for Golan Levin ::after falling flat trying to wrangle together coherent and accurate information on little brown bat populations over time, and then tripping up on a few other population-information attempts, I’m focusing in on movie captions — although I’m also highly interested in working with song lyrics, which is pretty similar. Thank goodness this project got a week extension, because I’ve been using all my time just trying to decide what the hell to do! It doesn’t help that I’m a little art Junior in a class chock full of Human/Computer Interaction Master students… talk about performance pressure. I’m using Processing and max.msp.jitter… will be online by Monday morning.

- x drawings for Clayton Merrell :: 10 drawings of anything, with anything, at any size, by Monday. I decided to take the bat stuff that tripped me up in the infoviz project and use it to my advantage here; I’m developing 10 images of pen and ink bats; I’ll scan and post as I finish. I’m finding the linework extremely meditative, and I’m disappointed with myself for not getting back into drawing a little sooner.

- hardboard automaton for Greg Witt :: mine is an elephant riding a rat. A little heavy on the whimsy side of things, but I really wanted to embrace the ‘toy’ aspect of the project. currently debating if I’m going to handpaint it or leave it plain wood… might make two. (and here we see where the stress really starts being my fault, but I’m feeling ambitious, dammit.)

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

::Current Musical Influences ::

on a separate note, these are things that I Cannot Stop Listening To this semester that are simultaneously helping me calm down && feeding my creative process; I highly recommend them to everyone and anyone.

- Amanda Palmer Goes Down Under :: Amanda Palmer - I’ve been an A.F.P. fan since the early Dresden Dolls days, but I’m really loving her current work. This album is like a love note to Australia, New Zealand , and Tasmania, and I listened to it on repeat for two days straight after it came out. Without skipping tracks. DOWNLOAD IT NOW, I TELL YOU. Amanda’s music is available on bandcamp for a minimum download of 69 cents; I’m a huge fan of this mode of music distribution, where it goes almost straight from the hands of the artists into the listener’s hands (err… ears). Amanda isn’t screwed over by a record company, we get the option to pay as much or as little as we want ( I opted for 5$, as a nice I-want-to-support-you-but-I-am-a-poor-college-student medium), and we even get the option to download the music in freaking FLAC if we want to.

Also, her blog is beautiful.

Also also, she’s married to Neil Gaiman. Extra points for both of them.

Also also also, I want to be her.

- The King is Dead :: The Decemberists - I have less to say about this one, except it is catchy and I love it. It’s a little easier to get into than their earlier stuff, since it’s not heavily reliant on literature or history or sea shanties or what have you; I love love love their older stuff, but this one is joyful and happy and fun - and the lyrics and still complicated and completely beautiful. Down by the Water and Rox in the Box. seem to be my most played so far. I’ve read that the album is influenced by REM, and I can hear it loud and clear; again, not a bad thing.

- The Life of the World to Come :: The Mountain Goats - I can’t speak highly enough of John Darnielle and The Mountain Goats; and I can’t seem to recover from the happy heart attack I had a few minutes ago when I realized he’s coming to Pittsburgh in April. I saw a video of him speaking about the album on the Colbert Report a while back, and they talked about his work being about being at your lowest low, and how that’s such a rich moment of your life because you’ve experienced so much, you have nothing left to loose, and nowhere left to go but up. He has a HUGE range of work; some of it super lo-fi and recorded in his living room, some of it professionally recorded in collaboration with other artists, but always hyper intelligent and - at least for me- emotionally compelling. In The Life of the World to Come, each song is inspired by a different Bible passage, and from that jumping-off point he gets to some very interesting places. I recommend all of his stuff, but this album is up there with Tallahassee, Heretic Pride, and We Shall All Be Healed… who am I kidding, I love everything he does. GO GO GO!