This past week, I finished up Grasshopper.codes and now the drum machine on Glitch that I remixed last week makes a lot more sense. Grasshopper was a great intro/refresher because it uses a plug and play puzzle-completion pedagogy that builds upon concepts. I found myself wanting to use it while on my laptop, but it's mobile-only. That aside, it was impressive in taking complex concepts and making them fun and approachable. Kudos to its creators!

There are still loads more gaps in my knowledge re: web audio and other unknown unknowns, but it's felt like real progress to be able to understand what every line of code was doing.

I started Khan Academy.org's Intro to JS: Drawing & Animation, which has complimented Grasshopper quite nicely. The style of instruction is a hybrid of video instruction and live-code editing called "talk-throughs." This approach to instruction they've created is novel in that a pre-recorded lesson can be paused and the code manipulated by the student. Following the "talk-throughs" are coding challenges and mini projects to practice and build upon new concepts.

As of today, Khan Academy's Intro to JS is  82% done. That's roughly 15-20 hours of studying this week. There are some tools provided to track progress on the site, but it doesn't appear to track talk-through time.

I've made nine projects to demonstrate understanding of drawing, loops, arrays, objects. Key-value pairs all of a sudden make sense (although, I can't remember when that concept was confusing).

Other stuff:

• I played guitar today and wrote half of a twee pop song. It was p cute.

This was my first full week back to normal life after two weekends away.

Over Labor Day, Panda and I road-tripped through New Mexico seeing literal tumble-weeds, the depths and awe of Carlsbad Caverns, the paranormal activity of Roswell, the charm and vibrations of Santa Fe and not spending nearly enough time at Meow Wolf.

The following weekend was five days in Portland for XOXO. This was my first year attending, and I was floored by how thoughtfully organized and executed the conference was, and by the community of people it attracted. Everyone I met was an instant friend. I was inspired hearing their perspectives and what they were working on. Some of the speakers helped give me the vocabulary for using design and tech to affect change, and for navigating spaces as a woman of color.

Boarding the plane at PDX, I could sense heading towards creating something that I have dreamed about for over a decade: using tech to make art. I'm being vague because it's shifted and morphed for me a thousand times. I've been inspired by generative art, projection mapping, using algos to design clothes, light installations, synthesizers, etc. The biggest blocker over the years has been me. Not knowing how to code beyond the HTML/CSS I learned in art school and not making a serious effort to learn. Add a bit of perfectionism, and you have the perfect recipe for inaction.

So, here I am... actually trying to do a thing. And sharing my process and whatever that ends up looking like here (and here). I'll be sharing all sorts of making as I figure out what I am most interested in.

This week:

• Started using Area 120's Grasshopper Learn To Code app. I am finding its fill-in-the-blank teaching method to be effective (but tedious) so far. I always have my phone, so it's easy to fill waiting time with quick lessons on for loops. I'm interested in comparing teaching methods as I look at other resources.
  • Finished Fundamentals 1 & 2, part of Animation 1
• Made several Garageband & Figure studies for music projects while flying to and from Portland.
• Made a Glitch account
  • Hurt my ears remixing a drum machine by haphazardly increasing the distortion on a tone too high. Lesson learned 😖
• Put "Getting Started With Processing" back on my Kindle.
• Made a couple of docs to home in on what types of art I can create immediately vs what I'll need to learn new skills to make:

The gist: Low scoring activities can be started immediately. Learning effort is how hard I think it will be for me to pick up the skills (1:Low, 2: Medium, 3: High), how cost/distance prohibitive accessing resources & tools are (1:Low, 2: Medium, 3: High) and lastly, how interested I am in an activity affects the overall score (-1:Pretty interested, -2: Pretty damn interested, -3: DO WANT!).

The ranking system isn't my best spreadsheet work, but it worked to help me get from overwhelmed: "I WANT TO MAKE EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW! (but don't know how)" to "Oh yeah, I can make music and traditional art right away" and, "Learning how to make simple generative art is hard for me but something I really want to do and I have everything to do it."

That last bit is important. Learning is high effort, but ultimately worth it if I want to create using this kind of technology.