Projects
Not that many things going on at the moment. I’m happy with some of the recent work at Boords
I’ve also found some more time to work on some generative music. Basically, I’m trying to teach my computer how to compose ambient music :). It’s a bit inspired by some of Brian Eno’s work (especially his last album and his Bloom app, in collaboration with Peter Chilvers). The latest version can be found on my SoundCloud.
Things I liked a lot recently:
Nintendo Switch
A while back I bought a Switch because everybody was raving about Zelda: Breath of the wild. I tend to like large open-world games, and this one is such a wonderful variation of it. There’s so many nice and cute details.
Recently, I’ve also been playing a lot of Splatoon 2, which is more of a shooter, but instead of using something like bullets, you blast people and environments with paint, and look good doing it 😎. It can be quite difficult (especially the single player modes and the expansion), but it’s all so stylish and crazy that I can’t really put it down.
Khruangbin
I discovered this band by coincidence, when Youtube recommended this Pitchfork session (which is really nicely produced, by the way). They’ve become one of my favourite things to listen to recently because it’s nice and smooth, it’s mostly instrumental music, and doesn’t really sound like anything I get exposed to nowadays. They have a lot of interesting influences, like old Thai funk music, to name one.
Other Stuff:
Without elaborating too much, here’s a small list of shows and other entertainment I’ve been enjoying recently
- Hannah Gadsby: Nanette
- Lots of Netflix Standup: “The Comedy Lineup”, Ali Wong, Iliza Shlesinger, “The Standups”
- Star Trek: Voyager
- Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s newest album: Sex & Food
- The Joe McHale show
James Ryan: Virtual Cities and other “expressive intelligence”
I recently stumbled upon the work of James Ryan through an article on the Verge. Besides some of his other cool work, I’m mostly fascinated by the “virtual town” that’s part of some of his projects. The town is completely generated by a system taking in account its inhabitant’s personalities, jobs, rivalries, relationships, and other factors over the course of a simulater 150 years or so. So every individual has a name, ancestry, relationships, etc…
That can then be used as a base for an interactive performance/game, or a “This American Life” type podcast, as discussed in the article above.
I’m really interested in generative/procedural mechanics, so this is very fascinating to me.