It's refreshing to be back out in the public again
/When I moved to Seattle, one of my goals was to get involved in the new media arts / tech scene out here. I wanted to go to meetups and share my perspective and bounce ideas off of others.
But when I arrived, I started working for a company that didn’t really want me to be social. My creativity wasn’t really allowed to be expressed in a public manner because of PR fears. They didn’t want any of their employees / contractors to say things that caused controversy.
Well, I finished that job in January, and things are slowly changing for the better. Additionally, I’m at a new gig at Looking Glass Factory that wants me to be more public across the board Here’s a list of a handful of things I’ve been back at engaging with the public now that I’m a free digital person again.
I presented at 4 public events
So the public events I’ve recently been at were:
OMSI After Dark in Portland to demo the Looking Glass
East Side VR in Bellevue to demo the Looking Glass
The Seattle Arts and Technology to share my history w/ 3d display tech, including Looking Glass & Lumarca
Seattle VR as a panelist on the topic of AR / VR UX design
This last one was particularly interesting for me. I loved blabbing about my opinions and also engaging with the two other panelists, who were clearly super well-informed on the topic. It’s also nice to occasionally take a step back (as I did in these last two public appearances) and to reframe my career, which has been kind of a wile ride.
Anyhow, here’s a shot of me in a panel.
(shot by Alexandra Steele, https://twitter.com/EmergentStgy/status/1111455207433474048)
I’ve been posting to my blog, sorta
This is the third post since leaving my job. It feels good to simply share some of the things I’m super curious about lately. The previous two posts were for projects that I had knocking around for a while, but am happy now to sort of let them go…
I’ve been posting videos
I’m taking a smidge of a pause with my YouTube account. Not that I’m a YouTube star or anything, but I find my subscriber count on YouTube to be a little overwhelming — so much so that I feel that if I post it really ought to be edited down and not be super rambly. Well, that and I should either turn off comments or be okay with… uhm… you know, YouTube comments. I mean, my last YouTube video I posted has literally one comment:
Ugh… Hard for me to motivate myself to engage w/ this audience and to ask them to remember to like and subscribe. Like what am I doing on this platform?
Anyhow, as an alternative low-pressure way for me to still have a creative outlet, I’ve instead jumped onto another video service: https://diode.zone/video-channels/albert_channel/videos. Diode.zone is an instance of peertube — which is a federated version of YouTube. It I love it! It reminds me of what YouTube used to be for me — just a place to document my unfiltered crappy progress updates and rambly rants.
I’m making a game, sort of…
A lot of what I’ve been doing on diode.zone is documenting my process for building a game. It’s in it’s super infant stages. I currently have two participants and am learning a lot from how they’re engaging (and often not engaging) with what I want them to do. Anyhow, I don’t know if I can convert this into a real game, but so far it’s been a fun and healthy process.
