Week 83
MIT rejection, API experiments, creative thinking vs being present, making a responsive p5 sketch and explorations of gridPainter.
Last week, I got rejected from the MIT Media Lab.
After two excruciating years, I found myself staring at an automated message on a Saturday morning – “we regret to inform you …”, it read. My heart sank.
It wasn’t because I hadn’t expected it, I did; and had even managed to convince everyone around me that I was fine with it. Then it arrived, like an airborne cherry to the mountain of failures that I had accumulated till then – no job offers, no chances of going to a residency that I was accepted into, no small studios that were willing to afford me and, worst of all, no clue about what to do next.
Truth be told, I still don’t know what to do next. At the moment, I’ve isolated myself from the world and interact with it it only via my internet presence, robbing people of the opportunity to reject me, my work, ambition and feelings.
Sakina angrily calls this an ‘echo chamber’ and she’s right – it’s an iron-clad echo chamber. But why is that wrong? The world is full of ambiguity – show me a paper and I can find a counter, discuss a perspective and I can keep unendingly questioning its unstable ground, offer me advice and I can pose logically-backed distrust. Everyone seems to be making it up as they go along and that is what I want to do as well. Live in my own little bubble, fulfilled by my creative aspirations.
Or atleast that’s what I want to do for a while and see where it leads me.
[Experiments] Messing around with APIs
I started reading about APIs and messed around with the idea of using them. ‘API’ stands for application programming interface, essentially a way for two softwares or platforms to communicate with one another. For example, a piece of code can communicate with Spotify’s API to figure out what I’m listening to currently.
Initially, I used a random-word API and made a mind-mapper that takes ‘x’ number of words and converts them to a mind-map. Everything is connected, right? Would be fun to use this as a thought-starter for a writing workshop or a game.
I then moved on to trying to get certain types of words, depending on their usage, such as verbs and nouns. I found one free API that achieves this, and made a random poetry generator. It generates one random pronoun + an adjective + a noun + a conjunction + another pronoun, adjective and noun. It results in fun things like:
I also programmed it like a text-based interface. You can try it here. Pretty proud for programming all of that in a couple of hours.
APIs open up a new array of possibilities for me. There are hundreds of free APIs out there, and so many interesting visuals can be made with that data.
[Thoughts] How can you ever think creatively if you’re always in the moment?
The world preaches the importance of being present (or living mindfully) – being focused and engaged in the here and now, not distracted or mentally absent.
If everyone lived in the moment, how would we ever be able to think creatively spontaneously? My best ideas come when my brain unintentionally wanders while I’m walking on a road, ‘zoning out’ when someone is saying something boring and letting my brain take me places while I’m doing household chores. I think I’m in the moment a very select number of times.
So I don’t get it – live in the moment or live spontaneously creatively?
[Learnings] Finally figuring out a responsive p5 canvas
I’ve struggled with trying to create a responsive p5 canvas for so long. I finally stumbled upon it today, while trying to make something else. It’s simple:
Use a windowResized function to let the computer know you want to track the resizing of a window.
Use clear() to clear whatever was drawn on the canvas.
Reset all arrays by stating ‘arrayName = []’.
Run the setup() again.
Voila!
[Experiments] Grid Painter
I’ve been playing around with my What Bombay Feels Like sketch to create a system for the computer to paint with a group of pixels over a grid.
“Even if I had the energy, though, I prefer a more tortoise-like approach. I plod, I ponder. Some days, I simply persist.”
- Excerpt from When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi.
This weekend, I am in Bangalore speaking at the CC Santé Conference. If any of you are around, don’t hesitate to say hi :)