Messy Studios In Cyberspace: Web Microtools and DIY Creative Communities
Radical Networks 2019 Proposal
Messy Studios In Cyberspace: Web Microtools and DIY Creative Communities
Format: Talk
Name: Lee Tusman
Pronouns: he/him
Location: NYC, NY
Email: leetusman åt gmâil
Twitter: @2sman2sman
Repo: [url to your code repository, aka GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, etc]
Url(s): leetusman.com
Consent to being photographed?: Yes
Consent to being on the livestream?: Yes
Speaker Bio and Profile Picture
I'm an artist and educator interested in the application of the radical ethos of collectives and DIY culture to the creation of, aesthetics, and open-source distribution methods of digital culture. I work with the Processing community co-organizing Processing Community Day NYC. I work on templates, starter projects and frameworks for gamemaking, creative coding and teach classes and workshops.
[Please tell us about your background, projects you've contributed to, if any, and your interests. Links to your website, open source projects, place of work, etc. Maximum 100 words]
I work as a co-organizer in artist-run communities. In New York I am part of Flux Factory. I am an educator in New Media and Computer Science at public university SUNY Purchase College. Online I am a part of the informally organized crew of folks gathering in Glorious Trainwrecks, a supportive experimental (anti)games making community. In each of these places, there is an emphasis on collective process, equality, experimentation and jamming and building the community we want to see in the wider world.
Description
It's a common current sentiment among creative folks that closed platforms like Facebook have constrained our creativity and contributed to the early cyber utopian emphasis on the plethora of early digital communities such as Geocities. But there is a small and thriving underground scene built around sharing works made with small tools such as small game-creators, small dungeon-makers, alt music-makers, and websites-as-art. These tools set constraints emphasizing friendliness, ease-of-use and building out a space for sharing works created within the tool and distributed online. These (micro) tools are smaller than OpenFrameworks and Processing for example, and share sympathetic goals, a rejection of virtuosity, an emphasis on quick sharing and space for feedback or collaboration.
In this talk I will discuss and show a number of these tools and the communities that have sprung up around them, including: Pico-8, Bitsy, Flickgame, Sandspiel, Sokpop Stories, Twine, Dwitter, Puzzlescript, and many others. How do these tools create a path for beginners and allow for feedback, support and collaboration? I will also connect these tools to IRL alternative artist-run spaces - including where they work similarly, where they differ, and what changes in online space. I show examples of how these communities exist simultaneously online and in shared DIY art spaces.
Length: 20 minutes for my presentation with 10 minutes for Q+A
Additional Info / Links / References
Non-exhaustive list of microtools:
- flickgame
- dungeonscript
- BFXR
- Pico-8
- Sandspiel
- Bitsy
- Flatgame
- puzzlescript
- boopyclub
- Sokpop
- Twine
- Shadertoy
- Dwitter
- doodle studio 95
- Newhive
- dump fm