Finally, talk season is over!
I gave five (todepond) talks in one month. Four of them were unique, and all were in different cities / countries.
Looking back, it was a terrible idea. I completely overworked / exhausted myself.
On the other hand, it was an intense learning experience. I now feel ten times more seasoned / experienced in giving talks. Doing so many in such a short space of time gave me the chance to get rapid feedback / make rapid adjustments.
The best part of being part of an event is the "showing up" and being around so many other people.
I saw many old friends, many who I had only seen over a year ago. And I made many new ones, some that I'd never met, only crossed paths with on the internet, or only in fleeting moments before. And those who were entirely new, who didn't know me, or they did from my blog or something, but either way, it was a chance for me to subject more people to my incessant demo-ing, to give me more practice at presenting / performing / keeping attention.
Heart of clojure was a real community event, and truly special.
Causal islands was more political, a wannabe Strange loop.
LIVE was fake academia.
Onward was real academia, but still a bit cheeky, so I'm told.
Oh and there was also futures of coding, which is way more performance-oriented, like an open mic night.
I was really pleased with how What it means to be open went. It was my first ever opening keynote and that was very nerve-wracking for me. But I couldn't have picked a better venue / community / mentor for it. Thank you to the European clojure community and Arne for all the support.
I presented Death of the tadi web twice! Once at London's Future Coding and once as a longer keynote at Causal Islands Berlin. And I think the future of coding version went better! We'll find out for sure, as soon as the causal islands video recording comes out. It's perhaps my most campy talk yet, and dangerously close to Dreamberd territory.
At first, I felt the pressure to top my talk from last year's LIVE, which was called Spatial programming without escape. But with a shorter duration and a wildly different topic, it seemed like this year's presentation would exist on its own.
Unblocking creation with friends (which starts at 3:27:56) was a pretty straightforward lift from the essay that I'd already written, which was also called Unblocking creation with friends. And I'm pleased with how it went. It seems like people "got it".
Dialogues on natural code was my first step into real academia, as it was based on our real published paper / essay / stage play: Dialogues on natural code.
This talk went the least to plan, but that doesn't mean it went badly. In fact, my timing fuck-ups may have accidentally improved the talk. I haven't properly watched this one back yet, so I'll need to take a closer look.
I haven't properly published it either, as I've been doing some audio fixup. Here's the latest draft:
I guess this all makes me a keynote speaker now! (not just a non-keynote speaker)
I don't have any more todepond talks lined up right now, but I'm looking forward to getting some scheduled in after I reflect on these ones and figure out how to do better.
I did submit a workshop for ICLC, so we'll see how that goes. The workshop is about Cellpond, and it explicitly makes links between Cellpond and "living computation", which is part of our Natural code work.
I'm also getting way more involved in strudel and flok and the creative live programming world. So expect a lot more work from me on that.
Torn leaf zero is on my plate next. I'm looking forward to sharing people's submissions with the world. If you want to get involved, there's still time to submit something to the exhibition. (There are no deadlines at torn leaf).
And I'm still working on the next video, Top 99 Ways To Make Sand. I'm working towards a teaser trailer, which will hopefully be out by the end of the year. The real video will almost certainly be out at some point during 2025. It's the longest gap ever between videos and part of the reason for that is all these talks I've been giving. Another reason is that the video will be over twenty minutes long. Thank you for your patience.
The emerging theme behind all of my imminent work is "repetition". It's what binds together all of these sometimes-seemingly unrelated projects.
"Algorave generation. We love repetition." Or whatever the phrase is.
And the repetition needed to run non-deterministic natural code.
And the repeated "better computing" movements of the tadi web.
And the repeated torn leaf logos.
And the repetitive job of making 99 sands in different ways.
It's no secret that I want to do this todepond work full-time. I won't be ready to do that for a while, but I'm gradually heading in that direction: Towards total todepond.
If you appreciate the work I do, please consider supporting it on patreon or liberapay.
Or if you're really rich and you want to enable radical steps towards empathetic computing, please contact me at todepond@gmail.com
Thanks,
Lu
xxxxxx