TODEPOND TIMES: New video every week

Welcome back... to the weekly...

🐸 TODEPOND TIMES 🐸

What's new this week? 

Radical openness 

I've been working on the workshop that I'll be running at the upcoming Art Meets Radical Openness event in Austria. I'm running it with some other members of Pastagang, which is a creative group that anyone can join. 

The workshop is about jamming with and "as" pastagang. It's called Jamming With And As Pastagang. And we're figuring out the balance of what we cover in the workshop: How much we should focus on teaching people the practicalities versus showing them the values of pastagang as a group, such as: How it's important to let go of ownership when collaborating with other people.. How it's important to do things without needing permission.. How it's important to make space for more jamming.. and so on and so on. 

One thing is now decided, though: We're going to start the workshop with some flower and ribbon making! 🎀

You can do collab strudel with flok.cc it's a lot of fun

I continue my streak of releasing one NEW VIDEO EVERY WEEK on youtube. I've been doing it since January now, so it's a pretty long streak at this point! which I'm really pleased about! 

But it does mean that I have to occasionally put up worse videos if I have nothing better in my backlog, and I've only lost many many many subscribers over it 🙂

This week, I published a talk I gave last year called You can do collab strudel with flok.cc it's a lot of fun. In my opinion, it's one of the worst talks I've given because I basically clock out in the second half. I should have stopped after the first section. But that's okay! I mainly did the talk to practise for the keynote I was preparing for at the time: How many heads do you need. The keynote went really well, so maybe the practice was worth it! Unfortunately, we're still waiting for the recording of that talk, but I'm really looking forward to it! 

It's Wednesday

I've been editing another video for my weekly video backlog which is a recording of a recent performance. My friend nadya via proxy did live vocals and my friend eggg did live visuals while I made noises with my laptop. 

The video is technically ready, but there's someone who appears in the video who doesn't want their face shown (but is otherwise happy for the video to be made) so I've been working with them to try to find some fun solutions to that. 

Cropping and cutting away doesn't always cut it, so I've tried various different ways of covering up their face. I've tried using things like black rectangles, black circles, emojis, their avatar, animated gifs of sparkles, but I've eventually landed on obscuring their face with a kind of aura effect:

I put an ellipse on their face, then add a ton off zoom blur to the ellipse, then a gaussian blur that's biased towards the vertical, then I modulate it with some noise that's stretched vertically so it looks like ripples, then I colour correct it to match the lights of the room, or the energy of the moment. 

We'll see how it goes! 

Slowpasta

I've also been working on something called Slowpasta. It's a new way of deploying websites!

Okay let me explain... I mentioned pastagang earlier on. It's a group that makes a ton of different creative tools and projects. The special thing about it is that anyone can edit anything at any time. For example, anyone can change pastagang's website. They don't need permission. They don't even need an account. It's like wikipedia in that sense. 

This has somehow been going fine for about 18 months! But recently, someone made a change that put something quite upsetting on pastagang's website, and I was a bit worried because it was the same day that pastagang's workshop was getting announced! I didn't want anyone to see the workshop and then click on pastagang and see something that made them upset. 

So there's a new thing called slowpasta. It still maintains pastagang non-rules: Anyone can changes anything. The only difference is: Changes get published more slowly: After a delay. This gives other people a chance to add their changes too.

We'll see how it goes!!!

But hey, thank you very much for reading and following along. And thank you so much for supporting me and my continued very slow artistic work!! I hope it makes you pleased to know you're supporting collaborative creative communities by funding me. And if you aren't a paying supporter, then you're not supposed to be reading this (I forgot to mention that), but that's okay, you can sign up here or on liberapay or anywhere if you want. It really makes a difference in helping me to spend more time on all of this (and the Sandpond Saga) (and Torn Leaf) so I'm incredibly thankful for everyone who has stuck around during my absence(s). And welcome to all the new joiners that have been wandering in from the recent videos! To all of you: Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, I hope you have a great week.

Tode is still asleep.
Bot is still missing.
And berd flew away.