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kathy's blog. software is enchanted sand and crystals written by haunted meat.

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playing w content aware land masses

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from march

writing is a muscle that atrophies

so let it. i am tired

of listening to me and tomorrow

im buying round trip

out of my mind so i can

wear a butter yellow

pair of wings, let

sugar or tongue make me

honey, make me leaf

of grass, or rivulet

returning home. language is

this map of the city

i am tracing and i am

retiring, to the jungle of

these hips, summer skin,

this ooh this drip

this go on, go in, this trip

won't last

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i think it means holding not clutching

letting words catch you

akin to music starting

lately ive been thinking about ghosts

and i couldnt tell you for the life of me

if i am haunted, still, or how

but ask now: where does art come from?

somewhere between the cracks of

profound joy and suffering and touching

somebody, holding a ripe summer fruit in your hand, looking at the old house with its battered eyes— is that where art comes from?

markets made us fearful

and perhaps counterfeit

consciousness is our kin

the spirits are abundantly

hiding, restlessly inside, tiredly stirring

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1

a pull across to fill screens

and a day fully eclipsed

joy lands with a light touch on green

time blooms in all directions

and one leaves the door open

without romanticizing too much

multiples and a deep swell of love

2

feel nostalgic for what you're living right now

3

an image travels faster than facts

and half truths baked into techno can

find scale out of shadows but

verse distorts in the public and multiplies in many mouths

getting the court case / parties / dates wrong in a slim

stand against oblivion

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7.31 (saturday) 12:33a, technically sunday

Trying not to fill the days, part 2. tho today was very full. Just meditating today on people I love, and how to slow the feeling of hunger I have to do things in the world.

Brain doesn't work, but thinking about how people find radical things, find where to direct their feelings of the world? it feels random sometimes how we come into information, but at the same time it's not.

nothing too insightful to say today but just wanting to incohere for a while. thinking about the smell of the woods, citronella, the temperature of air today, and the clouds, as if sitting on a shelf, full and bluish and bright, extending flatly for miles and miles.

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7.30 (friday) day 1

Today was my first real day of not working, and not being booked to the brim with travel or meetings or other obligations. There are so many hours in a day and yet never quite enough!

started with some oats and morning pages. Proceeded to be on hold in various bureaucratic supply chain nightmares, and had a convivial interaction w postal office guy.

I wish tumblr werent such a bot ridden app in decay, because I sort of hate Instagram. Here at least is a quietish space without the same feelings of exploitation or attention economy. Even if it's mostly the cobwebs of Web 2.0. A simpler and more utopian time I think, and I don't think it's just the nostalgia speaking.

Im learning to pace myself a little bit after working until 11pm yesterday, and 10pm today. There is so much I want to do and the time off is precious. Not sure what this quasi public space is yet but just thinking out loud I guess.

Thinking about:

- patience, and the practice listening to oneself

- not being attached to an institution for validation makes me feel like a liquid or gas

- liberating but unusual, a new physics!

- my brain is full of words!

New York was energizing, I missed it so much, but also gone was some of the idealism I had. It was so expensive, and I spent so much time on the train moving between neighborhoods and boroughs.

This past year has made me tired and serious, in a way that I think friends in the PMC and above have felt specifically around cramming our very beings into working. Such a default mode of survival given what we can't otherwise have right now. All I think about is working, and how much I desire not to work, and also lord I need health insurance.

Also thinking about

- radical aesthetics?! and cultural production, and objects

- desire and freedom from a book I'm reading

- moving around with intention and doing just a bit less

- missing my friends and wishing to just be in the woods

that's all for now

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another experiment

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experiments in browser with RiTa.js today

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5 images

It’s the month of October, and the animals are busy at work…

Still, a springy sense of whimsy persists in parks…

Meanwhile, like bees, everyone is so busy at ITP, gathering knowledge.

I’ve been thinking about lots of things. For instance, ways of understanding programming, without the programming…

[caption id=“attachment_2162” align=“alignnone” width=“402”]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursion#[/caption]

I remembered being so aware of recursion as a kid, and creating loads of recursive jokes with my brother. Somehow kids find infinity on their own, and it totally enthralls them.

(a TV in a TV, in a TV, in a TV…!)

I wonder what other concepts we learn through our world, through our bodies, through humor.

Here’s a new markdown language just for burritos.

I’ve been on the lookout for systems and new language short hands people make, especially when they don’t have a formal, product-polished system in place.

And as usual, I’ve been observing the hostile, barred-teeth expressions of our city. Somebody must’ve kept sitting on this pipe!

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feeling nostalgic for nyc

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I made a wacky project about language under capitalism. Feedback welcome! Just hacked together in a couple hours, so it’s a little broken still. Intended for mobile but works on desktop. You need to turn your sound on~

https://kaaathy.com/language/index.html

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I made an interactive web poem today! About Chinese bodies in a context of work, globalization, mass production. I have been thinking about these ideas and poems and words for a while. Also some of the themes and format are inspired by the work of a friend <3 

Check it out here, and let me know if you see any little things that can be improved!

I do sort of wish it were a bit more mobile first (the pop ups aren’t really great for that...) but it feels it good to at least get something out there.

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project day 3

Learning

Learning some basic image web scraping today just to play. Here are some images of “garment workers,” or alternatively, a search of what the internet thinks of as “women working.”

Not really sure yet where I’m going with this but mostly just trying to learn a skill.

Braindump

I had a really helpful conversation with friend this afternoon. Some notes from the conversation:

Embroidery project is strong - and feels thematically similar

Weaving - textile is also taken for granted (Kathy: this layer of metaphor feels more intersectional to me)Fiber arts - that form of manufacturing - originated in textiles (look up more)

this particular project concept feels very marxist: “All solids melt into air. All fast fixed social relations rot before they can ossify...”

voice seems important

Notion of marxist economic — the notions of abstracting this

Is text capital or labor? —> where does the capital labor distribution lie?

Texts that are more labor or more capital

Thinking about text as labor - a good entry point / novel thing for him

Juxtapose garment work - thinking about text itself dialectical 

Text as transactional - part of what people get so concerned about - abstracting high labor interactions

The feeling of: Prisoners making license plates for the buses that take them

Moves through that gradient very slowly (more or less human visible) <——————>

Is this tweet capital labor - is it something im investing in and expecting return

Automation - information age, scale, lots of people writing stuff

subtrates that we ignore

production modes of language

More project ideas (either mine or friends’ idea)

Chat bot that talks to a chat bot

Chat bot - autocomplete - clearly invisiblized or anonymous

Every autocomplete came with something kinda subversive

Decays into something that feels more like a person

imagery - Markov chains off the writing

Start up to automate your relationships

Improv game - real life auto complete - in google doc

Keywords farmed out to mechanical turk workers - fiverr

Text fragment - mechanical turkers

but im the turk

Paid to predictive write  

You get notified of the moment you cross the threshold for autocomplete learning

I don’t feel very good about using Amazon Mechanical Turk for some reason, but maybe can look into it more... 

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sketch, day 2

using python scrapes of duck duck go and looped footage of cvs

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"thank you for" - project day 2

I’m inspired by this project by my friend, and also this other project by Ellen whose work Katya’s work references <3

(from an ITP class, detourning the web)

https://github.com/ellennickles/the-answers/blob/master/getting%20the%20answers/autocompleteme.py

things I’m interested in scraping:

responses to “thank you for,” “best regards,” or “thank you”

unrelated to this project - but something with white masculine aesthetic - “landscape painting with man” combined with some version of thoreau / into the wild

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Sketching stuff idek

My words + robowoman at CVS’s words

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"alexa, shut up” – project day 1

Who is the programmer who programmed the command for Alexa, “Alexa Shut up?” I’m starting a new project and seeing where it goes. It’s been in my head for all of this year....

Keywords

• femme labor • service automation & gender • interfaces invisibilizing work + people • language under capitalism

Progress

• downloaded anaconda again • revived jupyter notebook • brainstormed some ideas

Ideas so far (very nascent, I’m not happy with these yet)

• program an Alexa, Siri, google home to do a spoken word piece.  inspired by K’s project about “work is....” 

• hack a kiosk at target – receipt printer that shares stories of people who work

• a film about a chat bot in which the options you can type degrade over time to just the most transactional

• sound piece using cut ups of female voices in kiosk

• a bot which sends you emails about people working who you don’t think about working - in the form of bot-made-worker-inspired poetry

Interesting things

• videos of CVS pharmacy check out sound effects. there are actually tons of these types of videos on youtube. side note: this particular person’s entire youtube channel is just kiosks and alarms and also geese. i’m in love. 

• i found a list of all of alexa’s commands. she responds to “Alexa, stop,” and more horrifyingly, “Alexa, Shut up” • somewhat also horrifying, the number of commercial voice services on fiverr and how women market their voices (bc society, not directing that judgment on them in particular!) 

• only partially related, this machine learning for artists class by Rebecca (lastname) from Goldsmiths that I REALLY want to take. it might break me idk • conversation with Z about this where she talked about how every response on her computer, even the ones that say “nulll......” and computer gibberish, had a human somewhere along the chain

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