The Wild, Wild Web
Surfing style sheets has never felt so good
So!
In the year-or-so since my last meaningful post, I’ve developed a whole slew of skills that warranted a full overhaul of my online portfolios and web presence. Dayflower went from vague graphic design, a smattering of motion graphics, and a lucky few audio projects to a fully-featured web design and development firm. It’s been a hell of a ride, and I’d be lying if I said I don’t feel at least a little pride in the fact I can look back to a year ago and laugh at how little I knew about the things I now do on a daily basis. Wordpress? The thing I built a site on to host some deep cuts I made in undergrad? I’ve spent somewhere around 200 hours crawling through its documentation trying to figure out how the hell to get the The Loop to work and best practices for building themes (read: figuring out what will or won’t break my site if I add it to functions.php).
Often, I find I look back on my older projects *cough* polyMorph *cough* and think it would’ve been really, really neat if I weren’t so hardheaded and gave learning web dev a shot years ago. I’ve been doing my best to make up for lost time between client projects, cultivating a bit of a weird web audio gadget practice on my newly-renovated personal website. Cycling 74’s rnbo~ offered an absolutely incredible jumping-off point into the world of the web, something I more-or-less entirely wrote off as beyond my scope of interest, and gave me a channel into learning the basics of HTML and JavaScript building my usual buffet of audio oddities. About two years later, now deep into my web dev practice, I remembered I had a rnbo~ license and jumped into the deep end. I’m still diving, figuring out how to best integrate audio into React apps and build real-time responsive audio engines (this is all a part of my very big, very (currently) early-stage passion project I intend to spend the next year with. More on that when I’m further along).
What a wonderful web
This brings me to the actual point of this blog: I love the web. It’s capacity for building and fostering community, as well as its unparalleled collection of the truly innovative and weird, make it one of the best tools anyone who’s creative can have in their toolbox. Web poetry calling into question the materiality of the medium, data sonification of Wikipedia, extensive archives rivaling the Library of Congress specializing in esoteric art, art collectives redefining the concept of live streaming and community interaction — the web literally has it all. I’ve been absolutely obsessed with the idea that the web exists as something you can access on a little device that lives in your pocket, that its something you can scroll on a bite-sized screen (whether that scrolling entails doom, who knows) wherever you’ve got signal. Wireless communication and data sharing is such a wild concept — easily capable of incapacitating a Victorian child — and even though the web is, what — 30+ years old now? — its capacity for hosting easily distributable creativity continues to grow exponentially.
As someone who’s spent the last 10 years working with some rather undistributable tech (I love you, Max, but you know it’s true), audio on the web opens up some, if not almost all, doors for sharing my work with folks. I’ve been doing it recently, and I love it: so much so, in fact, my entire creative practice shifted towards leveraging the possibilities of mobile-first websites as a means to share my usual wonky audio goodies. All of this to say: watch this space for more updates on neat little sound devices; while they might not be in Max for Live these days, they’re still coming!
From the toybox: a checkbox keyboard
In the spirit of my first blog posts, we’ll be taking a look at the first instrument(?) I built and featured on my personal site: my toy sequencer. In the spirit of making something obnoxious but still, at least, the slightest bit fun, I had the bright idea to make a synthesizer controlled by checkboxes (strongly inspired by the fun I saw happening over at 1 Million Checkboxes). It’s a piano scroll, but with standard, unformatted HTML checkboxes painstakingly organized to look like a normal piano scroll regardless of screen size (this was by far the most difficult part of putting this together). The audio guts are written in rnbo~, and look a little something like this:
For Max nerds: there’s absolutely a better, more organized, less banging-your-head-again-a-keyboard method to doing this, but just as a proof-of-concept, I did, in fact, manually make 12 different ossilators accepting 12 different on/off switches with individual names. If you want something really awful to look at, take a peek at this JavaScript:
Can I optimize this? Yes. Should I optimize this? Absolutely. Will I optimize this?
No.
Anyways: I built this neat doohickey that’s a play off my first experiments with web development and rnbo~ deployment. It lives on my nice, flashy personal site, now proudly featuring a background running Hydra.
Toodles!
That’s it for this week! I’ll be making this a regular thing at about 8:30 AM every Friday, so keep your eyes on your inbox for the latest from Dayflower!
STOP IGNORING MY CALLS