Kaizen + Joy
How do you measure a life?
Inspired by the ethos of digital gardens and Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s art of being a Learner, this personal wiki is a living document for learning out loud.
I am not an academic. I feel weird about calling myself an artist. I left academia to pursue community journalism and grassroots policy research; and left policy journalism to pursue community organizing; then left strategic campaign planning to be on the inside, and serve in government; then left the impure world of politics to conduct research and build software for government. In all these iterations, I’ve been a learner, a curious coder, and a maker/fixer/archiver of things.
My chosen craft is code. My first memories of childhood were being obsessively drawn to patterns, the beauty of mathematics in nature, and the magical medium of abstract language in code to fabricate worlds with the help of machines. I’m starting this blog in April of 2024 to document my learning at SFPC, and to be more intentional about progressing in the craft of creative technology.
I collect factual things: history, natural science, data visualized. Compulsively contributing to Wikipedia and archiving documents – a few themes I obsess about: urban design and social policy, permaculture and living cities, plants and birds, cyborgs and dogs as companionate species (Donna Haraway), human rights and oral history, testimony, reconciliation, participatory action research and pedagogy (Paulo Freire), diasporic Chinatowns, migration, labor, parecon, mutual aid, friendship, dignity and policy change.
I mix media because evolution happens on the margins and borders of ecosystems. Studying: documentary poetry, computational art, community art, protest and political process as performance, nature and eco-architecture, fabric art, circus/dance and movement art, augmented and mixed realities, diy electronics and computer-assisted fabrication, electronic music and sampling the city as songwriting.
Participating in communities of open ML research, civic tech, documentary poetry and computational art, I am mostly just a lucky and appreciative student of researchers and artists, making small experiments of my own to cultivate a body of studies over a lifetime.
