#240113: solstice toplap & year in review

write stories or write chronologies?

Here's a chronology: It's Sunday. Sunday, a 14th day of year 2024. I performed 'a livecoding' or two in last days of the year. I got ill. I wrote a 'year in review'.

Here's a story: These seemingly arbitrary milestones in time (the non-human world seemingly doesn't care about 31/dec or 1/jan, it's just another day) do mean a lot to us, humans, to a variing degree, granted... But it is also true that the ebb and flow of weather seasons, of planetary positions in space influence our behaviours, our feelings. Time when night is very long and daylight is scarce has a different effect on our psyche than when it gets dark at 10pm and sun rises before 5am in the morning.

Personally I feel like I manage to observe these changes but I fail to act on them with a purpose and action. Regular action. I wish and dream about being more "in tune" with these changes (and that includes extensions of those planetary events: new year's, summer holidays at the sea side). But when I examine my own actions more thoroughly, I realise (increasinly with years) I fall into a process of evaluating my work, actions, desires and goals - every six months. New year 'boundary' seems to be bigger one, and summer holidays is a bit less intense evaluation time.

At first sight, in a superficial way, this seems like a coincidence, but toplap community (or at least those at the helm of the most active initiative) often organize a global online streaming livecoding event with performances by livecoding practitioners at these planetary movement boundaries, usually at solstices. One of the more unique and striking things at these streams is that they work like an open microphone: anyone can write themselves into a free 15 minute slot and get a password (key) to stream into the main channel at that time. The democratic value and feeling of equity of such movement feels incredibly important to me.

Anyhow, I played at winter solstice toplap global stream. Each perforomance at the event was 15 minutes long - it was 160 slots and that was 40 hours! It's a quite incredible movement. All performances are available on Archive.ORG and YouTube. It was streamed via open source self-hostable server-software Owncast. Toplap community has also moved to Fediverse (Mastodon) too.

I edited a live video recording of my performance into an audio track - it's quite an ambiental slow granulated texture with some pulsations in the second part, so it's pretty 'chill-out' listening. There's also the complete video of my live-coding available/attached.

In other news, despite being quite ill over the New Year and well into this first month of 2024 I managed to finish a retrospective of the year, 'A Year In Review'. I cover a lot of ground, so it's quite a read, but also revealing.

Over the fall and into winter I've been thinking a lot about how to proceed with different ways to communicate (and, ah, "monetize") my work and while I have many (new) ideas, but also questions and experiments on my mind, one thing is clear: I want to work on my website as best and hard as possible first. Everything else (in that regard) comes after this basis is established, or at least improved. So, there will be some changes this year, but let's see how fast I can bring them about!

links:

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240113