#240208: friends vs fanatics, homepage, strudel, major arcana
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Dear friends!
A few days ago I watched a Chris Rock interview with Prince for MTV in 1997 and Prince said something quite interesting that I cannot really get out of my mind. He said that he doesn't like to call those listening to his music and coming to concerts fans, he rather calles them friends, because "fan" is short for "fanatic". Putting aside the creative and artistic potential of being fanatic about something I feel this is quite to the point: "fan/fanatic" implies some kind of blindness, being possessed, being out of one's mind. But art... art can have a wide specter of effects on people, but in general I personally would really prefer some kind of honest releationship that is in big part introspective, filled with curiosity and appreciation. I think fanatism in this context is beyond appreciation, it is someplace else from allowing yourself be moved by art without the cult of personality and commodification. Or in words of Austin Kleon: "Hearts not eyes" - I feel it's not the numbers of clicks the artist wants, it's the depth of the engagement with the artwork that matters.
Anyway,
so... friends, patrons on Patreon,
few days ago a wonderful thing happened. For the 18th time, I wrote a post with
audio release (algoforte05live), music accessible to anyone
with an internet connection, and you paid me for this (technically, I ticked a
box and Patreon charged your card and sent that money to my PayPal account). I
find this quite stunning. I'm immensely grateful for your support of my radical
opennes. And you know what? I want to continue and I'm already making steps to
make it even more radical with open sourcing music as much as possible.
homepage
For last two years I struggled with what to do with my homepage. I got tired with its backend based on WordPress - the most popular blog engine that is free and open source. But part of WordPress is also an ecosystem of various plugins that too often go out of date and stop working because people who wrote those plugins (with extra functionality) don't maintain them anymore while WordPress and other web technologies get improved. On top of that, when such homepage becomes filled with content it somehow becomes disorganized, and the state of it is unsustainable in some way. Let's just say it stops being possible to organize it in a way that is independent from that backend. I seem to be quite sensitive to this and start feeling like everything about that page is too chaotic. I wanted something better. I was searching and researching, trying, testing and exploring different systems of content management and was always somehow dissapointed. I was getting quite frustrated and disgruntled. It was becoming clear I need to program my own system that will satisfy my needs of sustainable organisation and updates.
To skip the technical details at this moment I want to say these prospects almost seemed impossible, since I'm not skilled programmer (more like a weekend hacker knowing bits of this and that) and I felt like I don't have enough time and patience to home-grow a little custom system for myself. Than one weekend in January when my health was getting slowly on its feet I realised I need to get assertive and bite into the hardest but inevitable option and accept that it might take me a year to write it, bit by bit, and if that must be so, so be it.
And look, I had a basic functional system written in two days! Then another day and another of fiddling and then slowly adding and fixing for last two weeks. Just bits here and there and there's a lot of functionality still missing but I'm mostly already giving the new address out to everyone: luka.princic.studio. While I hope to write about that process more in-depth soon I'm currently quite excited and feeling like part of me got a new place. There's a lot of content to be moved to this new place and some vital furnishing will be necessary in coming weeks. But my turf it is!
audio/music work
Recently the art and practice of livecoding is slowly gaining more (manifested) prominence in my work. As a we returned from Utrecht in April last year, where a small delegation from Slovenia has been on ICLC (International Conference on Live Coding), we found ourselves with a desire to do more towards a local TOPLAP (livecoding) community. We decided to have regular meetups (gatherings) and try to organize workshops. There was a gap in autumn as I was very busy with Mad Jakale project and other members of the micro-community were busy too (a common thing - extreme stress in autumn - for self-employed cultural workers in Slovenia). But after new year's we are coming back and so... last week I led the first intruductory Strudel workshop. Strudel is an accessible livecoding music-making "pattern" language that was created as a web app - this means that anyone with a modern web browser can immediately start to play with it, no extra software installation is necessary. The turnout for the workshop was beyond any expectation and we had quite a lot of fun, especially with a communal jam at the end. We are already setting new dates in near future.
I did another DJ gig (& org) at our small Major Arcana clubnight (#6) at lovely and cosy Klub Monokel together with Gašper Torkar this time having fun with the guest Tamara Kezz. It was great fun that I also live video-streamed and recorded. Sets from me and Kezz are available already at vid.pretok.tv. One of the things I immensely tresure with this project is how much Major Arcana and our sets feel appreciated by those who are running this lil' lesbian queer-friendly venue. The concept of the Major Arcana clubnight happening approximately every two months is that it is non-genre or, as I like to call it, genre-queer, in the sense that there are not rules about the electronic dance genres and how they are mixed. The second feature/rule about it is that every DJ plays for one hour before they are switched with the next one. The night goes for six hours and there are usually three of us. Also, every visitor gets to pull a tarot card for themselves and can take it home.
I'm attaching my set from last Friday for your enjoyment.
As always, thank you for your support and don't forget to choose the source.
