2024 year in review
music
In 2024 I released three independent releases: "algoforte05 live" (January), "WSOLSTICE23" (September), and a full-legth "DRAGX̶FUNK" (December). I also contributed a track ("My Shame On Your Power") to our annual Netlabel Day compilation Access Frame (in 2024 subtitled 'Authority') under my Prince Lucija name. Out of all those it is definitely "DRAGX̶FUNK" that was the hardest and the most dragging (pun unintended). It was planned that I finish all reworking of music from 'Image Snatchers present: Mad Jakale In A Film We Haven't Seen' stage work into autonomous tracks suitable for an album release by end of spring the latest. But different projects and my procrastination kept getting in the way and with autumn being crazy as it is every year, the whole thing was almost a failure. I managed to finish all the mixing far over the deadline, but I did finish it. Unfortunately the liner notes, editorial, and design for the USB booklet got further delayed but it is coming now in January! Apart from embarassment and shame I feel because of my delaying I'm fairly satisfied with music and how it turned out at the end on the album. I am quite happy with mastering from Samuel from OpenMastering too. At the end of the day, it is deifnitely one of the highlights of the year.
I also wrote music for the theatre stage piece directed by Matija Ferlin "Samo kraj svijeta" (Juste la fin du monde, Jean-Luc Lagarce), premiered in Zagreb's ZKM and Pula's INK. There are some gems in there that should see the light of day in a form of a release soon. I helped with music for Leon Marič's 'Küšni me (Kiss me)', composed some incidental music for a video project in Linz called "Cyborg Needs No Redemption" by Sofia Talanti, and worked on number of re-arrangments for Technoburlesque: Image Snatchers project (now in its 11th year!).
live
I played 22 music performances, out of those were 2 so-called lecture-performances, 10 were DJ sets, 4 were online streams, the rest were in 5 different cities, and 5 DJ sets were part of Major Arcana clubnight that I organize in Klub MONOKEL venue. Out of all performances I have to say that the most powerful was actually the DJ set at Ustanova (queer flinta collective, at GROMKA), with packed audience willing to dance and give feedback while the dj booth was on the dancefloor level. Following close behind are both DRAGX̶FUNK presentations (Grounded, Rentgen), and DJ set at Libre Musique Festival in Neuchatel, where, although played to a pretty empty venue, I found a completely new joy in playing my own production.
Since my proposal (#BeYourOwnPlatform lecture-performance) was accepted at AMRO, Linz, I was able to arrange some extra dates around it resulting in a mini-tour, thanks to great friends in Brno, Prague, and Dresden.
Major Arcana clubnights are special to me, despite the effort involved, because of the venue (Klub Monokel) as an actual safer space for gender non-conforming and queer presentations and identities - including my own.
I also did live sound for Image Snatches (13 shows, many of them sold out, within which I also performed my own 'Kate Butch' number 6 times), and for 'Image Snatchers present: Mad Jakale In A Film We Haven't Seen' (4 shows).
research
This year was intense also because I embarked on a more focused artistic research journey leading me away from well-established pathways into new territories (both physical and mental). There are actually three different strands in a neighbourhood of each-other that (hopefully) collide in more than one way in near future. My strongest practical and theoretical interest, which I would like to stay with as my path towards both completing MA/PhD and possibly teaching in the near future, is computer music (as digital art) in context of livecoding communities and posthuman feminism (including all kinds of FLINTA* communities). This of course touches upon number of topics, among which is also artists' digital autonomy, which in turn leads to this year's research under the title #BeYourOwnPlatform. While MA/PhD proposal is still in draft stage, I am happy that this year I did number of presentations on the topic (at Synth Library, Prague; DIWO, Dresden; AMRO, Linz and Figure It Out, Valletta) and started the BeYourOwnPlatform.site website along with a lot of discussion happening on the fediverse (see #BeYourOwnPlatform). The third research strand is within an EU-funded project called IMPULSE, where I'm leading research on artistic and performative use of digitised heritage in immersive (metaverse) environments.
practical self-platforming
#BeYourOwnPlatform has two sides of it for me: the research one mentioned above, and the practical one where I try to put autonomy principles in action on my own case: selfhosting (and programming) my own website, mailing list, membership project, direct donations, etc.. with as little intermediary agents and VC founded and SILOed platforms as possible. In February I suddenly managed a kind if breakthrough with my long and frustrating search for appropriate method of publishing and managing my own website. After more than two years of deliberating I whipped up some minimal php code in a way that I wanted my own site to work: using markdown files as posts and folder structure as database (so called flatfile approach). I caved in to always-in-construction philosophy, both in functional and content sense. Oh, and also, one of really neat things is ability to update most parts of my website via nextcloud web interface, since my server is mounted into it via ssh as an external storage (sync to desktop is not possible though). Now if only a plaintext editor in NC would actually work.
On the other hand I soft-launched a membership project called The Backstairs Tone using Stripe payment processor and Keila open source mailing list. While supporters from Patreon are actually receiving membership mailouts I'm still in process of moving them fully and closing Patreon account. I wanted to write every week to members but managed 20 throughout the year. It's not what I planned, but is not nothing, so perhaps a goal is a higher frequency in 2025. This is actually a very important project in my view, it means a lot to me, as it is a big challenge for me (regularity, remember?) and at the same a huge part of radical autonomy that I keep talking about.
I also established a good format for my releases within my homepage, including a payment button (via Stripe) for a download (see algoforte05live for an example), but I'm yet to update all relevant releases in the same manner. Which is true for other parts of the website too: so many things to bring in, past projects, old blog posts, journals, events, etc... It would be smart to establish some kind of measurement, to record progress.
netaudio
Through our netlabel Kamizdat we released four music albums and a compilation (Access Frame), with majority of collaborators being women or non-binary. All releases had a digital and a physical form - 3 USB booklets, 1 booklet with a tape, and compilation 'zine' with QR code bookmark. With an exception of the latter, all are numbered limited editions. I am (we are) still struggling with timelines in a big ugly way, the worst being my own release. Perhaps in 2025 we can get better at following the plans with milestones in a realistic way.
We also organized a series of events Kamizdat Rentgen coinciding with releases: Access Frame (on Netlabel Day), BUKA VS RAANE, Sujevera, Warrego Valles, and my DRAGX̶FUNK. We haven't streamed all events. To be honest, organizing and realizing streaming became a bit of an overkill with very little audience online (truth be told, probably not enough promotion was done for these events as well). However for Netlabel Day we introduced a new feature - discursive program where we ran a hybrid round-table with guests from Germany (Konrad) and Sweden (setto) before the concerts.
In context of net-audio we also organized a Netaudio Barcamp on 2/NOV, together with Konrad (ClongClongMoo) and FC Stoffel (der kleine grüne Würfel). This was a really interesting hybrid event with new knowledge, guests, and connections opening up. I'm hoping we will be able to publish the recording soon, and possibly create transcriptions too.
communities
I continue to be a very happy fediverse user, but my eagerness to take care of different online communities might be a tad bit too expensive (and often overwhelming) for me. I do get some donations from users of instances I run, but the fact is that paying for three mastodon instances (sonomu.club, toot.si, and djs.social) is getting more expensive everyday. I need to be transparent about these budgets, and will soon write an overview and roadmaps to the future - I've been planning to do it since summer. At the same time, sonomu.club remains a beautiful and caring community. It seems that most of people here are grateful to be part of safer space and not a free-speech maximalist environment where "freedom to" would trump "freedom from" (abuse, violence, trolling, spam, etc). I see it as a precious, fragile, rare communal space that follows some important values, including sustainability and degrowth: I have managed to keep the number of users small and managable which I think is proving to be beneficial to the community. At the same time I try to find time to stay up-to-date with fediverse moderation issues, including amazing and inspirational IFTAS (Independent Federated Trust & Safety) initiative on one hand, and other (perhaps more radical) mod/admin groups (like the loose #FediBlock hashtag). I must say I have learned and am still learning a lot from being in admin/moderation role on the fediverse and will continue so.
Slovenian livecoding community gathered around toplap.si didn't really grow that much. We did manage to organize number of meetups (7 to be precise), and I feel there's a window opening up with collaboration with 'glitch trigger' FLINTA* group with which we already had a strudel mini-workshop and there's another one scheduled in January. Ljudmila is preparing an Algorave in late spring where hopefully we can show more local talent. But back to 'general' toplap.si inititative, I feel the biggest obstacle to growth to a 'momentum' that doesn't scatter immediately is organizational one: we are lacking stronger, louder, and earlier promotion about meetups, and organizing meetups so that they are both informative and fun at the same time. I dissagree with making a different language workshop on each meetup, but when are where should novices learn live-coding? If these are then separate workshops, then this means more organizational strain and energy, lack of which is apparent. I'm hopeful that we can strike a tiny fire-circle in 2025 with combination of FLINTA* members and Strudel livecoding environment.
I was marginally active in local librehosters collective kompot.si - if nothing else (apart from being smart in the matrix channel, and two or three appearances on meetings), I designed one version of the sticker for this initiative.
personal
This year marks a special, difficult but inevitable farewell from our 18-year-old doggo Stella. We had a difficult decision to make (as many dog owners at some point): decide if it is the right time or not to let her finally rest in peace here and move to another plane of existence. She came into my life together with my partner's whole package, and we never lived together without her presence. A profound change with a lot of feelings involved.
While I failed to write many "weeknotes" (despite being a form that's even somewhat easier to write than classic 'blog posts') I established a different regular practice: scribbling a hand-written note /clumsy poetic fragment/ on my eink tablet/reader on more or less daily basis. I started sometime in June/July, so there must be ~150 notes in this year. I have original PDFs, while I publish a PNG image amd txt transcription. These fragments appear at the front of website prin.lu.
Together with embarking on coding my own website sistem I decided on a Prin Lu domain which is connected to gender identity/expression (re)search, which includes a playful name - too often the slightly special characters in my family name get lost so it appears as simply Prini. Shuffling character and names around it just seemed that "prin lu" can be basis for both identities: Luka Prinčič and Prince Lucija, as it currently looks like I simply desire to be somewhat 'demi-gender'.
I've pondered so much about who and what I am this year, what desires I'm prepared to express publicly, how my sexuality (and kink) relates to gender identity and expression. Few questions got answered, and some expressions found space: I continued the path of "less shame" from last year and somehow normalized wearing nail polish, jewelry, leggings, and makeup on daily basis (!), and dared more often go out in drag (evenings, club nights). I was even at my father's without even realizing I had nail polish on. I'm slowly finding my footing with different forms of clothing and dressing around - it's definitely constantly in-becoming, never static. I'm comfortable seeing myself as 'gender nonconforming' but not yet fully genderqueer (due to strong impostor syndrome, I guess). I did try getting a stronger trans* support network, although I still feel quite on my own thin ice about it all.
A mantra "tiny steps, my friend. Nothing's a must, maybe not today, there will be the right time some time soon." (when feeling overwhelmed by shame and pressure of self-imposing public gender nonconforming expression), Alok V Menon, and finally, existence of local queer and trans spaces (Klub Monokel, Major Arcana, Transakcija, Pride parade Ljubljana, Ustanova, Pritličje) helped me so much this year and I hope to make stronger and tighter connections in next year.