A year in retrospect. It’s been all over the place – a year in which there was no silver lining that couldn’t tarnish.
The big events of the year, the project for Rent, my VR residency with the library, and the death of my father, all in quick succession in the first half of the year, cast a pall over the second half.
In technology, this was the year in which everything broke.
I came into the year with a Mac that could post directly to Facebook from its share sheet, and with third-party Twitter clients that made Twitter a truly powerful platform for connectivity, and with Twitter able to post directly to my Facebook feed.
By the end of the year, my Mac couldn’t post directly to Facebook, and neither could my Twitter account. My third-party Twitter apps were smoking ruins of their former selves, and the best outlet I had to connect to the outside world from my regional town, had been effectively ruined.
I started on a TIG welding course, and got a few weeks in, before it became apparent that being the one TIG student in a MIG class, that was being run without any semblance of professionalism, meant I spent half a 3 hour class waiting for my non-working machine (which I had told the tutor about at the beginning of the class), and ended up in a shouting match with the tutor, who tried to blame me for not spending hours chasing him around an OH&S-unsafe workshop to get him to come fix my machine.
I build some nestled table workbenches for my room, with the hope they’d be something I could show my father, that he might get some joy seeing me making. But he died from his cancer while I was in the process, and so I don’t know if he ever really saw them.
I built a huge sculpture that went on stage at QPAC. It was a project from hell, marked primarily by a department lead who wanted me for my talent, but didn’t credit me with any actual expertise to know what I was doing when it came to the technical side of things, and so didn’t listen to my specific technical demands. She alternated between being angry that I wan’t keeping her in the loop, and complaining that I was overwhelming her with pointless information when I actually tried to tell the the specific information that informed my technical requirements for what I needed the production to provide, and what the consequences of choices I needed her to make would be.
I had to do a huge cleanout at my father’s house in victoria, to get it on the market to sell. What a headfuck of a shitshow.
I did my first VR residency, learning about sculpting in VR, and 3D printing. The tools demonstrate great potential, but are also not fully baked.
My public outreach roles for the library continued – It’s a fun passtime.
I worked on a new project for the library, constructing racing gates and obstacles for their drone racing programme. It was fun, but the work was so intense, the deadlines so tight, the stress so high, that I caused my health to fuck up again, and gave myself some (so far) permanent neurological damage in my spine, with phantom sensation as a result.
All in all, not a great year.