Wray Bowling

I have been writing lately. A lot. The things that have been interesting to me over the last couple of years have been buried in a black box that no one can access but me. I became very quiet online. Frankly, I became afraid to say anything. I was experiencing PTSD from losing my tech job in 2023 and I still have those feelings today, but there's a lot of journey to share. Like I said I wrote a lot. I had every intention of launching a website that was essentially a fresh blog. It would be in Vuepress, no Gatsby, no actually I did all that work in Vue already so it would be in Nuxt which is much better. Scratch that I want to look into Deno. That's too hard to learn right now maybe I should look into Next.js since it's really taking off. Actually, finally, around this time I discovered the best solution and it was Lynx from the Alibaba team. This would allow me make web apps but also finally learn how to make native apps. It didn't work at all so scrap it and I'll just migrate my old MySQL database over to Postgres. That's silly because then I'm still managing my db manually so you know what I already did the work of rebuilding my entire portfolio in Airtable I could just use that. I'm going to eventually hit a paywall with that, not to mention Netlify started cashing in on all that free usage so I guess GitHub Pages are back baybee. Okay so Actions are way more powerful but basically the same story as before where I should start figuring out how to make an SPA.

I wrote some articles into my static native web component website right then and there which was the obvious choice. the first article was all about how I'd built this very website with native web components. The only issue was that using native web components was awful.

It was time to drop everything and move to Rust, just kidding C#, haha gross let's try Python, okay Flask specifically. I was careful to not give into temptation by looking into Laravel. I knew I should really switch to Django but whatever this was working, at least until it didn't.

Late at night, washing dishes in a restaurant because I'd been paralyzed by the paradox of choice, stifled by depression, and crushed with anxiety every time I looked at what's going on in the job market, and especially to software developers like myself, I started to wonder how on earth I was going to update a static markdown website with my phone on the go. Would I build my own CMS? Would it have flexible blocks? Should I just spin up a Wordpress? Should I just crawl back to Drupal? What about having that nice native app experience? How do I avoid monthly fees? I'm broke! ...I do have a Tumblr. I guess there's that. wraybowling.com used to point to it. There's a mess of posts. It's fragmented as heck. But I guess at the least I'm here to say I'm not afraid to say something. A lot of what I've been writing lately is just me trying very hard to see the good in Language Models and Image Models, but even when I find the good, it's still just so disheartening to know that every day the vast majority of people out there are happy to never pay me for all the things I know to help them with. They'd rather have it fast and need an excuse to justify the $20/mo subscription they already paid for so they don't get "left behind" not "learning ai."

I still hate it. I'll always put "ai" in quotes because I don't believe in it. I refuse to see these things as anything more than what they are: statistical models, fancy autocorrect, inference engines, dice rolls. I've actually gotten quite good at using them in very careful ways. Before I could say that, I didn't want to say anything at all because all I could say in the beginning was that I didn't like it, and especially because it hurt me.

Donny's Orange from Danny Sangra on Vimeo.

An orange comes to terms with her purpose in life.

A film by Danny Sangra Voiced by Zosia Mamet as Orange Evan Jonigkeit as the Client/Director/Agency and Mary Ellen Lea as a cloud

3D Graphics - Velvet Spectrum Music - Jose Saudinos

But seriously from Andrea Allen on Vimeo.

How To Lose Weight In 4 Easy Steps! from Nicolai Smith on Vimeo.

Green Desert | Introduction from Julianna Villarosa on Vimeo.

Tallgrass prairie once covered more than 170 million acres of North America. Now, less than 4% remains. “Green Desert” — a nod to the endless acres of monoculture crops that have almost wholly replaced the prairie — grieves for this vibrant ecosystem while pointedly preserving it through original video, animation, The Smithsonian’s Botany Collections, and experimental techniques like pressing native plant samples onto 16mm film leader.

FlowILM 2021 from Gene A. Felice II on Vimeo.

The Cameron Art Museum hosted FlowILM, a live performance and light / sound installation by a group of Interdisciplinary artists and scientists known as the Algae Society, on Thursday, April 22, 2021 from 6 pm – 9 pm in celebration of Earth Day. Aquatic organisms unique to the Cape Fear River and coastal ecosystems were projection-mapped onto the museum’s exterior walls and landscapes, interfacing with silhouettes, shadows, and movements of a lone dancer, connected through the medium of sound. Water samples and data from the museum’s pond and the surrounding community made the invisible visible through projected digital light and scales of magnification. Visitors were encouraged to meander the museum grounds and interact with the art, experiencing symbiotic worlds of biological and ecological art, biomimicry, interactive systems, and multi-sensory data translation. This outdoor event was presented free of charge. Social distancing and masks were required.

FlowILM is the first in a year-long series of art and ecology focused programming at CAM in collaboration with the Algae Society and the Coaction Lab at University of North Carolina at Wilmington. This community art event is committed to articulating the un/stable relationships between organisms, environments, and technology. FlowILM features the work of Gene A. Felice II, Kimathi Moore, Janice Lancaster and Jeremy Roberts.

BAROQUE SUITE from Alex Tyson on Vimeo.

[Please view with headphones in full screen.]

Baroque Suite is a short visual-music composition that invites the audience to "listen to image" and to "see sound" in five synesthetic movements. The formal structure is guided by the traditional Baroque Suite: a set of musical movements as exemplified by Western European composers from the early 18th century. This Baroque influence also extends to the film's content; references to idiomatic musical gestures and painting techniques as well as common Baroque subjects/aesthetics are all present.

The composition is built upon the guiding principle that creative collaboration in visual-music must have no boundaries of input between composer and filmmaker. Thus the process was to conceive and realize images and sounds simultaneously, in a serious attempt to create continuum between media while not sacrificing the most expressive conventions relative to each.

Written and Directed by: Troy Herion and Alex Tyson

Composer: Troy Herion

Director of Photography: Alex Tyson

Lighting Designer: Zac Rubino

Choreographer: Meg Foley

Dance Producer and Consultant: J. Makary

Dancers: Gregory Holt Lydia Adler Okrent Joanna Quigley Gabrielle Revlock Sharif Abdulmalik

Photographer & Photochemist: Kateri Likoudis

Editor + Graphics: Alex Tyson

Musicians: Keyboards, Guitars - Troy Herion Drum Kit - N. Cameron Britt Clarinets - Jonathan Russell Strings - Rameau String Quartet

Audio Engineer & Synthesizer Programmer: Alex Tyson

Production Facilities: Woodshop Films Lightroom Photo Co-op Princeton University Music Department

3 Minutes in America (2015) | Alex Tyson from Alex Tyson on Vimeo.

Commissioned for New Works: Ciné-Roman (films in response to Chris Marker's La Jetée), "3 Minutes in America" is an experimental narrative criss-crossing the continental US. The film presents a romance unfolding amid an array of contemporary phenomena including vaccine production, basketball games, a fracking well explosion and illicit communications on a government server.

A collaboration with photographer Barb Choit.

Presented by Bowerbird, curated by J. Louise Makary. Full credits:

WRITTEN & DIRECTED by ALEX TYSON PHOTOGRAPHY : BARB CHOIT, ALEX TYSON NARRATOR : TOM CARROLL MUSIC : COLIN POTTER, ROGER WEBB

ADDITIONAL PHOTOGRAPHS: Lance Cheung United Soybean Board Ishikawa Ken Sergeant Ross Tilly , RAF Antonio P. Turretto Ramos, U.S. Navy Partha S. Sahana International Aids Vaccine Initiative Vallooran Jijo M. Justin Wilkinson, NASA Mike Russel Leon Ian Florida Dept. of Corrections Nicholas Hall, U.S. Navy Patrick Cashin, MTA Anthony Catalano Carrie Zukoski

Mr. Frisby's Beat Pocket from Simon Panrucker on Vimeo.

Download full track here:

mrfrisbysbeatpocket.bandcamp.com/

Pocket forever looping here: