On Monday, I spent the day at Wall Street on Demand in Boulder, CO. I was invited by Christo Allegra to talk about my work and give a brief workshop on the Cinder framework. The talk went well, and I liked presenting in the casual environment of the office; rocking chairs, couches, and cups of tea. My presentation was titled “Sampled landscapes, synthetic terrain” which seems to have gone over well enough.

WSOD has a relationship with RMCAD, and they provided design mentors for students in an their interaction design course this semester. The semester happens to have recently ended, so I also participated as a guest reviewer for their final presentations on Monday. I was impressed by the high quality of the student presentations. The solutions to the problems they defined were fun and displayed well.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t in the area long enough for a proper hike. I did get to go for a brief walk about a reservoir to start my day, though.

This morning, I learned that Time Spent Alone was nominated for a Webby Award. It is a collection of explorations of personal themes using, not surprisingly, the internet.

Check out the project, and consider giving it your vote for the People’s Voice Award in the NetArt category.

For a time now, I’ve been posting things on flickr, vimeo, this blog, twitter, archiving projects in various ways, and using tools like delicious and (recently) ffffound to keep track of things that come to me through the tubes. My stuff, like many other people’s, exists in a lot of places on the internet, and it became far too many to continue to tack onto an increasingly tall sidebar. So I stripped everything out (pretty much), and replaced it with a new website.

Depending on how you get here, you may have noticed the new splash page. Coinciding with the creation of a quick-and-dirty project archive, I put together a homepage that lets you, the user, decide which of my sites to visit. That’s the only thing it does. Previously, an .htaccess file rewrote requests for sansumbrella.com to things.sansumbrella.com.

The archive is a python script that walks through directories and wraps the contents in appropriate html for display. It will make it easy for me to catalogue past work and make available more of my work that doesn’t necessarily get written up in my blog or make it into my portfolio. I will be actively updating the archive, but the python codebase should be pretty stable. If anyone knows how I can map cleaner urls so I don’t have to point you to my cgi-bin, please let me know.

View the project archives. View the splash page.

edit: I updated the design of the archive site. The columns float, and you can tell what project you’re on thanks to a header above the images. A few other minor design changes were made to make it look more like this blog. Thanks to Zach for the impetus to do something other than strip the default styling down to Helvetica.

update: I figured out the mod_rewrite business necessary to make the urls in the archive site pretty. Please visit and bookmark away on the newer version of the archive at archive.sansumbrella.com

A few months ago, I was invited to take part in the Perfect with Pixel exhibition at Bowling Green State University. I’m excited about the other artists I will be showing alongside, including Andy Au, a printmaking professor at Miami University. From my recent work, Ikebana was selected for the show. Last week, I had the series printed on super-nice Hahnemühle photo rag by the folks at Hanson Digital in San Francisco. I’m quite happy with how they turned out.