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.

The goals of the new site–consolidation, clarification–are fairly obvious, although the need to build it myself isn’t. A number of other projects satisfy the need to bring a bunch of sources together. Lifestreaming services like SweetCron help to aggregate information. However, SweetCron, like many tools for aggregating/streaming information, is too focused on chronology as the criterion for determining hierarchy (not a problem for everyone, but tweets are less important to me than blog entries, and shouldn’t be allowed to bury them). FindMeOn, a service I’m not very familiar with, allows people to manage their identity across social networks and the internet as a whole. This seems awesome, but I wasn’t ready to join another service (where would it have gone in the sidebar?). By independently maintaining my web identity, I have more control over displaying what I think is important and organizing it as I see fit. If you’re interested in bringing together some of your web identities, but don’t quite love the thought of spending your free-time collecting all your things and sorting them yourself, I recommend giving either of the above services a try.

At this point, you should check out the new sansumbrella.com. I concurrently launched a new site to document my projects at projects.sansumbrella. Sketches, concept development, and finished work will be displayed there. I built it in part so I could grab a feed of selected work for the new main page. Having that dedicated site is already proving to be a more enjoyable way to keep track of things I’m making.

This site (things.sansumbrella), will continue to be a record of things I see, read, participate in, and otherwise experience.

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.

I wrote the following artist statement a while back to explain the work:

Ikebana is a series of prints created by reconstructing a photograph of an Osaka streetscape. I wrote custom software to manipulate the photograph based on the brightness, or energy, of different regions. This energy is photographic information, and I am concerned with the transfer of that information in the work. The center of Osaka Ikebana is packed with dense, dark information, while the edges are composed of the ephemeral, high-energy information which disseminates itself like pollen or seed-pods.

Ikebana is composed of four 16″x20″ prints, hung in series.

On view at the Dorothy Uber Bryan Gallery September 9 – October 5, with an opening reception on September 12. Curated by Shaurya Kumar.

A few more photos of the ikebana prints are on flickr.

According to my parents, who drove up to Bowling Green for the opening lecture and reception for the exhibition, Perfect with Pixel is a success. They took some photographs of the show for me, and even managed to schmooze with the curator, Shaurya Kumar, on my behalf. Thanks to Deborah Wood for what my mom describes as an introductory lecture that made her “understand what it is [I] do.”

Perfect With Pixel Exhibition Page

So I’m just putting in my final days at Domani Studios now. I had the pleasure of working on a lot of fun projects with some really cool people here. Figured it was appropriate to rick roll them for my sending off. Of course with a particle system, though. Of course.

‘Ikebana’, one of my restructured photographs, was accepted into a juried show at the Los Angeles Digital Art Center. It’s a 32″x 12″ semi-floral image that abstracts a photograph I took of a restaurant district in Osaka. I’m looking forward to seeing the work on paper, as I haven’t yet been able to find an affordable printer in NYC.

If you live in/around LA, stop by the gallery between April 10 and May 3 to see my work and that of a whopping 39 others. I’m going to see if I can make it to the opening on April 10, since I’ll be in San Francisco that week/end.

The images were created with Processing. More information on the LACDA website.

I took some time over the past few weeks to bring my portfolio site up to speed for the new year. Take a minute to check it out. A few new projects are in, and I revamped the interface to include way more fun. I enjoyed making it, and I hope you’ll enjoy looking at it.

The back-end is currently a flat XML file, but I’m working on getting a simple CMS built in Ruby/rails (the animation stuff is so much more fun). I successfully integrated a rails back-end with a flash interface for a project at work using RubyAMF (for some details on how to do that yourself, check Mark Llobrera’s tutorial), but I still find working with the mediatemple rails install a bit tricky. Once I figure everything out on my server side, I’ll likely do a log-type entry to describe the process.