I always bring up the Shapes (and Other Shapes) installation/performance I did with The Octopus Project and Everest Pipkin because it was probably the most fully realized non-movie art piece I’ve worked on in the wild before I started art school. One part of the show was a phone tree you could call that I built with the old ruby version of Tinsel. The phone tree was big and let the caller hear recorded and text to speech audio from Everest’s text generator output. This application had been running on Heroku for years and you could still call and play with it. Recently Heroku forced moving to a new VM, which required a newer version of Ruby. Updating ruby for the application was a nightmare of sorting out package dependencies, but after a day of futzing with it I got the dependencies worked out and was able to push to heroku and have the application build. But now when you call you get a voice saying “an application has occurred”. This all happened right around the time I really would have liked to have it still working to show at a talk I was giving.
Anyway, this just reminds me how fragile artwork that depends on other services and hosts are (I’m looking at you heroku). I could probably rebuild the whole thing in the js version of Tinsel, but it feels like a lot for a project that’s this old. I added all the recorded voice parts of the application to my [shapes process page(https://wileywiggins.com/shapes.html)] for now so at least those are listenable.
