In just a few days I’ll be starting work on an interdisciplinary humanities PhD at Concordia University in Montreal. I’ve spent the last two weeks getting settled in here. It’s lovely here but moving was hard. I thought that when I moved to California and back for my MFA work, that would be the last move I had in me. Naturally I would have to stay in Texas to be near my mother. When I got back I found, like a lot of my friends had, that Austin had become pretty uninhabitable to me outside the bubble of my own house. Outrageous prices, political hostility, ecological precarity, and most of all a lack of meaningful, stable work. I started compacting down with the rest of the sediment at the bottom of a deep lake of depression that was only allievated by continuing the work that I had started at UCLA— mainly three large writing projects, one expanding from each of the chapters of the thesis I had written. Small game prototypes supported each project. I had a little survey show of some of these early projects at The Museum of Human Achievement in 2024, and one of those prototypes has now balooned up into a toolkit for making dungeon games that I hope to develop into a sort of Bitsy for designing turn-based dungeon games. I also gave a talk to my friend and past advisor Danny Snelson’s electronic literature class about interactive fiction and uses of the text parser. Danny and I also had a productive prototyping sprint on a strange narrative documentary soccer game(?) And finally, I spent this summer deep in researching and writing a long essay about future imaginaries and The Tower of Babel for a new outlet of the UCLA Game Lab in development.
Looking back I’ve kept almost feverishly busy! But I let this feed wither and die into impersonal software development changelogs that were better kept in git repos than posted online. I think the main reason for this has been a sort of depression about the state of the web, where the only engagement you seem to get any more is having your work scraped for content by bots, or “bad actors” actively looking for personal information to outright attack you with. It’s sad because the web is still the place where I want to make things. There’s something generative to me about the idea that a stranger may stumble on something I make and have a connection with it without my ever interacting with them directly. One of the projects I had looked at but wasn’t able to pursue over the summer was archiving and restoring the early flash works of my friend Divya Srinivasan, who was an animator on Waking Life and is now a successful children’s picture book author. Her personal site circa 2000 was a very intimate web of photography, minimal animations and sparse writing, and I remember really loving exploring it during that time, and feel like it should be part of the canon of Net Art. Divya agreed to have the work archived and restored but became reluctant whenever any sort of promotion of the work was brought up. For her what activated the work was the encounter a person would have finding it and interacting with it as an anonymous thing discovered. I really understand that, that was what made Net Art interesting to me, especially projects like JODI, while they were still totally mysterious.
My first class at Concordia is called “Materializing Design,” and it’s a course designed by Dr. Rilla Khaled, adapted and taught by my advisor Dr. Pippin Barr. Part of the course is developing an approach to “Annotated Portfolios” in a software context. In practice this means adopting a set of versioning habits, and incorporating journals into git repos as opposed to just dry changelogs, surfacing design thinking. This is actually sort of like what I was doing for a while with this feed. I’ve pre-emptively started journaling inside the repo for Dungeon Mode Kit, after having copied early posts and changelogs there. I’ve stopped posting changelogs here.
That leaves me with what to do with this feed? I could use it to announce released things, but for all of the work I do, how often does anything ever actually come out? I keep a personal journal in obsidian now with sense memories of each day to try to keep me connected to my body and the world rather than just rattling around inside the prision of my own skull, but I would never share that on a site called “WILEYWIGGINS.COM”… a relic of an earlier thirstier and chattier internet.
I’m going to play it by ear and try to remember what feels correct to share with that invisible person who stumbles into a space I’ve created.
Hello from Montreal, I love it here so far but miss my family and cats. I got a somewhat fancy camera and as soon as I become bold enough to walk around with it hanging off my neck I’ll post some photos to /photos/ (especially when it starts snowing, which as a Texan terrifies me)
