☞Caveat lector — this site is being built at unreasonable speed with a guild of magic elves. If something reads not quite right, someone might have gotten carried away. Please tell me so I can fix it. — Aguas Infinitas, Star
current work
Projects
Some are live; some are still being written. Each has its own reason to exist.
8 projects
A new work at the meeting of self-knowledge and cosmos.
It continues a lifelong fascination with the sky, asking how looking outward might help a person recognize something inward.
A home for poems meant to be heard as well as read. Word becomes world.
The collection holds quantum sutras, oracle poems, and linguistic investigations in Starheart's spoken voice. It keeps the text and the breath together, where anyone can return to them.
SirenPatch
Emo dance anthems for homeless emotions, made with Claire Gardner.
Songs for feelings that have nowhere respectable to go: sorrow with a beat, yearning with a chorus, and enough room for the body to answer.
In the studio
In the making
The Original Thought
A developing cosmology that reads recurring forms across mathematics, planetary archetypes, body, and consciousness.
The manuscript asks whether a small generative grammar can illuminate a much larger world. It is being written as an instrument for thought, not presented as settled science.
Being written
Dao De Jing
A father-and-son translation of the Dao De Jing into clear, living English.
My father and I are making a new English rendering of Laozi that aims to remain clear without becoming thin.
In translation
These projects do not all make the same claim. They share a working instinct: make difficult inner experience legible without flattening it.
Earlier instruments.
The current workshop is only the newest room. These are selected systems I built or helped build before it—working artifacts, not a list of job titles.
2000–02 · memory & common sense
ARIA
An adaptive photo agent that listened while a person wrote and retrieved photographs through personal context and ordinary world knowledge.
2001–04 · everyday knowledge
ConceptNet & MAKEBELIEVE
ConceptNet organized common-sense assertions into a usable network; MAKEBELIEVE used causal knowledge from that network to improvise short stories.
2002 · natural language
MontyLingua
A practical English-processing toolkit for Python: tokenization, tagging, chunking, extraction, and lightweight semantics in one inspectable package.
2003–05 · feeling in text
Emotus Ponens
A textual affect system that inferred the emotional consequences of events even when the feeling itself was never named.
2004–05 · English as source
Metafor
A story-to-program experiment: ordinary nouns, verbs, and relations became the beginnings of Python objects, methods, and structure.
2004–06 · simulated point of view
What Would They Think? & IdentityMirror
Systems that modeled a person’s point of view from their writing, then made the model visible enough to inspect, compare, and question.
2004–05 · context in the world
InterestMap & Ambient Semantics
A graph of interests connected to RFID rings and watches, letting physical objects become prompts for personal recommendations and encounters.
2005–07 · computational taste
Synesthetic Cookbook & Gulp Fiction
One system searched recipes through sensation and emotion; another learned patterns from cuisines and attempted to compose recipes from words.
2005 · 24-hour MIT competition
I Am a Beautiful Snowflake
A first-place social artwork and program built in one day: individual expression gathered into a shared, computationally mediated field.
2006 · generative aesthetics
Aesthetiscope
A computational painting system that translated music and semantic material into evolving visual compositions.
2008 · culture in interfaces
GenderLens
A news experiment built from 150,000 blog entries to reveal how gendered taste assumptions change what an interface chooses to show.
2009–11 · portable taste
Hunch
A consumer taste graph that learned from a short sequence of questions, then carried that point of view across otherwise unrelated decisions.
2014–16 · public mood
Positivity Pulse
A Hedonometrics prototype with Nancy Etcoff for Santa Monica: an experiment in reading the emotional weather of shared spaces.
2015–17 · cultural significance
ArtAdvisor
An art brain that indexed 100,000 artist profiles and modeled exhibitions, institutions, press, markets, and career trajectories without treating value as simple fact.
2015 · Guggenheim collaboration
Åzone Futures Market
A simulated market in possible technologies: a public instrument for turning collective prediction and institutional imagination into visible movement.
2015 · Guggenheim Helsinki NOW
Architecture Personality Genome & Matchmaker Game
Two instruments for encountering architecture through taste: one mapped a person’s affinities; the other made those affinities playable with other people.