Some are live; some are still being written. Each has its own reason to exist.
8 projects
A new work about names and the meaning carried by sound.
Names arrive before we can choose them. This project asks what they teach us to hear. It is the ConceptNet move, run on sound: what a name means, read through how it sounds. “Sound is the firmware of consciousness.” (3 November 2023)
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. It began at seventeen, behind the glass at JPL as Mars Pathfinder landed; twenty-seven years later that promise has a name.
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.
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.
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.
A father-and-son translation of the Dao De Jing into clear, living English.
My father, a professor of literature and a translator, and I are making a new English rendering of Laozi that aims to remain clear without becoming thin. He handed me Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy around 2003; twenty years on, the channel runs both ways.
These projects do not all make the same claim. They share a working instinct: make difficult inner experience legible without flattening it.
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. Each one is an early form of a move the newest room still makes.
An adaptive photo agent that listened while a person wrote and retrieved photographs through personal context and ordinary world knowledge.
ConceptNet organized common-sense assertions into a usable network; MAKEBELIEVE used causal knowledge from that network to improvise short stories.
A practical English-processing toolkit for Python: tokenization, tagging, chunking, extraction, and lightweight semantics in one inspectable package. One call, jist(), runs the whole pipeline in order: split, tokenize, tag, chunk, extract.
A textual affect system that inferred the emotional consequences of events even when the feeling itself was never named.
A story-to-program experiment: ordinary nouns, verbs, and relations became the beginnings of Python objects, methods, and structure. With Henry Lieberman; the talk was English: The Lightest Weight Programming Language of them all (Lightweight Languages 4, MIT, 4 December 2004) and the paper Metafor: visualizing stories as code (IUI 2005). As I put it in 2026: “in 2004, 22 years ago, I started vibe coding.”
A graph of interests connected to RFID rings and watches, letting physical objects become prompts for personal recommendations and encounters. Under it, InterestMap mined public interest profiles and used statistical association to reveal affinities, neighborhoods, and cultural cliques.
Systems that modeled a person’s point of view from their writing, then made the model visible enough to inspect, compare, and question.
A first-place social artwork and program built in one day: individual expression gathered into a shared, computationally mediated field. The final program is eighty-six lines of Python whose top level reads in four verbs: strip banality, describe the person, lay out the person, render the person.
One system searched recipes through sensation and emotion; another learned patterns from cuisines and attempted to compose recipes from words.
A computational painting system that translated music and semantic material into evolving visual compositions.
Musical tones, genres, and successive choices became a lightweight taste signature that could recommend both artists and people; each selection one more strand, never a personality test.
The language of happiness read as more than positive and negative word counts: affect compared with grammatical form, activity, socialness, commercialness, arousal, dominance, weekdays, and hours.
Financial news aligned with market data and weighted linguistic features, to test whether a story’s language helped anticipate or explain a price movement.
An adversarial experiment: linguistic noise manipulated to expose what a spam filter attends to.
A news experiment built from 150,000 blog entries to reveal how gendered taste assumptions change what an interface chooses to show.
A consumer taste graph that learned from a short sequence of questions, then carried that point of view across otherwise unrelated decisions. The lesson, written down on 15 April 2012: “Taste, at its heart is about expressing the self […] but MUCH OF THE TASTE CODE IS ERROR CHECKING, VALIDATION CODE, to prove that what is communicated is authentic.”
A Hedonometrics prototype with Nancy Etcoff for Santa Monica: an experiment in reading the emotional weather of shared spaces.
Two instruments for encountering architecture through taste: one mapped a person’s affinities; the other made those affinities playable with other people. A formal Guggenheim commission, 2015, on three signed agreements.
A simulated market in possible technologies: a public instrument for turning collective prediction and institutional imagination into visible movement.
An art brain that indexed 100,000 artist profiles and modeled exhibitions, institutions, press, markets, and career trajectories without treating value as simple fact.