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Spring 2021 #OSSTA Lecture: Nathalie Lawhead

If you do any­thing gen­er­a­tive on com­put­ers and don’t know what to do with what­ev­er you just made, turn­ing that into a lit­tle tool that peo­ple can use to do stuff like tweak val­ues, play around with some visu­als, and just export what­ev­er they make goes a long way. Coming from more of a game design angle, it’s easy to over­think inter­ac­tiv­i­ty and want to build on the sys­tems in ways that get real­ly com­pli­cat­ed. If you look at tool design, often the oppo­site mind­set is the most rewarding.

Uncreative Writing

With the rise of the Web, writ­ing has met its pho­tog­ra­phy. And by that I mean writ­ing has encoun­tered a sit­u­a­tion sim­i­lar to what hap­pened uh, to paint­ing with the inven­tion of pho­tog­ra­phy. A tech­nol­o­gy so much bet­ter at repli­cat­ing real­i­ty that in order to sur­vive, paint­ing had to ors— or, uh, alter its course radically.