I make a practice of posting screenshots and GIFs regularly. Things I was inspired by: Mark Forscher's workinonittt, David Rudnick's font releases

Lately I've wanted to extend this practice into the physical space, but keep the same vibe of work-in-progress, not precious. Also want to make it fit into the flow of the work I'm doing. Inspired by: Dynamicland, Folk Computer, filmmakers focused on process like Van Neistat. Partly driven by having a toddler and wanting her to be able to see the process of creative work I do - which is hard on a computer and keyboard at this stage.

Started the tabletop series. Writing in the morning, sometimes with toddler scribble collaboration.

The setup. An overhead camera with capture link to the computer. Also an extended screen built into the desk (haven't figured out the exact use for this yet, likewise for the macropad).

On the software side I made https://tabletop.constraint.systems. A simple webcam view with live-crop. Imaging and cropping could have been done with other tools, but it makes the process more satisfying (and therefore repeatable) for me if I do it with my own purpose built tools.

I did start to want to explore collaging multiple pages together, so I started to work on a tool combining Tabletop with an infinite canvas/spatial app experiment.

Sampler (still a work-in-progress) let's you position cameras on a canvas and "stamp" images. It also lets you switch between blend modes.

The most conceptually interesting part of this is comparing the strengths of digital versus physical collage. Movement in physical, particularly managing overlaps, is much more satisfying. But being able to scale and duplicate in digital is really nice.

The Sampler project evolved as it went - since the default input was the conventional webcam rather than the overhead tabletop one I started playing with that. The blended images from webcam reminded me of a series of David Hockney photographic collages. I'd also been watching videos of building drum tracks out of sounds sampled from real-life - which seems connected.

Behind the scenes

I put the slides for this talk together in Sampler, first sketching and rearranging physically. It was a satisfying process! Still things to figure out, particularly how to collage the digital and physical in a way that feels connected and tactile.