Category: field notes

News, essays, reviews, surveillance

Algorithmic Art Assembly Archived

The 2026 edition at Gray Area in San Francisco

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Just a quick note that talks and performances from the 2026 edition of the multi-day Algorithmic Art Assembly event have begun popping up on YouTube thanks to the tireless efforts of its founder, my friend Thorsten Sideboard. I had the pleasure of giving a talk (“The Woodshed Is a Black Box”) at the first AAA and interviewing Mark Fell, Rian Treanor, and James Bradbury during the second AAA. As with those years, the 2026 AAA was held at Gray Area in the Mission District, here in San Francisco. I sadly couldn’t attend this year because as timing worked out, I was across the country in New York City when it happened (March 26 – 28), so I’m especially happy the material is getting a second life online. There’s — among many other videos — a performance and separate talk by Keith Fullerton Whitman, a live set by Kara-Lis Coverdale, and a lecture by Daniel Temkin, author of the excellent book Forty-Four Esolangs: The Art of Esoteric Code, which I’m currently reading. Can’t wait to spend time checking out everything I missed.

Agency & Gadgetry

Now emerging

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Continuing to really dig my Xteink X4 ereader, a tiny eink device that easily fits in a shirt pocket, where mine has now semi-permanently taken refuge. I outfitted the gadget’s sleep screen with the central image from the American edition of William Gibson’s 2020 novel, Agency. Doing so was simple: You just make a 480 x 800 bitmap file and pop it on the memory card. Because the CrossPoint Reader alternate firmware provides wifi access for file transfer, doing so was all the more easy. As for the image itself, I’ve always loved the ingenious way this book’s designer drew attention to how a simple load sigil can signify emergence, especially when combined with the out-of-focus face. Even though you know it’s just a still image, the circle with the arrow suggests motion — or better yet, a software glitch that has resulted in a frozen state. Now reproduced in low resolution here on this cheap digital device, the image has a sense of actual software. This little Xteink ereader is unique at the moment (there’s also an X3, which is smaller but requires an idiosyncratic charging cable, circumstances at odds with the ease of the X4), and it suggests a new category, one in which things can be purpose-built using limited chips, older generation screens, and modestly scoped firmware — and then be hacked after the fact as the GitHub set demands.

Scratch Pad: Cyberpunk, Deadloch, Audiograms

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts, I’ve found, serves as a positive and mellowing influence on my online activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

First full week back from my New York trip, and I barely posted anything.

▰ Nothing is quite as cyberpunk as mundane cyberpunk. Today I saw power and/or data cables dangling out from under the seat up a motorcycle, from the flap of an elementary school student’s backpack, and in the rear pocket of the jeans worn by someone on a stroll. Then level up to advertisements in GitHub pull requests, work slowed due to AI outages, and RAM shortages. “RAM Shortage,” in 1987, would have been the title of this story. Now we’re just living in it.

▰ No one makes me laugh as hard these days as Madeleine Sami’s Eddie Redcliffe in the TV series Deadloch. No one even comes close.

▰ Acquaintances send pictures. Friends send municipal field recordings.

▰ I guess there’s a chance that the new Westerlies album, on which they perform music by Bill Frisell, won’t be one of my favorites of the year at the end of the year, but such an outcome seems unlikely.

▰ This week I finished reading one novel (Hum by Helen Phillips) and one graphic novel (Cat Mask Boy by Linus Liu).

Radio Emissions

Qs and an A

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I for one would like to know what the heck this sign is about. The phrase “radio frequency emissions” is pretty tantalizing on its own. The preceding “all” is next level — like, versus what? Is there a different sign that stipulates a subset of signals? And what made this situation an “emergency”? Was something being disrupted? How were the offending emissions first noticed, identified, and triangulated? I would really like to know. (Also, my phone took this photo from about 25 feet away through a windshield, and the sign is barely the size of an 8 1/2” x 11” piece of paper, and this is only the top third of the sign. Kind of amazing.)

And I got an informative response via Threads.