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Side Projects

Neural Network Stuff

I’ve been using neural networks (also known as “AI” these days) to make art since 2015. Some links of note:

I’ve been using neural networks (also known as “AI” these days) to make art since 2015. Some links of note:

Check out my Instagram to see some of my experiments:

https://www.instagram.com/jcklpe_/

Art exhibits I’ve been in:

Art Exhibits

He110, W0r1d! member of vurv: Spring 2018

Summer 2022 Exhibit hosted by dadageek: Summer 2022

Starry Heights hosted by Art Island: Fall 2022

Portal Fishing hosted by Favored Channels: Fall 2023

What is your voice? hosted by Vesper: Spring 2024

Salon Show II hosted by Highland Collective: Spring 2024

SXSalon hosted by EFF-Austin: Spring 2025

EFF-Austin Interactive Spring 2026

Messing with neural networks is also how I first dipped my toes into Linux and open source.

Enzo Lang: a designer makes a programming language

Code is the ultimate user interface. It is the final user interface on which all other user interfaces are built. So I think it’s interesting to explore this space as a designer. When learning to program, I would often have ideas on how I thought the syntax design could be improved. Originally I had no intention of implementing it but now I have!

https://github.com/jcklpe/enzo-lang

Community Organizing

I began my civic tech journey with Open Austin as a volunteer in 2015, and I’m thrilled to now serve on the board. Over the past decade, I’ve contributed to various community tech organizations in Austin, including co.lab Makerspace, the art collective Vurv, the Federal Interagency Research-Ops working group, Open Source Design, and Austin Hack 4 Change.

I’ve run tech operations for several of these orgs, doing things like designing brand and marketing materials, standing up and maintaining self-hosted infrastructure such as Discourse, Wordpress (see the non-profit general use Wordpress theme I created here), or Nextcloud servers.

3D Art, Sculpting, Photogrammetry, and Virtual Reality

Back when I was still thinking the future of UX was going to be a lot more VR heavy I also spent a year learning 3D art on the side. You can see the work I did for that at my sketchfab here:

https://sketchfab.com/jcklpe

Endless Portfolio Websites

I do everything in Notion now because I’m a big believer in “Platform Thinking” and Not Reinventing the Wheel. But if you want to see some of the projects that I honed my craft on:

Running “the Cloud” out of my closet

From 2018-2022 I ran my own Nextcloud server out of my closet. Nextcloud is an open source groupware and cloud document service (similar to Google Suite, or Microsoft 365). This project taught me a ton about Linux, Bash, and how provisioning web apps worked.