Filed under
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:
- How Artists Can Use Neural Networks to Make Art - 2017
- How Artists can Set Up Their Own Neural Network (4 part series) - 2018
- Neural Network Art Resource list - 2022
- An AI Art Ethos - 2023
- What is Latent Space for Artists - 2023
- Maps of the World in it’s Becoming - Visual Essay - 2023
- Talk for EFF-Austin meetup: Generative AI's Historical Context: From Dadaists To Algorists And Beyond - 2024
Check out my Instagram to see some of my experiments.
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:
Endless Portfolio Websites
- 2026 portfolio, vue frontend, headless wordpress, nuxt, ssr in dev, static site generation in production, cross app design system: https://github.com/jcklpe/my-website
- 2020 portfolio, built with React + Frontity framework, hooking into the Headless Wordpress REST API: https://github.com/jcklpe/desert-jackalope
- 2018 portfolio, Wordpress with webpack: https://github.com/jcklpe/JackalopePro
- 2017 portfolio, Wordpress: https://github.com/jcklpe/Jackalope
- 2014 portfolio, my first: https://github.com/jcklpe/jack-a-lope.net
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.