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New year, new dreams

— 7 min read

Before I start speaking about new dreams, I want to touch on how far my journey has gotten in one year since I officially deviated career paths [only a bit] again.

2020 was a weird year. Many times I felt I was living inside one of those sci-fi films set in the future. The one thing I never imagined I'll get to witness.

When 2020 started, I've had the worst two years of my life and was looking forward to that year to return feeling normal after a successful fight. I guess life had different plans, and I have to wait a bit longer.

I am hopeful for this new year of 2021 that the world around all of us, even if slowly, heals.

On the bright side, despite such events, there were tons of positive happenings around my life. Let's talk about the career-wise ones.

Looking back at what I had hope beginning of 2020 when I rebranded myself and relaunched this site, I had these dreams:

I look forward to working in more artistic endeavors in the future. Whether it is making cool websites or creating digital visuals and installations for art + tech events, galleries, museums, musicians, fashion events, festivals, film industry, who knows? The sky is the limit.

I'm happy to share that many of those dreams came to be true! :)

Artistically speaking, the year 2020 brought me a lot of light:

  • CODAME invited me to join their artist collective in the summer. I started selling a couple of my digital artworks in their new shop and exhibited a few pieces in some of their virtual galleries.

  • My video and visual art were exhibited in the Global Gallery by Ars Electronica + .ART over the summer. I also exhibited artworks virtually in a few other places or events, from which if some are still online, I listed them on my about page.

  • Two new musicians contacted me and asked me to do visual artworks for their music. None of the deals settled, but I'd say it's a step forward if one of them found me on their own after browsing my instagram work.

  • I made an on and off collaboration throughout the summer with a local neo-grunge band, LIOTTA SEOUL, and created a series of audio-reactive shader visuals to some of their songs.

  • My shader artwork was showcased in NYC as part of an installation exhibit organized by Lightbox and Creative Code Art in the autumn. Sadly, I have no decent footage from it, so I cannot share this one.

  • I made a performance at GitHub Universe in the winter and collaborated with @_2xAA by creating a few audio-reactive shaders for his live chiptune music.

  • I started an on-going collaboration with @iamelizasj in late August to create digital art while exploring shader code. Our chemistry and flow have worked out amazingly that our collab evolved organically, and we launched the premier of our twitch channel during CODAME's JOYNT festival in the winter. A replay of our first live stream it's on our brand new youtube channel.

  • I met incredible people from the creative coding community, either by reaching out to them or collaborating with them. Everyone I have stumbled upon until now it's been very supportive. Thank you to each one of you.

  • I achieved making 100 shader artworks while learning GLSL shaders with my #anydayshaders challenge.

When it comes to my other two careers, creative development and design, I'm also glad for the achievements:

  • I won an award for mobile excellence and mobile site of the week at awwwards for this website, among other honor mentions and kudos listed on my about page.

  • I organized and gave the first Vue-Vixens workshop to learn Vue.js in my local tech community with my friend and co-orga @burgmary, right before the pandemic started.

  • I got my first 3D WebGL/installation freelance gig with Sinnerschrader during the summer. Thank you so much to @kotzendekrabbe and @hblank for thinking of me. <3

  • GitHub contacted me in the autumn, and I made a short tutorial on learning p5.js and generative art at their GitHub Universe 2020. Gosh, I was nervous as hell, so I speak at the speed of light, and I'm looking very serious in the video. 😂

Now speaking about dreams for 2021, I mostly want to keep growing as a digital artist exploring the new media, which I feel combines some of my creative developer and designer skills, among my passion for many other spectrums of the art scene.

I still want to do much of what I desired last year, but going bigger. Go big or go home, right?

I hope to create more visuals for musicians. Maybe even collaborate in the making of a music video.

I desire to make more installation work. Maybe some of it with interactivity, or my new machine learning knowledge [it's not here yet, but I plan to learn more of it this year].

I want to dive a bit into VR and explore that part of 3D in the art + tech bridge.

I'm curious to make music with code. Not because I want to pursue being a musician, but I realized it's another way I can enhance my video or visual art without asking or searching for sounds elsewhere.

Definitively, I want to continue collaborating with other talented artists by learning, exploring, and creating together.

I wish to make more visual, video, and sound art. Whether it's still for art + tech events, festivals and galleries. But also would like to work with museums, fashion events, the film industry, and the list goes on.

For most of my life, my motto has been to live for my dreams and die trying. Like Alexander Supertramp from Into the Wild said:
“If you want something in life, just reach out and grab it.” ✌🏽