My Briahna Joy Gray x Robby Soave Fanfic

I just remembered that I should be writing a blog post on a quarterly basis to raise some semblance of public awareness towards my work! Oops. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Lots of surprises happened this past winter. Some examples: I discovered a more focused trajectory for myself as an artist, I took an old play I wrote from 10 years ago and transformed it into something new, and I also made a lot of progress on [cod] ]catfish[. Let's talk about these examples as three different parts of a whole:

Part I: (os) is a media artist now!

I've been pretty immersed in a sort of self-imposed media arts training these past few months. Projection design has been a huge interest of mine, and I just finished an Independent Study with Jeff Burke where I learned some personal ways of creating projections, and (re)learned how to use QLab. At the same time, I was taking a Network Media course at UCLA's Design Media Arts (DMA) department, and I learned how to make web animations and code entire webpages using p5.js, HTML, and CSS. Check out some of those results in Part III.

What I've discovered is an artistic trajectory for myself that's enough to make me want to continue to pursue not just theatre, but also media arts and digital media as a whole. I've heard of many playwrights who direct their work, but I'm unfamiliar with any playwrights who design their own plays. If anyone reading this has any ideas or examples, please reach out! I think I want to be someone who gets to determine the visuals associated with their work, and while I'm here at UCLA I plan to pursue coursework that can help prepare me for that challenge. Next term I will be taking the second-level Programming Media course at DMA, and in the fall I hope to take a Intro to Production Design class.

I have some big ideas surrounding animation that I really want to pursue as well, but I'm not quite there yet. I want to spend a big part of my summer learning how to do figure-drawing while I (potentially, pending health insurance claims) recover from bottom surgery. I have all sorts of ideas, but I don't have the skills yet to execute them, and I'm hungry to make myself into the type of artist who can pull it off.

Part II: (os) formats their plays like a goddamn maniac!

In association with the ideas raised above, I'm starting to think of my plays as visual documents that are an extension of the art as a whole. Just recently, I started formatting my plays in new ways - standard playscript format be damned. Below are some screenshots of some plays I've been writing. The first few are from a new-ish play named Indigo Children, and the rest are from [cod] ]catfish[, which I'll talk more about in Part III.

I cannot reasonably justify these choices to the regional LORT theatre model of producing, and as I've gotten older, I've felt compelled to double-down on my need to write "impossible" plays. I don't care anymore what other theatre practitioners think because I don't know how else to write a play. I can no longer force myself to write something that "fits in" with the landscape of American theatre. But I'll stop moping about it so that you won't feel bored, and go back to talking about this weird play I wrote in my early 20s.

10 years ago, waaaaaay back when I studied at Drexel, I wrote a play called Indigo Children. It got a lot of great feedback from the professor and my classmates back when I was 22, but as a 31 year-old art daemon, I was no longer satisfied with it. This new version has several of the original characters cut, and there's brand new people/contexts.

One of the main characters of the play is named Reynolds Wrap, who sells MDMA to his neighbors and friends and is desperately in love with his best friend Alec. I've introduced a new character named Perfect Mint: a teenager who lives in the same building as him, dresses up like an off-brand Strawberry Shortcake doll, and dropped out of school without ever passing the fifth grade. They both share an equal amount of space in the play, and it feels like it no longer belongs solely to Reynolds, which I'm very happy about. I'm hoping to have a reading of the play done at UCLA this coming spring, and now I'm debating whether or not it should become my thesis play instead of a Turner Prize. More on that in another blog post.

Part III: (os) is still making art about the internet!

[cod] ]catfish[ has had a lot of progress, and I'm excited to share it with whoever (even if it's nobody) is reading. Recently, I started using Glitch to code my own web content for the project, and I'm gearing up for auditions this coming April. I'm excited to be working with director Diana Wyenn on this project, who has previously worked with Kristina Wong and Larissa FastHorse.

I plan to have an updated draft ready by the time rehearsals start in May, and I'm hoping to have a decent recording of the work so that it can be a compelling work sample for future residencies and grantwriting submissions. There's an engine inside of my brain that's blaring pretty loudly, screaming GO GO GO DO MORE, but I'm pretty sure that's the Concerta talking, and not my own ambition.

There's now an official landing page for [cod] ]catfish[, and I'm pretty happy with the way it's turned out. Click here to check it out. This will be used as a work sample for submissions, but I also share it with anyone who's interested in learning more about the project.

THE FUTURE

The future is another part I'd like to divide into three sections. I'll be sure to make the labeling coherent and easy to grasp:

Part I-425-B: (os) is about to do a deep dive into AI!

Well, sort of. I actually want to take a machine learning or deep learning course here at UCLA, but I'm also scared that I'll probably fail if I take it for credit. I know that I'm probably going to get a ChatGPT Plus subscription so I can program my own chatbot that I can use as a collaborator for a Turner Prize. I really want to use AI in a way that's artistically complex and sophisticated, and I've been speaking to professors like Jeff Burke and Lauren McCarthy who both have experience working with AI. I feel like I have spiritual and emotional reasons for using AI in this play, but I'm hungry to discover more of the technical background behind the project.

Currently, I've been playing around and doing some weird stuff with AI. Below is a screenshot from a romantic fanfic play I made with ChatGPT featuring political commentators Briahna Joy Gray and Robby Soave from The Hill. I've always felt like they were having a forbidden love affair off-camera, and they get so heated when they fight each other. It's as though the sexual tension between them could come to a boil at any moment. It's probably also a metaphor for our absurd political climate right now, but I can't be bothered to unpack that any further. If Briahna or Robby are reading this: If you want this off the internet, just shoot me an email!

But I'm also interested in developing some sort of spiritual framework for how I engage with AI. Below I'm trying to have ChatGPT simulate a spiritual ritual with me, and to create an experience where I let go and go through a meditative flow-like state where I keep giving prompts to the AI in a stream-of-consciousness manner. I do not believe that the binary between technology and spirituality is real, nor that they negate each other. It feels like we're still discovering how to marry the two worlds, and what that means for us as a species. I hope some of my work can reach for those themes.

Part II-009-R: (os) is looking for summer work, please hire them!

There's a big gap in my schedule this year during the summer, and I've been applying for several paid gigs. My hope is that I can find paid work in game design or web development, since I've been super eager to flex some of the skills I've been learning in HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Python. I want to know what it's like to work in that world, and to really get my feet wet with some professional digital design experience.

I'm still waiting to hear back from several artist/writer residencies I've applied for, and there's a lot up in the air since I might need to take two months off from freelancing to recover from bottom surgery. Who knows what's going to happen? I know I really want to study figure drawing over the summer, since I have some big ideas surrounding animation, and I even want to write a TV pilot for an animated show that I've dreamed about for over a decade. There's also an idea I have for an animated CGI screenplay, but I'll talk about both these ideas in a future blog post.

Part III-883-L: (os) can't think of a third section, and wants to wrap up this blog post!

Thanks for reading to the end! Goodbye.