gamepadcc

[gamepadcc]

[gamepadcc]

When I was a kid I loved drawing, writing, and making comics. My curiosity led me to take all my toys apart so my stepdad stopped buying new ones, and as a black kid with ADHD, the old ones were taken away and often never returned. Art was the one thing no one could take from me because all I needed was the pen and paper I was entitled to as a student.

As I got older and school got harder, my relationship with pen and paper became strained. The squeezing of story into MLA format damaged my relationship with the written word, and doodling soon followed as a result.

When I got to college I tried to reclaim my lost love by making it my career. I have been a professional filmmaker, journalist, and illustrator, and though I thought this exposure would heal my connection to art, in time, it only pushed me further away.

I found refuge in the last place expected, logic, mathematics, and computer science, oh my. Something about the formalization of abstract ideas into discrete objects just worked well with my brain, and provided an alternative to the pressure of the blank page. I could set clear boundaries, fill them, and know with confidence when I was done, which fit more neatly into the routine of my mid twenties.

Then I discovered Boolean algebra, semiotics, and computational linguistics, and an idea began to form in my mind. If I could harmonize the formality of computation with the accessibility of traditional writing tools, maybe I could find my way back to my original passions.

I’ve dedicated the last decade to developing a journal that makes sense to my mind, and designated this as one of a few spaces to experiment with and develop it and a companion pen powered programming language.

Allow me to introduce the GAMEPAD.