Who We Are

Today, about halfway through Priya Parker's The Art of Gathering, I finally faced head-on a problem I'd been looking away from. The Patternflow community is dead right now. That's entirely on me. I've been dodging my responsibility as the host. I expected that if I just shared the materials and left them there, people would build and take part on their own. That's laissez-faire. If I were fine with Patternflow ending as one more so-so open-source project that stops at sharing files, it wouldn't matter. But I want to make Patternflow art. I want it, maybe, to become a project that marks a line in the history of media art. That takes people's participation, and to draw it out I have to do the things only I can do.

So I'm rethinking the host's duty. What Parker says in the book is clear: a good host willingly holds authority for the guests' sake. Setting rules, deciding direction, running things firmly is itself a kindness. Laissez-faire wasn't humility, it was neglect. Because tending to it is hard, I treated neglect as humility and ducked the responsibility. From now on I mean to hold a generous authority.

Why we gather

First, Patternflow is an open-source LED synthesizer, and it aims to bring interactive media art to everyone. But that's closer to a description of the product. As a goal for a group, it isn't concrete enough. So I thought about what change in the world I'd want the people gathered around Patternflow to make.

Walk down the street and you see a huge number of LED panels. The graphics on them are mostly asleep. Closer to signage that only delivers information, all text and blinking. You could put any number of beautiful effects on them, and instead they sit there, dull and neglected. What if we treated that emptiness and waste as a problem, and Patternflow solved it? What if we hacked every LED panel in the world and infected it with gorgeous graphics? So I'm adding one goal to the group called Patternflow: "Infect every LED panel in the world with beautiful graphics." Of course this doesn't throw out bringing media art to everyone. The two go together. A group just needed a more concrete picture, and my intuition could already see what it looked like.

The people who'll come in

Before writing this, I looked back over the Patternflow waitlist for the first time in a long while. Roughly, these are the people who've shown up. First, people already deep in media art. People making their own work, generative art in TouchDesigner and the like. They already have their own tools and practice, and they want to plug Patternflow into it.

And then, people just starting out. Someone who said they're new to coding and want to make this their learning project. Someone who started soldering during Covid, just built their first PCB, and is discovering a whole new world. These people might matter even more. Because what Patternflow really wanted to do was make it easy for exactly them to come in. Both kinds are in one room. The ones who make and the ones who learn. Good.

How we'll do this together

I'd love for Patternflow to reach people like a game. Something you do for fun in your free time, no one making you, while you feel a bond and a sense of accomplishment with each other. I'll build the mechanisms for that bit by bit. Levels you climb, classes you switch into, that sort of thing. I love games and quit them long ago, so I keep wanting to make this one like a game.

And I want to be clear about what's opened and what's held, and where that line is. Patterns are wide open. I'll keep the current AI-based pattern generation as the core and keep upgrading it. Run the AI long enough and most of what comes out is much of a muchness, but every so often a pattern you'd never have thought of jumps out. You take inspiration from that, refine it, and it becomes a good pattern. On top of that there's post-processing, turning an image or video into code and layering it over the pattern. That's the layering.

But one thing I want to make clear: something that's only an image or a video, I don't count as Patternflow. There has to be an element that runs on code and shifts in real time according to the parameters tied to the knobs. Even if you use a whole video, if you lay a glitch effect over it with a knob, that's Patternflow. The point is that the room to intervene with your fingertips has to stay alive. This is our identity. Inside that line, do whatever you like. I'll write up the details separately.

Hardware is a little different. Modifying it and using it is entirely free. But selling it, or folding it into Patternflow as an official model, is another matter. Here I have to be careful, and a lot of my own judgment will go in. Usability, compatibility, funding are all on the line, so the core has to be protected. Even so, I do genuinely want experimentation on the hardware side. I hope people will show off what they've built, freely.

Honestly, this part I still don't know. How I should handle it. But I'll find the way as I go. I don't want to decide these things alone. I'll set the direction, but what we make and what we open, I want to talk through and tune together. Just look at the waitlist: someone wanted a feature I'd pulled because it didn't feel right to me, baking video for LED displays. The Patternflow I see and the Patternflow others see can differ. I want to close that gap together.

Three years from now

Sometimes I imagine Patternflow three years out. Guilds I didn't make springing up, people I don't know teaching each other, someone infecting a shop's sign in some city and someone else a club's wall with Patternflow. By then Patternflow won't be mine alone. That scares me a little, too. Honestly, I'm someone who finds letting go of control the hardest thing. And yet what I keep thinking lately is that what I really want to have isn't the pride of "I made a great work," but something more like "I made a place where people like each other gathered and became each other's strength."

So, right now

I've said a lot, but what I want to ask for right now is just two things. One, introduce yourself. Soon I'll make an introductions channel on Discord with a simple form and point you to it. Who you are, what you want to make, what you want to do with Patternflow. Whether you came to make, to learn, or to use it in your own work. That's enough. Who we are starts from there. Two, give your opinions freely. A lot is still undecided, which is exactly why now is the best time to step in. It's fine to be wrong, fine to be bold. That's how everything starts. You don't have to hold back out of fear. No one knows the right answer. I don't either, which is why we have to talk it through together.

There's a lot to prepare, so it won't all be in place at once. Still, at my own pace I'll move faster than you'd think. That part I'm not worried about. Before the crowdfunding brings a rush of people, I want the basic framework standing. Until then, I need the hands of those of you who are already here. The truth is I don't know when the crowdfunding will happen. For now, I'm aiming to have the community ready within about a month. I hope it goes well. We all live in different places, so there's some barrier of language and time, but I hope you'll take part actively.