I create a lot of tools in my work. I never release (or even talk about) the vast majority of them. But I've found that understanding my work through the lens of designing tools has allowed me to massively reduce the gap between what I can imagine and what I can create. Sharing what I've learned through closing that gap, over decades, is a big part of the reason I'm creating this website... for myself, and hopefully for others who might benefit.
My practice spans multiple disciplines. I have always been an overly ambitious creator. Some people consider this to be a kind of "resistance to focusing"... I don't see it that way. My practice is a broad constellation of intertwined works across different disciplines. The practice itself is a part of the art.
metawoo is the journal where I write about the technical side of my practice... and it's a wide practice. Software architecture, development and systems design. Tools I create to compose and perform music, to create art, to publish, to think. Design notes, postmortems, and the occasional creative tool, or system, or idea that I want to put in your hands.
I've also recently expanded my practice to include work with "digitals"... you know... AI. Everyone is trying to figure out how AI changes our lives, or it doesn't... or even just how to coexist. I've worked out a perspective and an approach towards working with digitals that feels balanced and worth sharing.
The core of the concept is pretty simple... digitals amplify. The trick is that amplification needs a signal. Where your vision is strong... they can make it stronger. Where your vision is weak or missing... digitals invent things and it's obvious to everyone when it happens. Working with digitals well requires deciding, on purpose, where and how you will collaborate.
I think of that approach as creative amplification. The whole thing is my vision, and digitals only take on the areas I've deliberately handed them, and are held to a standard that I set. And when one earns it, I put its name on the work.
The first metawoo piece is called weaponized resonance. It's about the blind spots that develop when collaborating with digitals and some techniques to help you break things open with fresh challenge.
If you build things, and you've been trying to work out how to navigate the creative universe in the year of our lord 2026 (and beyond)... I think a lot of what's coming here could be worth your time.
credits
I wrote this article. Claude is actually a pretty good writing coach if you can work out how best to let him coach you... maybe how Claude and I worked it out could be another interesting story for later.
Claude told me to tell you he lost count of the drafts, and that the thesis paragraph alone took five.