money and art

I felt that it was time for a bit of a status update. Not that I ever spoke much on here about what I spend my days doing, but nonetheless.

I am still a student at NYU, though I am not registered for any classes right now. The health insurance is cheap though :). I probably won't graduate this semester, but that's okay. I am making slow and debatably steady progress towards my masters.

I am working 3 days a week in IT infrastructure at a Very Large Bank, creating a somewhat peculiar software testing system. It's no great contribution to society but it pays well.

I can live with that because the rest of my time working I am making art, at least indirectly. On Tuesdays I work at Harvestworks where I work on any and all manner of things technical. This includes mundane IT stuff like fixing the wireless ethernet and some more interesting stuff like tutoring a resident artist in Max/MSP, and possibly working on an internet video piece being created by another (more details on that if I actually end up doing it - it's still in the planning stages).

A lot of people (myself included) thought I was crazy when I turned down a full time job at The Very Large Bank a couple of years ago. But you know what? There's a difference at the end of the day. At the end of the day at the bank I maybe helped out some other programmers to do their jobs better/faster/whatever. Which is alright. I certainly don't mind doing that, and I don't mind being well paid for it. But at the end of a Tuesday, I've helped someone make art, and that feels very different.

So just last week was a bit of a milestone. For the first time ever I got paid to work with an artist. It wasn't much, and the work was kind of mundane (embedding audio files in a webpage). But I got paid to help a musician with computer crap. And I think that's what I want to do.

/brian
musically inclined computer programmer