Black Rock Station
A mysterious rural train station appearing in the Black Rock Desert has become unstuck in time, haunted by ghost trains heard but not seen….
Wes Modes
- Website
- http://modes.io
Posts by Wes Modes
A Secret History of American River People
A project to build a collection of personal stories of people who live and work on the river from the deck of a recreated mid-century shantyboat over a series of epic river voyages…
DriftConditions
An online audio stream of uncanny late-night radio generated on-the-fly by code….
WesBot
A personality transfer experiment and teaching assistant with vague anxiety about being a digitized brain…
Free Skool Santa Cruz
A radically different approach to living and learning, Free Skool Santa Cruz is a grassroots educational project beyond institutional control. It is an opportunity to learn from each other and share what we know, to foster communities of mutual support and autonomy….
Secret History Web Doc
An interactive web documentary featuring video, images, sound, and stories gathered from my Secret History web expeditions…
We’re Still Here
Social practice and new media work involved interviews with dozens of local elders about the subject of social isolation…
Unavoidable Disaster
Unavoidable Disaster is a monthly eclectic, punky webzine, a collaborative endeavor whose assembly is part art practice, part therapy, and part pure lark….
Playing Bear Creek
Bear Creek is interactive fiction, a coming-of-age story from a child’s point-of-view. Looking back, it was that summer, or maybe just that one day that changed everything. Play online or with an IF player, includes period-accurate musical accompaniment….
Punk Rafting
A few of us set out on a punk rafting journey, building a raft out of found and scavenged materials and floating for a week, Huck Finn-style, on one of the largest fastest rivers on the continent. When we survived, we did it year after year on different rivers….
SubRosa Community Space
An anarchist and radical space offering anarchist books and literature, coffee and tea, shows, art, and a garden courtyard social space….
Night Ride Radio Show
I produced a radio show on Santa Cruz public radio station KUSP and pirate Free Radio Santa Cruz for six years between 2001 to 2007, over 120 volumes amounting to…
Santa Cruz Guerilla Drive-In
An outdoor movie theater under the stars that springs up in the fields and industrial wastelands. Showing great movies, bringing a broad community together, and reclaiming public space….
Santa Cruz Trash Orchestra
Trash Orchestra is a marching percussion band – a bone-shaking recycled orchestra – appearing at protests and celebrations, where a ruckus needs to be made….
Decision Maker
Reveal your secret plans! uncover your hidden agendas! It’s science and magic combined!…
Union of Benevolent Electrical Workers
Tech Community: UBEW provides mutual support to anti-authoritarian groups making radical social change through direct action, community involvement, and education….
Burning Man
Adventure: In 1993 when I first when to Burning Man, it was a few thousand crazy artists together for an apocalyptic weekend of camping in the desert. Since then, I’ve seen it grow from 2000 people to 50 thousand….
Spotify Vinyl
Missing those years of crackly vinyl records replaced by the streaming era, I created a web app that allowed you to listen to entire albums (and only entire albums) complete with crackly vinyl, scratches, and needle drops and lifts…
Grouper
Student Project Group Creator: I observed early in my teaching career that students were both stressed by and relatively bad at choosing groups for course projects. I created a tool to generate approximate optimum groupings based on student self-reported characteristics…
textalert
An Activist Text Notification System: Responding to the need that activists have to rapidly inform group members about actions and updates during protests, members of UBEW created textalert…