About

What is l-o-o-s-e-d?

This site is meant to be an in­cu­bator for crit­ical dis­course on tech­nology and pol­i­tics— tech­nop­o­l­i­tics .

Ap­proaching my master thesis, I wanted to re­search the state of the In­ternet and media in the United States. In par­tic­ular, I was in­ter­ested in com­paring the phys­ical in­fra­struc­ture, or­ga­ni­za­tion, and cul­ture of our Amer­ican In­ternet to the "street net­work", or SNET , in Cuba.

"LOOSED" began simply as a public, on­line plat­form to pre­sent the reading re­sponses as­signed in Pro­fessor Nicco Mele's class: The In­ternet and Po­lit­ical Cam­paigns. Al­though, I still hope it will grow into a more ro­bust dis­cus­sion place for ex­ploring how our ex­pe­ri­ences on­line be­come so en­tan­gled and in­sep­a­rable from our real, phys­ical lives.

Why loosed?

As the past tense of the verb "loose"— as in, to re­lease, or free— "loosed" iron­i­cally be­came a won­derful call-to-ac­tion for this pro­ject.¹ I'd been using "l00sed" as my user­name to sign up for most of my on­line ac­counts (meant to be read as "lucid"). I had been poring over a lot of dig­ital music and pro­ducers, and I imag­ined it could be my DJ name at one point.

Whoami

This is Daniel Tomp­kins— de­signing and de­vel­oping l-o-o-s-e-d.net

As a de­signer and fab­ri­ca­tion spe­cialist, I've worked in stu­dios from Chicago to New York City and Pitts­burgh. Much of my early pro­fes­sional ex­pe­ri­ence draws upon my ed­u­ca­tion in ar­chi­tec­ture.

The prac­tice of rig­orous vi­sual rep­re­sen­ta­tion and phys­ical pro­to­typing is in­grained in me, and still in­spires me to in­vent and to test my ideas.

In my stint of pro­fes­sional de­sign work, I have used 3D mod­eling and orig­inal scripts to pro­duce to aid in the sim­u­la­tion and fab­ri­ca­tion of custom in­stal­la­tion art­work.

At Har­vard's Grad­uate School of De­sign my tool-set ex­panded to in­clude working with com­plex dig­ital datasets. I built in­ter­ac­tive vi­su­al­iza­tions with code, ro­botic mech­a­nisms and pur­sued other tech­nical learning.

At MIT's Media Lab, I also con­tinued to learn to pro­to­type with elec­tronics and to code, par­tic­u­larly in Hi­roshi Ishii's course Tan­gible In­ter­faces. In my own work, I ex­plore the hy­brid space where dig­ital and phys­ical media com­bine and in­teract.

In my master thesis, I pre­sented a pro­to­type for the pro­posal of a public mon­u­ment re­sem­bling the nose of a rocket that would re­ceive satel­lite im­ages of Earth and pro­ject those im­ages onto the ground below the sculp­ture.

Media con­tinues to be cen­tral to my re­search&mdashd; in par­tic­ular, I'm in­ter­ested in how the phys­ical in­fra­struc­ture and or­ga­ni­za­tion of the In­ternet in­flu­ences so­ciety and pol­i­tics. Where I live, I've vol­un­teered with MetaMesh non-profit to help bring free wire­less In­ternet to com­mu­ni­ties through a net­work of an­tennas.

Through my re­search, writing and de­signs, I hope to en­gage people with this dis­course on phys­ical and vir­tual media— and to em­power people to in­ter­ro­gate how our dig­ital tools are changing the way we live and com­mu­ni­cate.

Get in touch

If you'd like to be­come a con­tributing writer, or­ga­nize a re­lated pro­ject— or just start a con­ver­sa­tion— please send me an email:

Daniel Tomp­kins
dan@l-o-o-s-e-d.net

Time­line

2012-7

• Bach­elor of Ar­chi­tec­ture, Cor­nell Uni­ver­sity
• In­terned at Bridge­water Studio, Chicago
• In­terned at Bed­nark, NYC

2017-8

• Master in De­sign Studies, Har­vard Uni­ver­sity

2018-9

• Moved to Pitts­burgh with my girl­friend wife!
• Worked as a de­signer and dig­ital fab­ri­cator at Ion­tank — a com­pany that pro­duces new media art in­stal­la­tions for com­pa­nies.
• I did a little vol­un­teering with the folks at Meta Mesh (now "Com­mu­nity In­ternet So­lu­tions". They're a local non-profit that's working to by­pass the ISPs by building a free and public net­work across the Burgh's neigh­bor­hoods.

2020-1

• Got mar­ried!
• Worked as a Web de­vel­oper at Shift Col­lab­o­ra­tive— web­sites and mar­keting for some in­cred­ible (and often local) busi­nesses
• Co-taught a tal­ented group of first-year ar­chi­tec­ture stu­dents as an ad­junct fac­ulty member at Carnegie Mellon Uni­ver­sity (CMU)
• Co-taught the In­tro­duc­tion to Com­pu­ta­tional De­sign course at CMU's School of Ar­chi­tec­ture

2022

• Be­came a fa­ther!
• Taught an­other se­mester of first-year ar­chi­tec­ture stu­dents at CMU
• Started working for the Soft­ware En­gi­neering In­sti­tute (SEI) as a Web De­vel­oper

2023

• At­tended Dock­erCon (Los An­geles, CA)
• At­tended Open Source Summit North America (Van­couver, British Co­lumbia, Canada)
• Pro­moted to Sys­tems/​Soft­ware En­gi­neer at the SEI

2024

• At­tended KubeCon (Salt Lake City, UT)