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Announcing Aesthetic Inc.

November 18, 2024

@jeffrey

I'm excited to announce the incorporation of Aesthetic Inc., a company founded to support the development and growth of the Aesthetic Computer project which I began coding in April 2021.

Aesthetic Inc.'s mission is to lift the computational literacy level of mass audiences by making computing more playable and accessible through the invention, distribution and productization of new media instruments.

After 10+ years making and teaching in the software arts, I desired new tools to publish and connect my work across platforms and device types, and educate more effectively through an integrated system. Today AC is growing outside interest in the field through viral mobile experiences and raising the skills of future students through an innovatively accessible software stack.

Built as a mobile-first runtime and social network, the aesthetic.computer domain and apps are home to art and music-making utilities, toys, games and a budding community passionate about the medium.

AC's client interface is designed to function like a musical instrument, on which users discover their own memorizable paths in the network of commands and published pieces. As users grow their code and media literacy through play and exploration, they are able to improvise, recombine, and expand their performable repertoire with the computer.



Every software piece on Aesthetic Computer is its own addressable doorway to the larger system. Most new users enter through built-in pieces like notepat or those published by user handles like @bash/hub* where no further onboarding or downloading of specific client software is required to fully experience them. We connect online through chat and play in-person by prefixing any piece with share.

Commercial components in the AC stack include support for priced ticketing of pieces like botce, mail ordering user media customized physical items like stickers through the print command and monthly subscription based network services like on sotce-net.
*@bash/hub piece by rackodo on GitHub.

Technical Progress

Today Aesthetic Computer maintains a growing library of 250+ runtime API commands in docs for JavaScript programmers and a built-in list of 150+ pieces and commands for entering into prompt. Users can enter list commands to play games together, interact with LLM characters, or learn musical instruments.

Platform and piece development takes place from within the AC VS Code Extension which saw its first college level use with students at UCLA this year.

This winter I worked on a programming language designed especially for AC called Kid Lisp which I will build a mobile friendly graphic editor for in 2025. Simple expressions like (wipe gray) (ink red) (write (* 2 3 4)) now evaluate to full pieces when entered into prompt. Using the .lisp extension is supported when publishing by drag and drop or in VS Code.

Chat released in the spring and has since grown a scene of daily users who exchange technical help and immediate bug reports. I personally keep up with chat by using the native notifications in the AC iOS App.

This summer I designed the notepat keyboard instrument, made refinements to metronome, tone, bleep and added automixing and additional wavetypes to the sound system. You can prefix these pieces with source in prompt to view their code and roadmap.

Project progress and upcoming plans can be found in the repository's README.md file and live platform statistics are below in the AC Report Card.

Interested Investors

Aesthetic Inc. is actively seeking seed investment. Please reach out at [email protected] for a detailed offer letter or book a demo and say "hi" in chat to learn more.


AC Report Card
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