From August 7th to October 27th, 2023, I spent twelve weeks at Recurse Center. This is my take on how it went.
As the weeks went on, I continually refined the spiel I gave when telling people what I was doing day-to-day. Most people in my industry who are not familar with Recurse Center associate 12-week programs with bootcamps, generally designed to provide some basic amount of knowledge necessary for an entry-level position in [INSERT TECH INDUSTRY ROLE HERE].
Recurse Center explicitly bills itself as not that. But when we define a thing it's maybe not enough to say what that thing isn't, and instead also try to explain what that thing fundamentally is.
I mostly oscillated between the following categorizations:
The first of these comes from the official Recurse Center materials, but it usually wasn't really enough to explain what I was doing – neither I nor most people I talked to had ever attended a writers retreat, so this was essentially trading one ambiguous meaning for another.
The second felt a little more true: I did spend a lot of time doing research during Recurse Center, but it was generally in service of another goal, like building a mobile app or making an online gallery, rather than for some academic pursuit of knowledge.
I ended up relying on the last explanation a lot. It captured the common thread across all my projects1 – that they all relied on software and programming – but allowed an open-endedness in what I ended up creating.
I think I'm still struggling to figure out a succinct way to explain what Recurse Center is. For me, it was an important lesson in the act of creating something new and a opportunity to learn how to trust my own intuition and taste on my own projects.
In total, three (and a half) distinct projects: a mobile app for running a checkpoint race, an infinite navigable hallway for GLSL shader art piecers, a bezier curve slitscan video project, and a very basic wave function collapse bitmap pixel toy. ↩