Introduction
This summer has been filled with a lot of action. With the spring semester being very busy for us, we went into the summer thinking it would be quiet, however lots occurred as you will see. The new Creative Media Lab made major headway, we even shot some walk through videos. We have hit a bump with the build out as in mid August our whole building, Bolton, was flooded on the 3rd and 2nd floor and minor flooding at the 1st where they lab is. As we write this, the whole building is closed and being fully accessed, let’s hope the opening date won’t be delayed too long.
With that said, there is a ton planned for 2026-27 and what we accomplished over the summer in terms of projects, events and research was great.
Will Connor performs in Columbia and Germany
This summer Will traveled to Columbia to perform in Bogaton as well as record. Additionally he also traveled to Germany where he played 10 shows over 10 days. Check out some screen caps of his IG and also some embeds of his IG videos.
Creative Media Lab gets a new faculty member!
The Creative Media Lab is happy to announce a new that Richard Cornelisse was recently hired at Texas A&M in the department of Communication & Journalism and will be teaching COMM 230 courses and has already started collaborating with the lab. He specializes in visual story telling and we are already working on grants and visual projects & workshops for the 2026-2027 academic school year.
Check out his work & website:
ACTLab Summer 2026 Summit
The ACTLab Summer 2026 Summit was held on July 26th online and was a huge success. With around 15 attendees, it was definitely an intimate meet up where we all shared our current projects and initiatives and discussed potential collaboration and future projects. An overriding theme that came up was A.I. and we had multiple people present what they are up to with A.I. currently, all the way from practical implementation for marketing to using A.I. prompts for painting art. While this is a small update, the event itself was major.
We definitely built up enough energy to host another event this fall, so stay tuned for dates.
Synthesizer & Visualization Workshop
We have a full write up for the workshop so make sure to take a read, watch and listen.
BMO AI LLM Project Update
The BMO AI LLM project continues, the concept behind this project is to build a local LLM empathy based agent that is a physical object or plush. This summer joey formed a groupme research chat where members all contributed to a purchase list. Joey then made the purchase with his own funds. His brother is an electrical engineer with a Bachelors and Masters from UT Austin, he offered to help get the Pi setup so they met up and worked on doing a Pi build which went well. They figured out the screen purchased needs an adapter, so that will be ordered. One of the next steps once the touch screen is working is to start prototyping out some 3D printed characters. So stay tuned for that one!
Will & Joey Jam
Over the summer Will & joey had a jam session. Joey has been working on his synth setup and wanted to Jam with some visuals as well and Will was ready! Check out their jam session. They say more are to come and hopefully some shows!
Project Miata
For those who do not know, Johnny and joey have been into cars for years. This summer Johnny decided to make the jump into sports car culture. Check out his article:
Mary Cantu Endowment
A non CML initiative but one worth mentioning for the summer was joey working with a group of Mount Holyoke Alumni who knew Mary Cantu on creating a pledge drive to raise a $100,000 endowment for her. Using a domain joey registered, he built out a website for them and works with the group weekly to build programing and pledges. As of August 19th, the group has nearly $70,000 in pledges so far! Mary Cantu participated in our showing trajectories lecture series and donated materials regularly for our workshops.
Individual Updates
Nicholas Martinez
Congratulations to Rick, as you all know Rick recently defended his dissertation and this summer he officially graduated! He starts this fall at Cincinnati Clermont College as an Assistant Professor. We are so excited for him and are wishing him the best at the start of his semester. Congrats again Rick!
Link to the full film is down below:
Link to the Behind The Scenes video is down below:
Some stills of the film are down below and behidn the scenes:
Rick Pulos
Over the summer I worked on a personal feature film project called The Journey Of A Star with a couple A&M students and even one of the heads of 12th man productions. It was a coming of age film focused on a character named Andy Palmer and his journey through one of the hardest years of his life as an ex Jehovah’s Witness, confronting his faith, family, and identity while transitioning from high school to college. I utilized the creative media lab by borrowing some of their equipment and even filmed in one of their rooms for one of the scenes in the movie. Joey was extremely helpful in getting access to the room for filming, and we really appreciated the support from the lab on the project. For the equipment, I borrowed the media lab’s gimbal, lenses, and some of its audio equipment for some parts of the film. In the end, the whole experience was very eye opening for me and taught me a lot about the process of filmmaking and learning how to work with others and even some high profile actors from Backstage. It also really helped my channel grow and put more experience of filmmaking on my resume and portfolio.
Bomi
Photographer, videographer and runner, now Barista! That’s right, Bomi spent his summer break working at two local coffee shops gaining some good experience. By the end of the summer he landed a job at Texas A&M as a multi-media specialist for the College of Architecture.
Gabe
I spent this summer working in Thompson Hall’s engineering labs at TAMU; this granted me some time to work on an assortment of skateboarding-oriented projects. One of these projects was painting and clear-coating the TAMU Skaters’ ramps, which made for quite the learning experience in terms of paint/coating selection, stencil design, and painting larger objects as a whole. Joey, just as he did during the ramps’ construction last summer, provided me with his driveway to paint, plus dinner on the occasion (thanks a bunch, by the way).
My other overarching project was designing and testing FDM/FFF 3D-printed skateboard parts. This included pivot cups made from TPU, deck rails made from PETG, a riser-turned-jig to aid with redrilling my wheelbase, and modernized lappers (the adapters made from PLA, the detachable skids from PETG). For the rails and lappers, they are structurally sound yet their wear resistance would be vastly improved with Nylon and ABS filaments. Until I buy a more capable printer, it’s been a real trip making functional parts out of the cheaper, more readily available filaments!
joey
joey was up to a lot this summer, he taught two courses, worked on lab projects and took on a number of truly random personal projects. Here are a couple things he did:
joey started a soundcloud account to document his synth journey https://on.soundcloud.com/VwjMfrzDxmck1VrUlJ
He also has been posting on Youtube
Dungeons & Dragons
Not knowing a lot about D&D but wanting to learn so he can play with his son, joey bought all the D&D books this summer so they could get a kids campaign group going and so far it is slowly taking off. He says he has a lot to learn and has begun reflecting on how D&D has influenced nerd and geek culture in general.
Automotive Research
As a participatory ethnographer, joey’s automotive research continues with automotive journeys through helping Johnny find a Mazda Miata. He also obtained a 2009 Cadillac CTS 3.6 through a random deal and spent the summer working on it, doing repairs he had never tackled before, such as motor mounts on a rear wheel drive car. He also attended and put on some cruises with friends which were a good time and bringing him back to the community for which is the foundation of his research. So stay tuned for more!
