Hello, friend! I'm Peter, a Christian ( ✝️ ) gay/queer/aroace ( 🏳️🌈 ) side B ( 🐝 ) composer ( 🎵 ) sharing anonymous gay dispatches from inside outside the closet ( 🚪 ). I can be found on Bluesky: @koechliniana.bsky.social. I ascribe to the Side A/Side B solidarity position – first and foremost I want Queer people to be alive, and second to that I want them to be free to discern their walk with Jesus in whatever direction it takes them with the help of supportive religious communities who love them regardless of theology.
In November of 2020, I gave a virtual talk to a group of friends entitled, Creativity & Constraint: Queering the Formal System where I discussed how my experience as a composer and my interest in formal systems has helped me to better understand the unique calling and vocation of side B people like myself.
After spending much more time developing some of my thoughts and starting to write connected notes in Obsidian, I decided to begin using creativityandconstraint.com as a digital garden to share my current thoughts on these various, sprawling, interconnected subjects. My goal is to make space in my life to intentionally develop these ideas. Because this garden is my personal collection of resources, some of the notes and ideas gathered here will be of a highly specialized nature (i.e. particularly focused on music). I make no apologies for this, but if you would like to know more about any of these obscure topics, feel free to ask on Twitter.
If this is your first visit, I suggest that you start with my note for the Creativity & Constraint talk mentioned above. You might also want to check out the website where I came out publicly.
Disclaimer: I am not a theologian, mathematician, or philosopher. 🙁 I study music and the humanities, and so I will primarily be engaging the models that I have developed for thinking about music and my own experience. Feel free to send corrections or pushback my way on Bluesky, but note that I will not be engaging in *Discourse™️*.
Manifesto: I hate what many people like to call "artificial intelligence." I do not call it that because it is not an intelligence and to claim that it is devalues the holy image of God across humanity. I abhor the theft, the ecological disaster, the dehumanization, the devaluing of labor, and the misinformation that corporate Large Language Models breed. These are not "generative AI," they are ==degenerative LLMs== which cannot think, reason, love, pray, grieve, or experience the world. For these reasons, nothing on this website will ever be even remotely touched by these horrendous and degrading technologies.