SHELLY BLAKE-PLOCK

This Would Be the Syntax

In a manner of speaking, Shelly Blake-Plock's work can be considered an extended riff on the nature of ambiguity. Or more to the point, some form of learned bilocation. Being in two places at once. Perhaps being two people at once. Perhaps more.

He is a person of indeterminate names. Indeterminate roles — on the one hand a musician of thirty-odd years in the hinterlands of American music. On the other a technologist known in select circles for theories about data architecture, semantics, and the meaning of experience.

Shelly Blake-Plock (b. 1974) — also known as Shel Plock, Shelly Blake, R. Richard Wojewodzki and by various handles (including Newroutines, Pentary Th' Mos, and several anonymous and yet prolific pseudonyms) — is a music producer, performer, half-hearted philosopher, occasional film-maker, poet, failed novelist, hoaxer, teacher, and technologist.

Music

Since 1988, he has explored and merged a great variety of musical genres and approaches — acoustic, synthetic, and hybrid — on over 20 projects and 400 songs. His output has ranged from highly idiomatic traditional forms to freely improvised music and often blends aspects of the two. He is as comfortable in an experimental electro-acoustic setting as he is playing honky tonk or Bluegrass music. His work in heavy music has been celebrated by people who likely don't realize he has a sizable recorded output of poetic acoustic music (and vice-versa). And there is much theatre, or at least acting, through it all.

Blake-Plock is known for his "subtractive" approach to studio productions as opposed to an approach that would favor traditional songwriting and compositional layering. He generally records lots of material and then subtracts from it to form a song.

Technology

During a period teaching high school in the late oughts, Blake-Plock started writing about the intersection of the experience of learning and the experience of using technology.

In 2014, he co-founded Yet Analytics to explore these ideas further in the context of software development. His team develops open source software that increases interoperability and data accessibility for orgs responsible for learning and training. They concentrate on relatively arcane matters like machine-readability and semantic data. They were awarded the Nielsen Data Visionary Award from TechCrunch Disrupt and continue to maintain and develop key pieces of the open source ecosystem for learning and training data.

He has published and presented widely, primarily on the topics of data architecture, synthetic training, data simulation, and the ethics of artificial intelligence -- particularly in the spaces of learning, training, and human performance. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and has served as an officer of the Learning Technology Standards Committee since 2018. He is past-chair of the IEEE IC Industry Consortium on Learning Engineering and has assisted in a variety of working group leadership roles in the domain of standards development.

In 2022, he was presented with the Distinguished Alumnus Award from The Johns Hopkins University. He lives in Maryland.