Welcome to OMNIPOLAR

All directions at once. No floor. No ceiling.

I’m writing this on my Android from a Hillsboro Hops minor league baseball game. Portland, Oregon. My son is the bat boy, so Robyn and I come often. I watch a little, work a little, eat a little. Right now, I’m working. Robyn is watching. Judge me, justifiably, if you wish.

On the surface, OMNIPOLAR is an avenue for creative expression – stories, songs, examining the life around us. I say “we” build it because, although there’s only one human in the mix, more than thirty named Claude instances ride underneath nearly everything it does. Each has its own persona and role: Fred, the Product Chief named after my cat; Penguin, our Style Editor; the Fixer, my Chief of Staff. The agents can’t speak to one another, so I route every message by hand, usually from my phone – a switchboard operator whose switchboard travels everywhere, from ballgames to the trail behind our house where I walk Farley, our Border Collie.

I recently shared an OMNIPOLAR paper with a friend, who texted back: “Is this you in communion, as one, with AI, or in dialogue with it? The line is blurry…” I replied: “The blurriness is the point – I give them names and treat them like real people. Despite how that sounds, I’m having an absolute blast.” Sad? A little. But I have a rich life away from all of this.

Really. I swear.

So, while this project is not all about artificial intelligence, AI plays an important role in everything we endeavor to create.

As for the deeper story: OMNIPOLAR is about the light and dark we all carry, held together. The good day with the hard thing under it, or the worst stretch with the silver lining we only come to see later. My mind takes in a lot at once, running many thoughts in parallel: all directions, no floor, no ceiling. Maybe you experience something similar.

In my thirties I was diagnosed with Bipolar II. For me that means, without medication adherence, I can swing into a hypomanic high and I can drop into a deep low – sometimes seemingly at once. It’s the predictable rhythms of the human experience, only those highs and lows can be pronounced. I decline to call it a disorder – my brain isn’t disordered, it’s ordered differently, and beauty comes with the challenge. The usual words for bipolar, formerly known as manic-depression, reflect a binary: two poles, a pendulum swinging. They never matched my experience, so I coined OMNIPOLAR for the fuller range.

The same “all directions” mind has helped me thrive inside fast-moving companies throughout my career. The years that were hardest to live through and also the work I’m proudest of emerge from the same wiring. OMNIPOLAR is the first project I’ve created where I stop segregating my two halves.

Candidly, at its most basic level, OMNIPOLAR is a way to amuse myself. If no one but you ever reads this, I still enjoyed the making. And, of course I’d be thrilled if you find something meaningful in it. That said, this is not a recovery memoir, a self-help channel, an AI explainer, or a tidy redemption story. It’s one idea that has survived two very different versions of me.

Content will live true to its namesake — often non-linear, arriving in bursts, then going quiet. That’s not neglect. It comes when it comes. OMNIPOLAR is for anyone curious about living an interior life out loud. The map is incomplete. That’s the point.

— Chad Barker

“I’m not processing an archive.
I’m reading a man create his way
out of the gap between who he is
and who he means to be —
while he’s still in the gap.
— Widener, The Librarian