Art Cal

Built by Hannah Levinson • more at hrlevinson.com

A personal calendar for making and seeing art in New York.

Live: https://nyc-art-cal.vercel.app

Subscribe from Google Calendar or Apple Calendar:

• All events → /feed.ics
• Just shows to attend → /feed-attend.ics
• Just classes and workshops → /feed-practice.ics

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Why I built it

I wanted a personalized instrument for moving through the artworld and my own art practice in New York.

What it is

• A weekly calendar of events across media and venues including theatre, dance, film, music, workshops, readings, and more.
• Two modes: Make (classes and workshops) and Witness (shows and screenings).
• A picks / shortlist system with passphrase-based cross-device sync: star on your phone, see it on your laptop.
• A self-updating ICS feed.

What it does

• Groups events by week, one week at a time by default. auto-focuses on the current week; arrows to move; jump-to-week dropdown.
• Every event carries structured metadata: category, mode, start / end time, category-color left border.
• Weekly summary strip: event count, cost range, making %, picked count and cost.
• Past events dim and hide by default with a "show past" toggle.
• Places to make / see things: comprehensive list of venues also provided as an ongoing resource, collapsed below the calendar.
• Cross-device picks sync via Supabase, keyed to a passphrase hash, no account, no email.
• Filterable exportable feeds that GCal auto-refreshes.

The categories

• sound: concerts, sound art, opera
• dance: dance classes and shows
• film: screenings, workshops
• tech: hardware, generative visuals, live-coding
• make: book arts, darkroom, printmaking, woodworking
• stage: performance art, theatre
• word: readings, writing groups
• circle: communal meals, meditations, social practice

What Art Cal is not

• Not a listings site. It's a curated personal map, not a scraped aggregator.
• Not a social product. The picks-sync is one person's picks shared across their own devices. No feed, other people, or sharing links.
• Not automated. New events go in by editing a JSON in a GitHub web editor. No scraping cron, no email-parsing pipeline (for now).

How it's specific to me

The tech build is generic; what's included in the calendar is a reflection of my personal practice and preferences.

Fork the code, rewrite the JSON.

How it's built

• Vite + React + TypeScript, strict mode, no CSS framework, hand-written stylesheet on CSS custom properties.
• All events in JSON: src/data/events.json, spaces.json, fall.json. I edit these directly in GitHub's web editor and commit, no admin UI, no forms.
• Supabase for picks sync. SHA-256 hash of a user-chosen passphrase is the row key. The passphrase is never sent to the server, only its hash. Nothing else is stored in the backend.
• Build-time ICS generation. A tsx script (scripts/generate-feeds.ts) runs after Vite build and emits three .ics files into dist/, served with Content-Type: text/calendar from Vercel via vercel.json.
• Stable event UIDs derived from date + slug of event name, so calendar apps update existing events instead of duplicating them on each refresh.
• Today-aware everywhere. Days-until countdowns on events, current-week highlight, past-event dimming, all keyed to today() at load.
• Deployed on Vercel with continuous deploy from main. Editing JSON on GitHub triggers a Vercel rebuild within a minute; GCal picks up feed changes on its next refresh (typically 12–24 hours).

Scanning

A scheduled GitHub Action (scripts/scan-events.ts) sweeps the venue list in scripts/scanner/venues.ts and extracts upcoming events. It tries the cheapest, most reliable source first and only falls back when it must:

1. Published iCal feeds (icsUrl on a venue): parsed directly, no LLM.
2. JSON-LD structured data on the listing page.
3. Detail-page crawl: follows event links to pages that carry JSON-LD even when the listing doesn't.
4. Platform parsers: server-rendered Squarespace event lists and WordPress "The Events Calendar" markup.
5. LLM extraction: last resort for JS-rendered venues with no structured data.

Every candidate passes gates (real future date present in source, title tokens present, valid category/mode) and a fuzzy dedupe check; dense performance runs collapse to one opening-night entry.

No-pay LLM setup

Step 5 uses whichever free API key is present, preferring the largest free tier. Set one as a GitHub Actions secret:

• GROQ_API_KEY: Groq free tier (thousands of requests/day; covers every LLM-needing venue each run). Recommended.
• CEREBRAS_API_KEY (+ optional CEREBRAS_MODEL, default llama-3.3-70b): Cerebras free tier; a strong alternative if Groq signup is down.
• GOOGLE_API_KEY: Gemini free tier (~20 requests/day; venues rotate across runs via scan-state.json).
• OPENAI_COMPAT_BASE_URL + OPENAI_COMPAT_API_KEY (+ optional OPENAI_COMPAT_MODEL): any OpenAI-compatible endpoint (OpenRouter, Together, …).

With no key set, steps 1–4 still run, so feed/JSON-LD/CMS venues keep updating for free.

Editing

Any event or venue lives in src/data/. Edit in the GitHub web editor, click Commit, Vercel rebuilds automatically and your subscribed calendar reflects the change on its next refresh cycle.

Where it lives

• App: https://nyc-art-cal.vercel.app
• Author: hrlevinson.com