New Year, new internet

My creative output stalled as I changed jobs. I thought that the lack of commute and the change of scenery would inspire more creative output. I underestimated the learning curve at my new job and quickly filled my former commuting time with cooking and socializing. And to be fair, these are things I was sorely missing.

With the holidays I found time to breathe and work on something creative again. So I painted a bit. And then I turned that painting into the first post on a new website.

I had been pointing my domain at my Micro.blog account - shunning Squarespace and trying to keep things simple and light. Just writing, linking, sharing a photo. Keeping it simple.

A good sort of argument

A few weeks ago I was in Portland for work and caught up with some friends. One is an artist and we had a goad argument about art and intentionality and process and what justifies a work of art. It was a good argument - not a fight - a discussion, an argument, a debate. I came away from it with fresh perspective. I realized I am more fulfilled by art when I at is a process of discovery and not a result of a prescriptive process. My life is full of schedules, plans, best-practices, algorithms, and point systems. It’s very nice just to mash things around until something happens. I think this is what appeals to me about Abstract Expressionism and other procedural art. While I don’t make that kind of art I do make things that way.

Under-thinking things

I have a habit of restarting creative things at the new year. I don’t think it’s symbolic. I think it’s because I have time off. This year is no different. I made a fresh new website with some net-art.

This piece started with a painting.

This painting started with an email. I subscribe to email newsletters from fashion brands I like. Mostly for the pictures. (Though my whole wardrobe is Uniqlo these days). I was taking an image from an email and using it as drawing practice. And I kept doing that. I realized that I was looking at these image and the same way you might take. A picture of the landscape. Advertising is a part of our lived world. It’s part of our landscape. So I paint it.

On the website, it’s just the image, repeated, filtered, and masked. Again, under-thinking things. The repetition reminds me of how often I see the same images in different emails. Once the images came together I realized I wanted it to be responsive to the screen size. So on small vertical screens, like your phone, the composition is rearranged to fit. As you tilt your phone, some parts sway aback and forth a bit. They’re not glued down. And finally when you touch or click the image, parts will “erase” back to the blue background. The state of erasure is stored in your browser until you destroy your browser history.

I coded this piece to work on modern mobile and desktop browsers, excluding Microsoft Edge (it’s not really modern). If you decide to look at this work on an old Windows computer or an old Android phone, it will probably fail hilariously. If it does, send me a screen shot!