10/17/2025 – On recording memories
This morning I started My Struggle, Book 3 by Knausgaard (I
can't stop reading his work!) and the first few pages have
been on his reflections of memories captured in old
photographs when he was a baby. How strange everything in
them seemed now that they're gone. This got me thinking of
how a month ago, my mom sent me some recently digitized
videos of my older sister's 1st birthday party. As a family,
there exist almost no videos before I was about 14 or 15
years old. It was such a visceral experience to not only see
my parents as young kids in their mid 20's, and to now
myself be older than they were in those videos, but also to
see familiar faces move around my childhood yard in an era
before cellphones when you'd just set up a camcorder on a
tripod for 2 hours to capture the entire event. The 90's
clothes, the way everyone spoke, the hair. I was struck
seeing someone I know playing as a child, knowing they'd go
on to struggle with addiction and be in and out of jail. Or
another familiar face having conversations with aunts and
uncles now knowing the last years of their life were spent
completely degraded in a care center from years of
alcoholism. Another face down on one knee so engaged in
conversation and laughter, knowing they'd die when I was
just a kid from cancer. None of those people had any idea
what would happen to them in 10, 20, 30 years, nor were they
concerned. They showed up to my baby-older sister's
birthday, and were only concerned about what everyone was
thinking about them in the present moment, catching up on
the mundane goings on of everyday life.
I've been thinking about our obsession with recording the
past, and how sometimes I wonder if it can be harmful to
dwell on what was, when it only continues on in videos and
photographs. Those moments are unable to be captured or
relived, no matter how much we yearn for it. Sometimes we
might look back and feel upset at how we used to be, even
years ago, when all that's left are the impressions made on
us, on the pixels of a screen. Are humans meant to remember
the past so vividly? Of course the benefit of remembering is
understanding. Knowing how things became the way they now
are so we know what to continue, what to leave behind, what
to repeat, and what to never do again. It's strange to think
that the past doesn't exist, nor does the future. The only
thing that exists is now, our impressions, our
understanding, and our actions. Everything is so derivative,
layers and layers of impressions. It's always a welcome
reminder that we only exist in the now, and can only ever be
who we are because of what we've experienced, for better or
for worse, and that we always have the opportunity to
understand and to act accordingly.
9/9/2025 – Reframing how we see time and
progress for a better life
This morning I watched a fabulous video from a woman talking
about the philosopher John Mbiti's ideas on the difference
of how African people view time, and how for many African
societies, the distant future as a concept is not in their
language, and does not exist. Time is something that you
wait for or create through the occurrence of events, and
time only exists as a "long past, vibrant present, and
virtually no future". Mbiti contrasted these ideas with the
Western idea of 'time as a commodity', something to be
spent, gained, and even lost or wasted. When a Westerner
sees someone sitting against a tree, they may think to
themselves, "that person's wasting their time", but in
African thought, that person might actually be waiting for
time to happen. The woman in the video ended her thoughts by
suggesting that this Western idea of 'time as a commodity'
is what drives our incessant need for progress through work
and growth, and that for Africans, the 'golden age' is in
the past as it develops through events, ceremonies, and
experiences, and joins the cycle of time.
I love learning new ideas from non-Western cultures that
challenge what I think of as reality. To clearly frame 'time
as a commodity' as a Western idea helps me to see how our
lives are experienced in capitalist societies where our days
are rigidly divided up with the goal of maximizing our
position in the great machine of society. The output of that
machine, while it has built large global societies, benefits
few over the rest. I read once that hunter gatherers in
their simplified lifestyle had more leisure than we do
today. It's one of the great paradoxes of innovation–by
attempting to improve our lives and make menial tasks
easier, we upset the balance elsewhere and leave gaps that
need to be filled through further innovation–the cycle just
continues. We build gyms to offset our inactivity caused by
the automation transportation and work. We produce vitamins
and health products to offset our bad diets caused by the
automation of food production and farming. We create apps
and social networks to offset our isolation caused through
the internet and the disintegration of third spaces and
physical interactions. With every innovation, we think life
will get easier, but instead we create more demand for
productivity, and our quotas for work increase, diminishing
our leisure and life experiences.
What if, instead, we saw time as something to be produced
through experience? What if we sought ways to improve our
lives by maximizing our health and increasing time for
leisure, to create time through more experiences with
friends and family? Time to experienced doing what we love,
time as an archive, as a legacy, as something to be proud of
and remember. What if progress was measured by these things
rather than by greed and constant growth, the idea of which
is in itself a fallacy and cannot be sustained? Prosperity
is not found in money–you can have all the money in the
world, but if your time is not experienced being with who
you love and in doing what you love, then it means nothing.
These ideas encourage me to readjust and shift my
priorities. To protect my dreams and fight for my time
feeling peaceful and being with loved ones. Real wealth and
progress is found in memories and knowledge, things that
only exist in the lived present and in the past.
But the wise only want to be last,
To live on solid ground,
To think deeply,
To be gentle and kind,
To speak with honesty,
To govern with peace and order,
To work with skill,
To act at only the best time.
– Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
8/31/2025 – Opt out, refocus
Recently, I've been noticing an increase in discussion about
the state of our consumerist society and how the quality of
every product and experience has declined while prices have
increased. How options have dissolved, and what's left is
empty and hollow. Everything requires a subscription. There
are several streaming platforms that everyone subscribes to,
but none have the movies we want to watch. Social media
bombards us with more ads than actual content from our
friends; it algorithmically prioritizes certain content
based on how long we interact with it, regardless of how
positive or negative it is. Nobody can afford to own a home,
jobs are requiring more and paying less. Rent is high, but
the quality of our spaces is low. Everything, it seems, is
minimum in, maximum out.
This phenomenon is honestly depressing and has left many of
us wondering what happened to the seemingly idealistic world
our parents were raised in. To put it in the words of a post
I saw: "everyone is paying more for fewer products with less
disposable income". I feel this, and it makes me feel angry
towards the reality we've allowed to develop, and that we
continue to put people in power who not only allow this to
happen, but profit off of it because they are in the tiny
minority of people with the money and connections to benefit
from it. But what I've found is that in order not to get
beaten, I need to stop playing. This doesn't work for
everything, of course. I can't "not play" healthcare, and I
need to work for my food and shelter. But in a day-to-day
existence, I can opt out of my main sources of entertainment
being centered around a television. I can opt out of paying
exorbitant amounts of money for books and clothes and find
my things second-hand from small shops. I can opt out of the
raised prices of Uber rides by riding my bike or taking the
bus. I can opt out of services that prey on us to subscribe
to their services and choose to spend my time in ways that
require little to no money to leave me feeling fulfilled.
I speak only for myself on this, but life can be peaceful
and fulfilling with very few commodities. Take away
something and see how you adapt your routine without it.
When Steph and I moved to NYC, our apartment had no (and
still doesn't have) dishwasher, microwave, washer, or
dryer–and now we have no TV. Contrary to what I expected, I
haven't missed any of these things, and we've completely
adapted to living without them. I'm not going to say I
wouldn't be glad to have some of these things, but I've
noticed many improvements in my life without them. My food
tastes better because I'm cooking fresher meals. I feel more
present in my space because I'm doing more housework by
hand. I spend more time deep in thought and have more time
for reading and writing because watching TV isn't as
convenient anymore. I think as a society we have optimized
ourselves into a higher quality of life–it's one of life's
great paradoxes. By optimizing work, we're expected to
produce more. By making entertainment so easy and mindless,
and by making socializing so impersonal online, we've
forgotten how to talk to and keep up with real people, how
to enjoy living a regular daily life in the real world. Opt
out, refocus. Find a way to live that's cheap and accessible
and detach you from the oligarchical corporate systems that
want nothing but to enslave us.
8/21/2025 – Traveling
Travel is a curious thing. In many ways, travel as we know
it is an extremely new experience. Before the invention of
airplanes, travel was significantly more difficult and not
accessible to the average person. It was reserved for those
with time, money, or for those whose careers required it of
them, i.e., sailors and merchants. But with the inventions
of airplanes and cars, suddenly, in the mid-20th century,
anyone could travel almost anywhere in the world. Tourism
became a massive industry, and places once sleepy became
destinations, entire economies sprouting out of the new
phenomenon. There are so many ways to travel, but this
corporatized view of it lives on just as strongly as it
always has, with travel guides, must-see photo op
destinations, and a finite list of sites to check out your
list as quickly as possible. Steph and I just returned from
10 days in Paris, the French countryside, and Amsterdam. The
latter half was spent with friends, and we didn't encounter
this travel cadence very often there, but in France, it
could be argued that we were visiting during the peak of
this high-season tourism. One caveat that I'll make here is
that Paris is, in many ways–I say this full acknowledging
that I'm making a broad generalization of a very large,
complex, and diversely complicated city–a city of monuments
built for tourism. The Seine, the palaces, the statues, the
fountains, the museums, and the cathedrals have been built
or retrofitted for the world to view when they visit Paris.
It's astonishing how many things there are that are so
incredibly famous and well-known. In August especially, this
means waiting in 1-2 hour lines, never-ending ticket
reservations, tight spaces, over-crowded, phones swinging in
your face at every turn, of people trying to capture the
moment that they were there. It's hard because Steph and I
as designers and artists have a genuine desire to visit many
of these places for their beauty and the inspiration they
give us, but it seems the vast majority of folks who travel
to these places care only for how it will make themselves be
perceived by their peers, and this quest to take the photo
and move on to the next thing was frustrating and
distracting to be around.
Regardless, we were still able to gain experiences and
create the types of memories one hopes to gain through
travel. We saw the stained glass in Saint-Chappelle and
stayed until closing time, where we were the only ones there
and had a conversation with a worker who was developing his
own personal AR tool to study the hundreds of stories
recorded in the designs of the windows. We mused on the role
of royal religious buildings, such as those that were both a
gift to god, but more so a symbol to the world of their
wealth and prestige, on their value and their importance to
art, but also on their vanity. We attended mass at Notre
Dame and smelled the incense from the thuribles and heard
the singing and organ music echo throughout the ancient
walls. We thought of how different cathedrals feel when they
see continuous use over time compared to those that became
museums long ago, and how they have more energy and spirit
inside of them. I stood in front of some of my favorite
Monet paintings that I've dreamed about seeing for years,
and was moved nearly to tears by his painting of his dying
wife. We learned about the intricacies of the French
Revolution and what they stood for as we analyzed the
paintings of Jacques-Louis David, who painted for the
emperors before and after the revolution, but was also a
strong Jacobin who voted to have the king beheaded and
painted propaganda for the cause. In all these places where
tourists challenged our peace, we remained strong and were
able to still draw inspiration, because we knew why we were
there and why it was important.
Some of our best experiences in our travels were because of
the people we met off the beaten path. In our bed and
breakfast in Béhen, our French host came to say hello as we
were sharing a bottle of wine on the front lawn, and he was
carrying a plate with his dinner. We invited him to sit with
us and had a wonderful conversation where he told us about
the property and neighboring towns and their use by the
occupying Germans in WW2. We learned about their methods and
what gave them away, of how they caused the nearby town of
Abbeville to be burned, and of how the French people still
bear scars from that time almost 100 years ago. Of how his
father, who purchased the property in the 50's, planted
trees in every crater created from the falling mortars. To
hear these stories from someone who lives where it happened
and still grapples with its effects was priceless. Another
man we met was Mr. Rosenkrans, a Dutchman staying in our
Paris hotel who was visiting his daughter nearby. He offered
to show us around his town, Leiden, if we ever came. As luck
would have it, we did go there not even a week later, so we
took him up on his offer. Peter, an 80-year-old retired
professor of internal medicine, invited us into his
beautiful home from the 1600s for tea and then walked us
around the town to show us its most important landmarks. I
had never heard of this town, but it was unbelievably
beautiful and historic, with a reputation for being a city
of scientists, artists, and scholars. In this town,
Rembrandt was born, the Pilgrims of the Mayflower set off
for America, 16 Nobel prize winners made advancements in
science, and the tulip was cultivated before being
introduced to Western Europe. We learned so much from Peter,
and he was sure to show us his first home and the home of
his now passed wife when they first met half a century ago.
I feel it is our duty to travel in a way that expands our
understanding of the world. To experience a new language,
culture, and history, and to talk with the people who live
there is a sacred experience, one that not many throughout
time have had the luxury of experiencing. To go and treat a
city like a theme park is not only disrespectful to the
residents who live there, but it is a missed opportunity to
change your mind, mold it into a new, more refined shape.
Speaking with people and forming relationships in the
regions you visit reminds us all that we are humans with
dreams and desires, experiences and histories; we can see
ourselves in each other, and in these bonds we can find
peace. Everywhere we've been in the world, I've held on
tightest to the smallest and quietest places.
8/4/2025 – On the shortness and longness of
life
Yesterday my mom sent me an email with twenty video links on
Google Drive. The videos had names like "1st Birthday
Party.mp4", "Relaxing.mp4", "Nap Time.mp4", "Jake and
Friends.mp4", "Jake Messing Around.mp4", "Jake Lip
Syncing.mp4". For decades we've had video tapes recorded on
a handheld camcorder sitting on a designated shelf in my
sister's old bedroom closet. Recently, finally, my mom sent
them to be digitized. I knew some of them were from when my
sister was a baby, or from my parent's wedding, but I
haven't had many opportunities to sit down and watch them.
So last night when Steph was out at a party and I was home
alone, I sat down and watched them. I don't have a lot of
videos from when I was a kid, there are some YouTube videos
still up of me and my friend Kyle in 2007 solving Rubik's
cubes set to double-speed so they look super fast, but that
was about it for a long time. Only recently I thought to
download them off the internet and slow them back down in a
video editor to hear our voices as they were for the first
time in almost 20 years.
Watching these new videos of me and my friends playing
together in 2006, silly dumb 10 year-old boys staging overly
violent puppet shows with our stuffed animals, imagining
that we're going crazy, playing with my childhood dog,
hearing my friend's laugh again, I was predictably washed
away with memories and nostalgia. It's scary how dim
memories become without reminders. 19 years isn't a very
long time, and yet it's a lifetime in a lot of ways. The
world is so different now, but these videos took me back to
my parent's unfinished basement, my childhood bedroom, and
re-surfaced a million other memories of us playing Jet Set
Radio on my friends Xbox in his basement while listening to
Queen, light saber duels in the front yard, walking home
from school and sitting on the planks covering the
irrigation ditch that led out to the farm fields which have
long since become cul-de-sacs and homes.
The older videos titled "1st birthday party", "relaxing",
and "nap time" were all of my sister when she was a year old
in 1993 and my mom was only 26. The parties especially
entranced me. 36 minutes of the camcorder set up on a tripod
in the front yard trained on my whole family only 30 years
younger, my parents younger than I am now, my grandparents,
aunts and uncles, cousins, some teenagers, some babies, I
was struck with just how much everyone had lived entire
lives before I was even born. Some of those children would
go on to face unimaginable hardship. Some would become great
people. My parents were so young and sweet and excited by my
then-baby older sister. I watched the body language and
dynamics I was blind to as a child but now seemed so
obvious. Tensions, discomfort, love, care, companionship. It
was like looking into a crystal ball or a portal to another
dimension of a world that feels familiar but has been long
forgotten.
Life passes frighteningly fast, but so much life can be
lived in such a short amount of time. Some days I feel like
I'm getting old too fast, and some days like today I feel
like I'm just barely starting to live. I've meditated on
this before, I still believe in my theory that life passes
too quickly when you become too comfortable. Things slow
down for the better and life is richest when you become
uncomfortable, take risks, and push yourself outside of your
comfort zone. I'm grateful for these videos and for their
insight. They gave me fresh eyes to see my parents more than
any of my other family. I could see their love for my
sister, and by proxy for me, though I wasn't born yet. I
wonder what it will be like for the children of our younger
generations who will have every day of their entire lives
recorded somewhere. How much more will they remember, how
much more will they see? Will it be too much? Will they
appreciate it or take it for granted?
7/30/2025 – Alive internet theory
I've been thinking about the internet today and how there
still exist communities keeping it alive the way it used to
be. Over the past few years "Dead Internet Theory" has
entered the public conversation more and more, especially
with the Ą̸̻͎͕̰̲̯̝̲͉̬̳̎͗̃͜ͅI̸̹̲͉̼̳̘̙̬͖͍͖̅̿̀̅̄͗͌̎͌̇̔͝
revolution. It's the idea that because of the sheer amount
of bots creating websites, profiles, accounts, and content,
that it's become so bloated that the internet is essentially
"dead". Honestly, this might be the case for the big social
media platforms. F*ceb**k is filled with posts made by bots,
and the comment sections are filled with... you guessed it.
Bots. On Inst*gr*m you constantly receive follow and message
requests from spam bots, you find accounts with thousands of
followers but only a few dozen interactions on their posts.
Bots. P*nter*st is all AI content. These corners of the
internet could be considered dead, or at the very least,
dying. But we forget that the internet existed for decades
before Big Tech swooped in with their big box social media
platforms. For decades people learned HTML, harnassed
platforms like GeoCities (or con contemporaneity,
Neocities), and carved out their own corners of the web for
themselves and their friends. Maybe because of this the web
wasn't for everyone, but it was open to everyone, and it was
beautiful. With the migration to more accessible social
media platforms like the aforementioned FB, IG, Twitter,
etc. a lot of these spaces were abandoned, their hosting
subscriptions left to expire and to fade away into the past.
But there exist communities still who keep this part of the
internet, the true internet, with soul personality and
connection, alive. I'm not naive enough to think someone
like my mom will create her own website from scratch, those
who created the first web blogs were the "nerds" of the day.
To reintegrate into this part of the web, you have to be a
certain type of person and personality. Most folks will
likely leave the internet altogether (I've already seen this
happening). We will still have to deal with the consequences
of a dead internet, i.e. useless Google search SEO, lack of
availability (or extremely high prices) of domain names,
etc. But I think the more people learn about the communities
that still exist who are creating their own websites and
connecting with each other through them, we might be able to
bring more into the fold and resurrect that which made the
internet so amazing in the first place.
7/28/2025 – On friendship
This morning I'm looking back on past friendships and trying
to understand their nature. Friendships are, by their
nature, conditional and liquid, and yet they are imbued with
nostalgia and often a level of guilt. One of the primordial
conditions of friendship is loyalty. A relationship between
two beings is formed when the other can be relied upon, when
a level of trust is formed and when the two can work
together in understanding of each other. This is why the
first friendships formed when a child learns to play with
another, both relying on one another for entertainment–and
these friendships end just as quickly when their
underdeveloped ability to share produces conflict and the
play date ends in tears. As a teenager, friendships form in
school as the brain develops and adolescents learn to depend
on each other for belonging. Social circles form and watch
each other full of trepidation, analyzing their differences
and similarities. It is in adulthood where friendships
become perhaps the most complicated. For 8-9 hours a day,
your friends are your coworkers. The similarities and
loyalty you have for one another is built on necessity of
your work situation. You may have nothing in common, but you
rely on your interactions with one another to establish a
base of trust to overcome work challenges. Inside of
coworkers, there may form tighter bonds–you may share
similar interests, feelings, concerns, and a friendship
might extend beyond work hours. As an adult, you learn to
have different friends for different purposes. There are
those who you see at parties, those who you spend one on one
evenings lost in conversations. Those who you go to concerts
with, those who you meet occasionally for drinks, those who
you message online but never make plans with. The ranks are
always shifting and people often shift from one position to
another. In all friendships, there may come a time when a
change in circumstances means a friendship ends, or becomes
dim. When you no longer need to, or can depend on each
other, the friendship drifts to the final rank–one of
occasional check-ins, the "how have you been"s, the "what's
new in your life?"s, the "congratulations!" and "happy
birthday!"s, and eventually the "what have they been up to?"
when your connection fades to where your only link is
another mutual, now closer friend. It is in this fading that
we find guilt, maybe because the distance was one-sided, and
one of the two feels like it was their fault. But it is
important to never force a friendship and to accept their
seasonality. The most important friends are current, they're
the ones you can depend on right here right now for support,
and we should cherish them while they're here knowing that
while it may not last forever, their impact on your life
inevitably will.
7/19/2025 – On earnestness
In my opinion, earnestness is a virtue, and one that does
not come easily as it requires a level of self-sacrifice and
innocence. Sincerity and conviction for a particular thing
or idea is synonymous with care, a quality that is not
celebrated–especially in our contemporary hyper-online
culture. The opposite quality, irony, is a hallmark of the
younger generation. On the internet, everything is forced
under a microscope to be analyzed and scrutinized. To hold
onto a particular idea or action to firmly is to put
yourself in the line of fire–and those who fear earnestness
quickly find acceptance among their invisible tribe by
laughing at this display and branding it as "corny" and
"cringe worthy". I myself felt (and still often feel) the
heat of irony as I spent nearly half my life in spaces like
Twitter. I've had to consciously analyze my responses to
certain displays of earnestness and ask myself why I felt
the way I did. In every occasion, the answer had nothing to
do with what I was criticizing, but everything to do with
myself. At our core, I think we are a deeply earnest
species. We cling to meaning and exist on the pretext of
belonging in order to survive. We are social creatures and
demand acceptance. To show sincere, deep conviction for
something is vulnerable. It's exalting your ideas and
interests above the rest, taking a risk and trying something
new, making known something that likely incubated in
privacy, but has become important to you. I love
earnestness, and I love those who take this risk and risk
the spotlight illuminating them. It is courageous, and it
makes me want to be passionate like them.
7/18/2025 – On symbols
This morning I was reading "If On A Winters Night A
Traveler* by Italo Calvino, and in the chapter the narrator
speaks of the symbology of an anchor as a message to
"attach, cling, delve, and end a fluctuating condition and
remain on the surface–but also to cast off, set forth
towards open sea. I love the idea of interpreting objects,
or even animals and patterns, as symbols of virtues one
wishes to keep close and top of mind. It seems to me that
the use of symbols as such was once a prevalent part of the
human condition, and you see symbols like these woven in the
fabric of everyday life for those in the past. Even up until
the late 19th and early 20th century symbols were
everywhere. I think of the Victorian Green Man that is
carved throughout architecture from that time as a "symbol
of rebirth, representing the cycle of new growth that occurs
every spring."
Before reflecting on what things are symbolic to me and how
we might reintroduce them in modernity, one has to ask why
they have gone? It's perhaps a narrow point of view, but I
see a lot of things like this stemming from the industrial
revolution and the slow commodification of all aspects of
life. With the slow dissolving of craftsmanship and the mass
production of all things in life, our basic surroundings
have become duller, flatter, simpler and cheaper to
manufacture and maintain. Along with this came the
commodification of culture and ideas which have also, in
many ways, become duller, flatter, simpler, and cheaper
manufacture and maintain. Virtue and profound inner
contemplation are all but lost unless these things are
placed upon you by a higher authority such as a political or
religious leader. But these too run their organizations more
like businesses to be optimized. To bring back wisdom once
understood over 100, 200 years ago, these things must be
acknowledged and rejected. One must shift their focus
towards things which are long form, well thought out, made
with skill, effort, contemplation, research. One must spend
time lost in thought without the influence of others
barraging them at every moment.
So, how to reintroduce symbols into my life? I think I would
like to spend some time writing about the things around me
and admiring their virtues. It would serve both as a form of
meditation and prayer, as well as an exercise to understand
what I value in life and want to incubate in myself. I would
also like to spend time reading of existing symbols from the
past–perhaps this would serve as a good starting point in
this practice. The end goal would be to work these symbols
into my daily life. To choose objects I acquire based on
their meaning, to inject them into my art. Even find ways to
include them in my clothing and everyday objects. This is
something i love when I visit museums–when something as
simple as a belt clasp or a hand mirror are decorated with
symbols which tell a story to remind its owner of something
important in every moment of every day.
7/17/2025 – 80 year anniversary of the
Trinity Test
Yesterday was the 80th anniversary of the Trinity Test, aka
the detonation of the first atomic bomb, a day that has
changed and will forever change the history of our planet.
It fore-shadowed the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the
cold-war, and the looming fear that persists to today. It
symbolized, perhaps, a great conglomeration of human nature.
Those who developed it in the name of science too blinded by
their curiosity to question its consequences. Those who paid
for it and dropped it on human beings in the name of power
and preservation, even harmony and balance. To me the air
weighed heavy yesterday thinking of the untold suffering
something seemingly so small could bring to the human race.
And to think we saw what they could do and still continued
to develop them 1000 times past their original power.
I think of the people who were there at the Trinity Test,
the scientists and military personnel who watched the first
light of the blast, who saw the mushroom cloud rise into the
sky. I think of the people in Japan who were there when the
bombs were dropped, who saw their cities burn and their
families die. I think of the people in Ukraine and Russia
today, who are living through a war that is tearing their
countries apart. I think I see today stories and images from
Gaza, children crying and starving, bloody and orphaned,
entire cities leveled without nuclear weapons. I see Jews in
New York City, regular people who go to work every day,
clinging to their Zionism saying its justified, that they
were promised that land and that the conflict was instigated
by the Palestinians. Humans have this incomprehensible
capability to destroy each other, to destroy themselves, in
conquest of individuality, dominance of their own tribe over
another.
I look at the energy used in war, the nuclear fission
reached to detonate an atomic bomb and its similarities to
the nuclear fusion which lights our sun and provides us with
life. It's such a strange juxtaposition. The first light of
the blast of the Trinity Test, the first light of the
morning. Life and death. I think back on the Thom York lyric
from I Am A Very Rude Person: "I have to destroy to create".
When we destroy ourselves, when every human on Earth is
gone, when all life has been wiped away, the Earth will
regrow and new life will take its place. The system is in
balance and when we tilt the scale too far in our own favor,
it will re-balance itself. And we will be forgotten.
7/10/2025 – Transitions in life
There's something strange in life about what ones focus
shifts towards based on the environment you're in. As a
teenager and when you're single, it's about being outwardly
interesting and posturing yourself to be desirable for
making friends and attracting lovers. Since being married,
I've noticed that when we have single friends, they're
significantly more busy with social gatherings, and they
share far more selfies on social media. It's like in that
stage, you're almost marketing yourself. I haven't been in
this stage for a very long time–I suppose I was in limbo for
several years having been newly married, but still getting
my footing. I went several years between 2016 and 2020 where
I was in a liminal space with no real focus besides survival
and escape. But once I started MDD, I transitioned into a
new stage of life, and my focus became more of discipline in
my field and in always striving to do something that was
cool and interesting to my peers so they would remember me
and think of me when we graduated. Now I'm graduated, and I
still feel like I'm in that stage as I look for work and
meet new people, but I feel myself outside of my career
slipping towards a new stage, one of seeking peace and
clarity. I had a brief moment in 2019-2020 where I was here,
but as a coping stage to deal with my faith crisis. Now,
perhaps, I am doing it for similar reasons to survive
unemployment and the anxieties surrounding it. But I feel
like I want to constantly be grounding myself, strengthening
my mind, seeking inspiration through reading and writing,
being outside fully present and unplugged from the internet.
I feel excited for one day when I am comfortable in my
career and I can fully dedicate myself to these things as I
find a lot of fulfillment in them. I do think someday I'd
like to become more of a researcher, write a book, dig for
understanding.
06/24/2025 – why/should vs how/can of
AI
As a designer and as a creative coder, the AI revolution has
been full of complicated feelings. I have felt both the
excitement and wonder of software engineers when new almost
magic-seeming capabilities have being developed in insanely
short time frames, and the horror of artists and graphic
designers who are seeing their jobs be automated and
replaced in real time. So where do I stand? Over the past
couple years after spending time in these cross-boundary
spaces of creatives and programmers, I have noticed certain
patterns emerge when it comes to thinking about
technological innovation. Very often I see software
developers spending a lot of time on "how" and whether they
"can". But in the process, I have seen an absence of asking
"why" and whether they "should". So in favor of challenging
this mindset, why AI? Why should it be developed? In the
case of many historical innovations, the answer is often the
automation of laborious tasks. For some this might be
summarizing emails, filling in repetitive data in
spreadsheets, or auto-populating text. LLM's have been a
game changer in automation and I myself use it for this very
purpose very often. However, among the most advertised uses
of AI has been image generation and now video generation
with audio. Why should this be used? What is this
automating? The most common argument is accessibility. In
most cases its just because its impressive. But aside from
the horrifying consequences of being able to create any
video with audio that you can imagine that's imperceptible
from reality (and increasingly so), to automate creativity
is to automate the jobs which are most pleasurable, and
replace the expression of human imagination with nonsensical
regurgitation of human imagination which has been stolen,
blended up, and spewed out by an algorithm. It hearkens back
to the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th century
where artists and designers began to emphasize the skill and
craftsmanship of the decorative arts in protest to the
soullessness of the industrial revolution. They understood
something that we have now seemingly forgotten. That the
whole reason art exists is because its human. By creating
art, human imagination and emotion is made communicable and
understood. Art has a soul when its made by a human. I
circle back to my complicated place in this debate as a
creative developer. Why is it so different for someone like
me to create art with code? The answer is idea and intent.
For me, programming is my medium, but the idea and execution
is totally my own. I had to learn a skill, research the
idea, and execute it with the tools available to me. AI, on
the other hand, allows the user only the idea, but automates
the approach and execution. Great ideas cannot be simplified
to a sentence prompt. They are built on technique and skill.
6/15/2025 – Natural pull to the philosophies
of Daoism
Over the past few years I have spent a lot of time sorting
through the beliefs and values I've acquired throughout my
life now that my faith in a god has been replaced with an
open curiosity of the mysteries of the universe. I once
thought I knew exactly how everything worked and had
conviction in the religion of my family and community. But
since that was completely lost and I was left like a child,
I allowed myself to be for a while without trying too hard
to understand anything. Ideas are powerful and can be
dangerous. I've been weary of allowing myself to reach any
conclusions when suggested to me by someone else. Of course
most ideas and thoughts I have are derivative, but as time
has passed, I have followed my heart and the facts of
science in determining how I feel about existence and in
deciding what I think the purpose of everything is.
In 2022 I took psilocybe cubensis for the first time. It was
unlike anything I've ever felt and was not what I expected.
In my blank slate state, I was forced to confront the
feelings of my soul and my place on the planet as a creature
on it. I felt strongly as I looked at the trees around me
and watched the dead leaves on the grass that I was part of
a huge system, one that depends on itself, every organism
working in unison to live and die and cycle through itself,
totally in balance. I felt that to live and die and become
part of the soil, for grass to grow from my flesh, to be
part of this system, was the purpose of life and is
inherently meaningful. I've taken psilocybe cubensis a few
more times, and on the most recent occasion in 2023 in the
Netherlands, I felt the closest to full understanding this
meaning in feeling. I could feel the energy vibrations of
the trees as I neared myself to them.
Since then, I've thought about energy and the nature of it.
How energy from the creation of the universe is the source
of all life and existence, that this energy originated from
somewhere. I suppose one could say its sacred, although it
just is. I've formed my beliefs around these experiences and
concepts, and recently I decided to investigate whether I'm
the first to draw these conclusions. What surprised me was
that these ideas and feelings appear to be the root of some
of the oldest philosophies in the East, namely in Daoism.
Recently learning about Yin and Yang, Wu Wei, I learned that
I on my own came to believe my own form of Daoism, or
something very similar. There's something validating to find
that people for thousands of years have been living with a
similar view on life. I resonate with the ancient Eastern
philosophies. I feel like these people had it figured out
and understood harmony and discipline and how to make their
own existences in balance with the energies of the universe.
So I will keep learning and studying, and hopefully I too
can become like the plants and the animals and the trees and
the water to be in balance with this wonderful and complex
system.
6/12/2025 – Thoughts on curating life and
the souls of objects
I'm not sure I believe people are simply individuals. It's
like the parental warning for choosing good friends: "You
are who you surround yourself with". I'd like to extend that
saying further–"you are _what_ you surround yourself with".
Like everything in life, this phenomenon is both a cycle and
a balance. An individual's mindset can quickly deteriorate
their environment and attract negative influences, which
will in turn perpetuate the deterioration and negativity in
their life. Unless interrupted, the cycle becomes a
corkscrew, spiraling down into ruin. In today's modern age,
for many, simply having the humility and self-awareness to
interrupt this at all is an arduous step. By no means am I
perfect, but I feel that I have mastered this aspect of life
and would like to consider what life looks like when you
reverse the direction of the cycle in an upward-moving
screw, one that ascends and uplifts into a happy and
fulfilling life. Once a balance has been reached and the
cycle has stabilized, refinement comes through curation. One
should never settle or grow too comfortable; life is best
lived when constant evaluation is done to assess all things
that penetrate the senses and enter the mind, and to
determine whether they are the best thing. The objects in
the home, the things that you touch day-to-day, the people
you speak with, the music you listen to, the content you
see, the things you feel, the sites you see; everything
should be analyzed closely and should be adjusted, thrown
out, removed, and replaced to better align with what's
important to you.
For me, this is why I care so much about antiques and using
old things in my home. First and foremost, things used to be
made with higher quality. Pre-industrial revolution, the
objects of the home were crafted by hand by someone with
skill. Time went into the creation of that object, from
acquiring the materials and processing them to shaping them
and crafting them into a usable item. Objects were made to
last lifetimes. Even into the early 20th century, when
machines began replacing many of these processes, durability
and longevity were still important to people, and these
objects still exist en masse today, just as useful as they
were when they were made 100 years ago, or easily repaired
to be useful again for another lifetime. Second, antiques
contain stories; they've often been used by hundreds of
people. They were created by people whose children and even
grandchildren have been born, lived, and died. These objects
contain souls, and that to me is extremely important. Third,
contemporary objects are often made with a limited life-span
in mind. In many cases, they're designed to fail so as to be
replaced, over and over. Capital gains are the priority of
manufacturers, so corners are cut, materials are weakened,
processes rushed, all to create as many objects as possible
for the lowest possible cost so the consumer purchases their
product, uses it, breaks it, and buys the same thing again.
This is exactly the problem with the industrial revolution
and late-state capitalism. It is thoughtless, harmful, and
soulless. It is a downward spiral of waste and greed. To
give old items a new life detaches me from this system, and
is more aligned with my convictions of living in harmony
with the planet and in maintaining a balance in all things.
I'm not the first person who considers the souls of objects.
The Arts and Crafts Movement was centered around this
concept. The Victoria and Albert Museum says of the Arts and
Crafts Movement, "The birth of the Arts and Crafts movement
in Britain in the late 19th century marked the beginning of
a change in the value society placed on how things were
made. This was a reaction to not only the damaging effects
of industrialization but also the relatively low status of
the decorative arts. " I was first introduced to this
ideology when visiting William Morris's summer home
Kelmscott Manor in England in 2022. I was moved as I
marveled at the artifacts in the home, at their beauty and
quality, their simple forms, and the echoing of medieval
craftsmanship in 19th/20th century decor. Then, as I read
the plaques throughout the home and learned of Morris's work
in forming the Socialist League, The Society for the
Protection of Ancient Building, and in protecting historical
sites, advocating for the revival of handcrafted objects,
and in making these things commonplace in everyone's homes,
I felt a fire lit in my heart. This visit changed my life
and shaped my political and even spiritual views. I've
written much on energy and the transfer of energy in ways
that inspire and are in harmony with other energies, and to
me, Morris understood this and fought to preserve it.
5/29/2025 – On AI
I've ranted extensively on this, but it feels like every
time I've gotten all of my thoughts and feelings out into
writing, a new advancement comes in the world of AI to make
me feel like I need to write again. It has become clear to
me now that AI will soon, in the not-to-distant future, be
capable of creating any media a human can create in a way
that's indecipherable to human work. It might even look
better. Today I saw a LinkedIn post (which is perhaps the
most delusional of all AI echo-chambers) celebrating the AI
video creation platform "Flow" developed by people from
Google. It's really good. It is turning out videos that are
both surreal and insane while maintaining their realism. The
comments on the post are all software engineers or other
professionals in the tech sector responding with flame and
clapping emojis, the wow factor has them totally bewitched.
And yet, as a designer and an artist, I'm watching from the
outside in horror knowing that not only my livelihood and
passions will be at risk, but that companies will soon
replace all human creativity with AI because it's faster,
easier, and cheaper, completely ignoring what makes these
creations special in the first place. What will happen when
the wonder at technical innovations wears off and we're
suddenly living in a world where we can no longer trust we
we see? Where the process and the skill is replaced with
algorithms? What will anything mean anymore? I feel so angry
with these developers who only care about thinking if that
can without any thought of whether they should.
5/28/2025 – On energy
After parting from Christian theology six years ago, the
world around transformed into a formless vestige of empty
meaning, it was like being born again. Suddenly I had to
listen for the first time in my entire life. I was brought
up being told that we were the center, that as a child, I
was smarter than the most learned of academics because I
knew the truth of the gospel of Christ. The world and its
mechanics, even the very idea of existence was all
explained, it all made sense. So as a twenty four year old
infant, I grappled with good and evil, cause and
consequence, yin and yang, from a completely zoomed-out
perspective. Over the years as I've listened closer than
ever before, and as I've scrutinized everything I read and
hear, I've started to mold an idea of what I feel like is
the core of how I see and understand the world. Energy is at
the core of everything. The big bang 13.8 billion years ago
expanded and its energy went into stars and planets. Those
stars subsequently allowed for life to flourish on earth.
Energy from the sun makes plants grow and those plants
become food. Animals and humans grow from that food, and
begin to influence each other. It's the butterfly effect. I
am typing this on my computer right now because of the
energy of millions, maybe billions of other people before me
at this very moment. Their energy to live and die, to
procreate and create me, to create those around me, the
people who make my clothes, who grow my food, who build the
microchips in my computer and in my phone. The people who
write the books I read, who impress upon me with their ideas
on the internet. Every idea, in a way, is derivative from
the ideas of others. We aren't brought up in a vacuum, we
are impressionable creatures–its our ability to influence
that allows for the development of communities. Communities
of two, three, ten, two hundred, ten thousand, eight
million, eight billion. This idea that we are part of an
infinite system of interconnected energy is full of purpose
and meaning. We are simultaneously so small and
insignificant and yet, how we use the energy we've been
given can have tremendous consequences. A simple idea can
grow and spread to the minds of thousands, a kind gesture or
a beautiful work of art can inspire kindness and culture.
Energy is infinite, but it's also a scale and a spectrum. A
balanced system supports itself, we hear perhaps the most
about this in ecology. In a balanced ecosystem, predators
thin the herds which prevents overgrazing which protects the
geological landscape which influences the weather as well as
the well-being of other species. We hear a lot about how our
influence as humans is endangering species, how pesticides
are endangering bees, which are vital to pollination, which
is vital to our food supply. The system needs to be
balanced, and will do so itself if necessary. As humans, we
need acknowledge and embrace this balance if we are to
survive. So often we think we are the center of the universe
and that everything was given for us to use and consume.
This ideology is at the center of many religions and at the
center of capitalism. It's harmony versus dominance. Good
and evil energies are always at odds keeping each other at
bay and keeping things in balance. When the scale tips, it
all slides off and re-balances itself. I don't think humans
will ever go away, but empires will crumble as soon as a
threshold is reached and the earth reacts to what we have
done to her.
Returning to individual energy, I want to get at why this
understanding of the world has become core to my personal
beliefs. I don't know what to call this ideology, surely I'm
not the first to think through this, but for me this belief
is why kindness, peace, harmony, and creation are so
important to me. There is no personal reward beyond my own
peace, harmony, and fulfillment, but the best way to bring
balance to this system is by creating things that inspire
and connect, which influence people to self sacrifice and to
be selfless. If I can reach the hearts of others through
sharing my own ideas and through kindness and self
sacrifice, hopefully they too will do the same and the
butterfly effect will spread its wings and change
communities, even the world.
The last thing I want to touch on is the energy of objects
and why I feel its imperative that humans be at the center
of creating art and ideas, not machines. Machines should
only be used in the creation of art as a tool to emphasize
the human, to ask questions, and to generate new ideas. For
a machine to create the final product, as is the case in AI
imagery, is wrong. When a human puts energy into learning
new skills and developing their craft, what they create has
a soul, or an aura as Walter Benjamin once said. All the
energy surrounding that work of art gives it something that
is immediately felt. AI art is an empty gimmick, trained to
only hold the visual similarities of real art, and
unfortunately, it removes opportunity for real humans to
create which in itself is a fulfilling process. By
automating pleasurable labor, we are going against the
system of harmony, exploiting that which is joyful and
putting stress and soulless labor onto the lower-class.
5/19/2025 – On ancient things
I am drawn so strongly to the ancient. I find myself filled
with wonder pouring over archives and books of medieval art,
fascinated by the craft. I listen to old music, religious
chants, piano melodies, compositions and symphonies that are
hundreds of years old. Something draws me to lands,
buildings, things built in a time completely different from
our own. Everything is derivative of these places, these
sounds. I can't help but feel an energy emanating from the
past, as if there are secrets lost to time waiting to be
uncovered and understood. I know I'm not alone in this, I
keep finding others on the internet who, like me, are
fascinating to hear the "oldest written song" played out
loud, or to taste the "oldest written recipe". It's as if
making manifest these old records, we are being transported
back in time. I always wonder that if by connecting with
those from hundreds or even thousands of years ago, we might
understand something that they understood that we have lost
sight of among the distractions of modern life.
I have been studying and researching visions as of late. I
consider myself agnostic, pessimistically perhaps; my
experiences with religion have been that of complete
dedication and disappointment. It's hard to imagine a
relationship with religion and spirituality that is separate
from that of what I learned in the Mormon church. Yet I feel
a draw to the feelings I have in connection to ancient
religion. The wonder, the mystical awe of feeling like
something supernatural just happened, that perhaps an
outside hand played a part. That said, though I crave
spiritual experiences, I am resistant to looking for excused
to claim a god had anything to do with the small medial
occurrences of every day. I don't know if these things
exist, hence my pessimistic agnosticism. Regardless, I am
fascinated by those who have had visions, especially in
antiquity. If anything, I think these occurrences reveal the
human psyche of the time and how people strove to make sense
of their surroundings. These were the people who were
bleeding out sick patients to get the "sick blood" out of
their bodies as a treatment for illness. We just understand
the mechanics of the world so much more differently now.
Visions are a thing of the past. But there is something that
still entrancing me about a person seeing vivid
hallucinations revealing the workings of the universe.
9/20/2024 – The city
Growing up in Utah, Salt Lake City was “the city”. To
everyone around me, Salt Lake was the most dangerous place
you could live. Large amounts of homelessness, crime,
poverty along state street, the Rio Grande. When we decided
to finally leave Pleasant Grove to move to Salt Lake in
2022, family looked at us with worry in their eyes and
warned us to be careful. People like my brother in-law would
talk about how he could never live in Salt Lake City, that
it was “over-crowded”. Now that I live in New York City,
these thoughts are laughable. Salt Lake City is about as
small and suburban as you can get while still living in an
urban metropolitan area. It’s funny, I never felt like I
identified with these sentiments, even though I grew up in a
small rural developing farming community along the Wasatch
Front just like all these other people. I knew there was
inherent risk and danger that comes with density, but that
even so it is uncommon, especially if you’re smart. Now that
I’m here in Brooklyn, I feel an energy that’s completely
different, towards people in particular. I feel so much more
patience and tender care for the stranger walking down the
street. I love speaking with an Italian man who immigrated
here to start the laundry mat where I wash my clothes. I
love interacting with the cashiers at the market and
bartering with the Turkish man at the antique store. People
walk down the street in front of my apartment and I hear the
father talking to his ten year old son like a grown man,
asking him how he feels about a relationship. The mother at
the train station asking her daughter if she remembers their
family friend who’s on a trip in Italy. Cheering a few
blocks away at the park, maybe it’s a protest, maybe it’s a
parade. Who are all those people crowded by the Holy Name of
Jesus Catholic Cathedral? Turns out there’s a grand annual
Irish fair. There’s always something happening in the city,
and everything that happens is supremely human. People don’t
like cities because of the density, because its too crowded,
but that density has never made me feel more human in my
life. We have more friends, we leave the house more, even
without trying to.
I’m reading My Struggle, Book 2 by Knausgaard, and he talks
of leaving Stockholm to stay with his mother in-law in the
forests of Sweden and how peaceful it makes him feel. I grew
up with that peace being something you take for granted.
People spend time in nature everyday, in 30 minutes you can
be in the mountains climbing a cliff-face, casting a fishing
line into a glacier run-off stream. I am so grateful I was
raised around that, but now spending time around humans and
feeling human, I can’t help but think I will appreciate
those moments so much more when they’re infrequent. I think
the human mind needs people. It makes you a decent person to
learn how to be around others, and when you get a break from
them, it feels like a load taken off.
7/17/2024 – Knowledge and resistance
I'm thinking about this passage from My Struggle: Book 1 by
Karl Knausgaard.
As your perspective of the world increases not only is
the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning.
Understanding the world requires you to take a certain
distance from it. Things that are too small to see with the
naked eye, such as molecules and atoms, we magnify. Things
that are too large, such as cloud formations, river deltas,
constellations, we reduce. At length we bring it within the
scope of our senses and we stabilize it with fixer. When it
has been fixed we call it knowledge.
Reading this I was moved by my own experience with this
phenomena. Unlike what Knausgård is describing with this
being a phenomena which is inflicted with age and time, I
felt this when I restructured my beliefs post-religion. As a
Mormon, the world and every experience is imbued with
meaning. I used to take every breath, every action, as a
message from God. If I was doing something that I was taught
to be wrong and something interfered, it was God stepping
in. When grandma died, God was taking her home. I thanked
God for the rain, for the sun, for wind. When I left
Mormonism and my understanding of the world crumbled, I was
forced in my early twenties to build the world back up again
from books, research and science. While I am infinitely more
grateful for things now that I truly understand how they
work (not to say i understand everything or even most
things, it's just that I have confidence that most things
can be understood), there is a certain distance I feel from
the world now that it's no longer shrouded in the
supernatural veil of God's will.
Throughout our childhood and teenage years, we strive
to attain the correct distance to objects and phenomena. We
read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Then one
day we reach the point where all the necessary distances
have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in
place. That is when time begins to pick up speed. It no
longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races
through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we
know what is happening we are forty, fifty, sixty... Meaning
requires content, content requires time, time requires
resistance. Knowledge is distance, knowledge is stasis and
the enemy of meaning.
I feel pressure now that I feel my life has been adequately
demystified to add resistance. I'm only twenty-eight years
old, but just the other day I was twenty. I'm only now
starting my career, but yesterday I was graduating high
school. I feel like if I settle down now into a routine that
I will uphold for the next twenty years that I won't know
where that time has gone until it's gone. And then what does
life mean? Whatever magic exists now that I'm agnostic will
fade away. Steph and I move to New York in a month, and the
process is deeply uncomfortable and anxiety inducing. But
for a brief period of discomfort, we will uproot our lives
and shift ourselves into a new world where we're forced to
adapt. There will be so much knowledge to obtain and I think
that resistance is necessary for our lives to progress and
to give us meaning.
4/10/2024 – Memory and its fragility
I feel imbued with memory. Not memory in a sense of
remembering something that’s been, but memory as a feeling,
as a premonition, a hierophany. A consternation envelopes my
thoughts that I have forgotten much of my life. I think this
is normal for those who have tried in some ways to forget.
Memory isn’t selective, it’s specular, it manifests itself
in relation to where you are and where you want to be. I
fear that in my pain and abnegation of my past that my
memory too has been renounced in collateral. Swaths of my
childhood, of my time in Colombia, of the first few years of
my life with Steph — it’s already faded into a semblance of
a memory. Minute instances spread so thin that they have no
substance, as if to remember this is to have it told to me
by someone other than myself. Something about memory makes
me feel so sad, so afraid. It’s so tragic, so fragile. Steph
documents obsessively and nostalgically collects every
detail of her life, and I understand why. To archive is to
remember, to remind. So little exists of who I’ve descended
from. A few knives from my dad, a fishing reel from my great
uncle, a belt buckle from my grandpa, a security badge from
my great grandpa. The rest are scans of photos, simulacra of
the originals, lost to time. Their homes are crumbling in
the desert, abandoned and lost. The oldest writings I have
in my lineage is a single line from my 3x great grandpa
Joshua Sherwood, a pathetic and desperate request for a
raise in VA pension for fighting in the western frontier
Indian Wars. He writes, "Could you give me a little raise of
pension on account of old age? I am now 76 years old and my
wife is 68. We are not able to work much and it would help
us to live… If you can help us out in this matter it will
oblige." The oldest memory in my tree of his own words, not
barely 100 years old, and it’s of one of his lowest moments,
stricken with poverty, asking for help. His request was
denied. I am filled with fear that my own memories will be
lost to time. That nobody will remind any one of what I
remember. That my great grandpa told me about being a
prisoner of war to the Germans in Austria when his plane was
shot down. That my grandma told me about her memories of her
father insisting on driving his team of mules and wagon
until he died. That my great uncle remembers my great
grandpa showing him the wolf spring trickling up out of the
rocks in the mountains and a rattlesnake that guarded it. My
memories live in me, memories of my family live in me. My
dreams, my thoughts, my worries, my passions live in me.
7/9/2024 – Thoughts on memory
I just got back from UMOCA where I've been working for the
past several weeks with Milad Mozari to develop his exhibit
as part of the "In Memory" show. As I was leaving at 3pm in
the afternoon, I spent some time looking around at the
exhibits. There is a large amount of work from Do Ho Suh of
his fabric sculptures of various objects from places where
he's lived in Berlin, Seoul, and NYC. This placard explained
how he would sculpt these objections with obsessive detail
as if the over information might contain memory. For me,
something about seeing the meticulously hand embroidered
warning text hidden in the back of the fabric sculpted light
fixture, and the names on the doorbell directory, made me
feel emotional. Such a beautiful amount of attention given
to recreating the most mundane details of a moment in time
really encapsulated memories for me. The feeling of
nostalgia towards the smallest building blocks that
construct a moment in time.
Another piece I loved was of a sculpture made of an FBI
report about Martin Luther King Jr's "communist" activities,
and the entirety of the report was redacted. The artist made
the redacted portion a mirror, raising the question of whose
memories persist, and whose memory becomes history. It's
such a poignant question that feels strongly relevant.
Seeing myself in the reflection delivered the artists
message and left me questioning how my memory might persist
and how my words might be received and controlled.
The last piece that resonated with me that i want to write
about was this artist who takes found photographs and writes
fake obituaries for the people in the photographs, often
satirical, in a way to address their own fears and
obsessions with memory lost. This unexpectedly made quite
the impact on me. I have many photos from my childhood but
almost no video. There's nothing left behind of my
great-grandpa and beyond. I come from generations of farmers
and ranchers. The land settled by my great x1 x2 and x3
grandparents is a ghost town. Only a handful of photos
exist. As I scour antique stores and find discarded
photographs, faces of those who nobody remembers, I fear of
my own memory being lost.
I'm left with so many thoughts and feelings surrounding
memory, mostly fears around my own memory, both how I
remember things and how I will be remembered. I left the
gallery looking up at the buildings taking a mental snapshot
of my surroundings. I left thinking how I will always
remember the first gallery exhibition I worked on being
about memory. I'm left thinking about how I have so much on
my mind and how I need to write it down to remember it all.
How I want to write a book so I will always have my memory
preserved, so people remember me and what I remembered. I'm
left thinking about the videos of civil war veterans talking
about their grandparents memories of their grandparents. How
memory is preserved through storytelling. When I read
Faulkner, I am absorbing his memories of the post-civil war
American South. It reminds me of my own grandparents, the
way they talk as rural Utahns. There is so much to remember,
to remind, to record. I want to explore these thoughts more,
maybe with my own art on memory.
6/14/2024 – Balancing my love for generative
design and impressionist art and music
I hardly know how to title this let alone write about it,
but I have this contradiction inside me creatively where I
make art and designs using code and have an innate interest
in the technical, and yet I find that the art I am more
consistently drawn back to and more uplifted by are works
that are as far from coded algorithms as one could get.
Piano from romantics and impressionists like Chopin,
Debussy, Schubert, etc. and paintings from impressionists
and post-impressionists like Monet, Van Gogh, etc. Maybe
this is a normal thing for artists, to settle into a balance
with their creative interests. Recently I performed concert
visuals at the Salt Lake City Masonic Temple and the opening
act was an intense, brutal post-metal band called Black
Shape, and one of the band members I immediately recognized
as Scott Shepard from the sweet long-time Provo folk guitar
and cello duo, Book on Tapeworm. His music from that project
has always been a symbol of storybook fantastical whimsy –
so seeing him blast us away with post-metal distorted
guitars was surprising to me. Maybe that's what we need as
creatives, the courage and flexibility to express ourselves
however we feel drawn to. I love opportunities to mix my
interests when they arise. Today a friend of mine shared
work and thoughts on the internet as a "garden" and how he
explored arranging snippets from his browsing as "flower
arrangements". I've discovered similar concepts from old-web
enthusiasts called "digital gardens", and sometimes
"screenshot gardens". This resonates with me and my
interests in generative art and web design, and the natural
world, of gardens flowers, and the beauty of the Earth. I
think a lot of what humans find beautiful is that which is
natural and reminds us instinctively, maybe even
programmatically in our DNA, of what is safe and a
sanctuary. The romantics felt this when they painted scenes
of serenity. So for me, treating a webpage and the framework
of hypertext it was built on as a garden and allowing its
forms and limitations grow and dictate the flow of its
navigation is inspiring to me. Bringing together these
seemingly conflicting ideas into a connection unexpectedly
leads to new avenues of thinking, allowing new things to
grow.
3/11/2024 – Thoughts on the web – where it's
been, where it is, where it's going, and where I could be
I have been deep in thought about the internet lately.
Undoubtedly, it is the most important development of our
time, and has completely changed the fabric of our world.
Some might say that it has made life easier, and in some
ways I believe that to be true. But as we have streamlined
our lives, we have also made them busier, more demanding,
less quiet, more rapid. In the early days of the web, it was
an esoteric realm for those that had the will and the desire
to decode it. Websites like GeoCities allowed users to carve
out their own spaces and form their own communities around
them. Chat rooms and forums were town halls, plazas,
community centers. The world wide web seemed limitless,
anyone could do or learn anything.
Today, the web is a different place. Because of big tech
companies cornering interaction through social media sites,
it has mutated into a tool for essentially brainwashing the
general public to engage, click, scroll, scroll, scroll,
until inevitably they a. get irritated enough by the ads to
PAY the company to hide them, b. see the same ads frequently
enough that they BUY the product, or c. never heed the ads
but, no matter, their data down to the most minute lingering
on a web element gets analyzed and archived next to that
users name and is used to construct a data-clone of that
person which is then sold off to data brokers and used to
get them to buy their products elsewhere. On top of this
every-thing-is-for-sale capitalistic hellscape, algorithms
perfectly curate feeds for interaction and outrage. If it
gets the user to engage, the algorithm hones in and
intensifies. The effects on us are severe – death of
subcultures as we know them, a young population incapable of
face-to-face interaction, an older population incapable of
distinguishing truth from reality.
Now with AI progressing faster than any other technology in
our lifetimes, all of these challenges will be exaggerated
to the nth degree. The internet was the most important
development of our time, and in only a few decades it is
being challenged and threatened to destruction. "[Dead
internet
theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory)
that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot
activity and automatically generated content that is
manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic
human activity." Every day this conspiracy is proven to be
reality. Google images is dying with search results turning
up AI generated images. Bots on social media platforms bait
users into clicking their links sporting pornographic
profile pictures generated by AI. Foolish silicon valley
developers are building so-called "growth tools" to generate
comments on LinkedIn using AI to farm engagement. With so
little human touch left in the internet, how will we
survive? What will happen to our beloved world wide web?
I dream of the ways of the old web. Recently I discovered a
website built in 2023 by a biologist through NeoCities, a
GeoCities offshoot designed to bring the old web back from
the dead. As I filtered through their pages – one dedicated
to bugs, one a scientific chart of every plant they've ever
eaten, one a gallery of sticky note drawings made for their
boyfriend, one a contact page with a guestbook where any
visitor could leave a note – I became strangely emotional
and hopeful of what we could reclaim. I dream that as more
people become disgusted with the dead internet that a
movement might take place where we carve out our own spaces
and make the web ours again. I dream of a web revolution (a
webolution? lol).
8/20/2023 – Thoughts while reading News from
Nowhere by William Morris
We as a species advanced how we did because of our abilities
to form communities, collaborate, work together, & maintain
large scale communal relationships. This communal nature has
been dulled in modern society through capitalism &
individualism & has been the impetus for a lot of the
inequality in our society. If we were to change our culture
& ideologies to be more communal like our ancestors, perhaps
we could eliminate it.Imagine a world where the hard work is
automated as much as possible & the remaining work is
divided up equitably among the able so that it only needs to
be done for a few hours a day. The remaining more
pleasurable work could be done by all. We need a balance of
work for the body & work for the mind.
We have machines that manufacture thousands of articles of
clothing. We are then meant to buy these & wear them to
express our personal feelings. Thousands of people wear the
same clothing & we try to afford more expensive clothing
than others to create a sense of luxury & glamour which we
can then leverage to make ourselves enviable. However, if we
decided to focus our machines to benefit society instead of
benefiting the manufacturers, things might be different.
Items such as furniture, art, clothing, etc. should not be
mass produced -- at least not on a global scale. These
things should be kept local & should retain a hand-crafted
element to them. That's part of my issue with AI, that it is
being used to automate art & culture, an aspect of our lives
that should remain untouched by automation.
8/17/2023 – Thoughts while reading Design as
Art by Bruno Munari
Bruno writes this book to argue that today's designer is
yesterdays artists — that artists have been in large part
replaced & made irrelevant, & that designers are artists
using their skills & creativity to be planners.
I struggle with this sentiment because to me, the difference
is more in that design is art which is marketed. It feels
like, while a chunk of what makes good design *good* lies in
how well it solves the problem at hand, that design relies
more on marketing — whether or not it makes money. The
capitalistic marketing side of being a designer is
increasingly hard for me to reckon with. If a design does
well, it can be mass produced & populate the world until it
becomes “out of style” in a few years & ends up in a
landfill. Designers love to think of themselves as artists,
but at the end of the day, we’re often sacrificing our
vision to appease the client, who often doesn’t care or have
the same aesthetic eye as you, & we’re ultimately forced to
create work that feels disembodied & without a soul.
The reality for me is that at heart I’m an artist, but our
world no longer values artists as much as designers. If I am
to survive in this day & age, design is the closest way I
can make a career while still holding onto the artist in me.
But it will always be under the umbrella of capitalism. How
can I read about publicity preying on people’s sense of
powerlessness & dissatisfaction with life to offer them
empty “solutions” that can help provide a false sense of
glamour in their monotonous lives, then work for those very
predatory companies helping create those very publications
being used to trick them?
Perhaps the answer lies in the type of design I settle into
as my career. What I do & who I work for. Will I make
educational exhibits & art installations for a museum? Or
will I make ads & branding for a a financial firm?
8/14/2023 – From John Berger's "Ways of
Seeing"
It is important here not to confuse publicity with the
pleasure or benefits to be enjoyed from the things it
advertises. Publicity is effective precisely because it
feeds upon the real. Clothes, food, cars, cosmetics, baths,
sunshine are real things to be enjoyed in themselves.
Publicity begins by working on a natural appetite for
pleasure. But it cannot offer the real object of pleasure
and there is no convincing substitute for a pleasure in that
pleasure's own terms. The more convincingly publicity
conveys the pleasure of bathing in a warm, distant sea, the
more the spectator-buyer will become aware that he is
hundreds of miles away from that sea and the more remote the
chance of bathing in it will seem to him. This is why
publicity can never really afford to be about the product or
opportunity it is proposing to the buyer who is not yet
enjoying it.
Publicity is never a celebration of a
pleasure-in-itself. Publicity is always about the
future buyer. It offers him an image of himself made
glamorous by the product or opportunity it is trying
to sell. The image then makes him envious of himself
as he might be. Yet what makes this
self-which-he-might-be enviable? The envy of other.
Publicity is about social relations, not objects.
Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness:
happiness as judged from the outside by others. The
happiness of being envied is glamour.
Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It
depends precisely upon not sharing your experience
with those who envy you. You are observed with
interest but you do not observe with interest - if
you do, you will become less enviable. In this
respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more
impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for
themselves and for others) of their power. The power
of the glamorous resides in their supposed
happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his
supposed authority. It is this which explains the
absent, unfocused look of so many glamour images.
The look out over the looks of envy which sustain
them.
The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she
will become if she buys the product. She is meant to
imagine herself transformed by the product into an
object of envy for others, an envy which will then
justify her loving herself. One could put this
another way: the publicity image steals her love of
herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the
price of the product.
This excerpt is talking about the role of envy in
advertising, but it is making me think about the role of
envy in myself, & how I make decisions for want of being
envied. I think the art & produce, the way I dress, & even
the way I decorate my home are partially affected by wanting
to be envied. To be envied is to be desired, which of course
is something I want.
I think envy is, in a certain sense, a necessary feeling to
possess -- to be envied is to be in demand, & especially
when operating in a career where reputation leads to work &
especially work that is desirable, envy is a mechanism for
success; for obtaining & fulfilling my goals.
How then can we avoid envy that, like John Berger writes
about, is "impersonal", "absent", & "unfocused"? Is there a
balance between being envied & respected but also being
humble & grounded? Perhaps envy is the wrong approach? Is it
rooted too much in narcissism & egocentricity? Is there a
way to be desired & respected while also not caring about
what others think?