What Gives?

In part the motivation for creating this site was to get back to building things from scratch - to have a place to put my experimentation with code, sound and writing that wasn't a wordpress blog with its abstraction of diarised posts or Facebook with all the social baggage. I imagined a place that needed less upkeep, didn't require proprietary stuff to run, didn't require me to post finished missives - allowed me to write and rewrite and add things (code, sound, visualisation, interaction, network, ai etc) at odd angles and digressions and to allow a form to emerge out of a daily practice rather than some weird notion of engagement or esteem. I imagined a place that I could mix code, sound, media and text freely and liked the idea of testing and developing my chops to see if it was possible. Maybe it'd be a site to think with, rather than perform on?

The writing/publishing part of the site was important. It was meant to be a prototype of some other kind of experimentation with non-linear collaborative writing that I've always found suggested in version control systems like git and is suggestive of the old ideas of hypertextuality in the crazy freewheeling sense that Ted Nelson imagined but never quite realised. I think I wanted something that allowed a fluid movement between modes and for form to emerge out of a practice . Mostly I hoped it would inspire some practice - writing practice, coding practice, design practice, production practice.

Part of me also just wanted to play with some tech and some code that wasn't preset, template, cms, or proprietary - that avoided all the proporietary and algorithmic shit and determined form that goes with those things. I guess there is some nostalgia here for an old new media future as well - that was kind of full of potential.

The network I was originally impassioned by and enthusiatic about felt full of technical and political potential, full of technical and design experimentation - and so I tend to think of the current network as the expression of what was lost, what it didn't become, what wasn't realised. That said I'm just not motivated to engage with the 'platforms' anymore - and not engaged by platform culture beyond the odd doom-scroll of distraction or engagement with my immediate community. So I guess this is also a place for me to put stuff that isn't there and isn't that - doesn't need to have to have an image at the top and a title and a date and so on and so forth (although it might) and so isn't linear or serial or of those things determined by an abstraction, become architecture, become infrastructure. Maybe it doesn't even demand to be read...maybe its just for me.

Instead of installing and maintaining another CMS instance I've built something from the ground up that is pure javascript with the addition of p5 and Vue deployed from gitlab, text is published in pure markdown and is distributed via git, text is available to code, and both code and text are available to ammend, fork, distributed...whatever. Sketches can become novel interfaces, interfaces can include text and data....basically things are kept as flat as possible with the hope that I can continue to play with them and twist them togther in an ongoing practice of playful experimentation. I also kind of hope they might survive because they won't need constant upgrading. I can explore and present new sketches along with my writing and maybe new sounds as well - who knows?

The first sketch that I've adapated as a clunky interface is a copy of a Flash based animation that sat on my site for 20 years. It was the first time I realised the creative potential of simple aesthetic play, repetition of a simple form and a touch of generative difference that produced a humbly emergent aesthetic quality. Back then a site that moved was novel - a site that moved with some genrative quality or interactivity even more so. At the time I was inspired by the interactive and network design of Yugo Nakamura and people like Future Farmers (Amy Defranceschini) which harnessed the power of flash and director to explore the instersection of new media design and interactivity. Oddly people like that have moved on and nothing similar really replaced them; a site that moves, that is novel in its appearance and interaction, is perhaps even rarer now than it was then - the rise of platforms kind of killed all that experimentation --- or perhaps we just got tired of it and prefered the social to the technical? Either way - here we are....hopefully this need not be anti-social....perhaps I need to play with that.

I hope this might be a place where I can re-engage and rethink what interested me over the last 20 years of being immersed in digital culture and to play with the tech and format that animates that thought. What were those qualities of the digital and the networked? How can we play with them, animate them, explore them. The nexus of creativity, computation and ecology - the place where computation provides a means of opening onto the new and why and where that opening speaks to the dynamic of an ecological becoming. I'm still interested in what this means for things like the definition of intelligence and creativity more generally, the implications for our understanding of both human and machine intelligence as integral to each other, as the torsional coalescence of thought and felt, of affect and technic, somewhere there is the very definition of our being as becoming, 'technics as the very possibility of a future' and in this there is something to say about how we are an expression of a wider dynamic the sustainability of which our future depends...of course - it'll probably end up another empty 'blog'. I live in eternal hope that tomorrow will be different.