FIELDWORK

May you live in interesting times. 


A fascinating proverb and the title of the Venice Biennale I attended in 2019, my last cultural gambit shortly before the world paused (COVID hit). It's often wrongly attributed in popular culture to ancient Chinese wisdom, which feels fittingly apt in both calling to my heritage and ironic - as it likely actually originated in the late 19th or early 20th century from British political figures.

Since my art school days, I've always been relentlessly drawn to the space where art meets the boundary of the strange - the speculative, the ecologies, the emerging technologies. And what's emerging now in these very strange times is both the ground itself shaking under our feet, the air shimmering in 4D space - and something new altogether. 

I don't know what it is, or where we're going. But I find myself back at the screen with the same compulsion I had at twelve, making glowing neon HTML sites with glittering banner animations. A new digital era. I feel caught between two threads - the terror of a sci-fi dystopia descending on us like a herd of electric sheep - and a pressing desire to press on, forward. Regardless.

What awaits us in this brave new world? What will CG, design, or art direction look like when machines uncannily copy our work and sap us of our creative energy? A prescient substack essay by Lyle W. Fass I read recently called The Only Freedom My Mother Gave Me has stuck with me:

"The world decides almost everything for you. [...] Inside that machine, taste is the only territory that actually belongs to you. No one can make you enjoy a movie. No one can force you to love a wine. They can shame you, lecture you, call you uncultured or contrarian or basic. They can push you to pretend. But that tiny inner flicker of “yes” or “no” is yours. That’s sovereignty. It explains almost everything about how I move through the world.

If you can’t choose your health, your job, your future, you can still choose what you love. [...] Taste is the entry-level version of political clarity. It’s practice for not letting someone else colonize your inner life. [...] “I like this. I don’t like that.” The rest of my life has just been elaborating on those two sentences."

So here is a call to myself: to put my humanity first as I choose what I love - creating worlds, stories, exploring what's possible.

I'm not an 'AI-first' person. What interests me now and has always interested me is to explore (and break) new tools and technology. Is AI 'just a tool'? Can a machine be a 'collaborative partner'? Does meaning and feeling live in people and things, or the relationships between them? The liminal vectorial pockets, full of fluff and fuzzy semantic edges.

The things you'll see here on this page are a jumble of curious objects: fully fledged research projects, AD thinking/references, AI tool workflows, explorative r&d. None of them are finished conclusions (and, in fact, are more likely to have led into each other, like a rhizomatic warren of potato roots).

Below is what that looks like in practice. Ongoing, unfinished, raw and distilled fieldwork. So welcome - to my digital garden. I'll keep planting things as ideas grow. I'm building alongside the tools that are reshaping how creative work gets made, and figuring out what that means for the kind of work I want to direct. To ground these new ways of working in human feeling, desire and curiosity.