Why All This?
I make a living building websites. Everything I do is restricted by commercial considerations.
Sometimes I feel the need to create things without restrictions, where the only considerations are: Do I like it? Is it interesting?
I want to deprogram myself. I want to unlearn the engrained behavior of always asking myself: Will other people like it? Is it useful? Can you make money with it?
So that’s what I’ve been doing in my spare time. Working on things just for the fun of it. And when a work is complete, it’s time to set it aside and move on to the next one. But what do you do the old pieces? That is a real problem.
Sometimes I think these things are like Zen Buddhist sand paintings which should be ritualistically destroyed after completion. But the idea of discarding them doesn’t feel quite right. They seem to have taken on a life of their own somehow.
The collage artist Ray Johnson solved this problem by mailing his work to other people. He would just put it out there. What became of it after that was no longer his concern. Recipients could keep them, destroy them, or pass them on. I think this was an elegant solution.
This website is my solution. It is a gallery where these things can live. Once I put something out there, it is no longer my concern. It is now available to anyone who stumbles across it. If anyone finds it interesting or useful, that’s great. I think this imagery of online messages in a bottle is very romantic.
