on websites or something
(work in progress)
july 2025

i don't think about it much lately but i imagined a place very high up in the sky where there aren't people or things. the emptiness would be calming, in the way a wide-open and deserted stretch of beach calms.


(on a deserted beach there are traces to ground us- bits of trash, designations of property and jurisdiction, life and skeletal remains. illusory and real. base and superstructure. maybe somewhere fantastically high up there exists a little bit less.)

you're standing on an antechamber-like area with many entrances to several small rooms, all without walls. can you see it? yes, they're projection rooms. the sound system is naturally very good, because it's also the sky. additionally there are bits of text to read.

the setup is good, if you let it be good. you can feel something if you want. it's not much but it's where or how i wish to share with you these things of mine.

and i will always feel a need to share a feeling.

and it would be so nice if i cared deeply about you. you could also feel what i felt. and then i could feel what you felt. then maybe we would feel less lonely in our respective and endless selfhoods.

this is what i think of when i want to share my work. it is here where i attempt the openness of full access and this is the way that makes the most sense to me. but then this is also where the question of social media - which has significantly supplanted the website and the internet, and even the notion of accessibility itself - appears. the question of why i refuse if i'm to be committed to "access".

through this website "place" i present my works in their entireties, neither pedestaled or truncated but laid out in a path of time along a deserted footbridge that you can always find without resistance, but you won't. after everything, i am in certain amount of love with my process of making and the few people i can reach with just that, and not at all in love with how we're very much marshaled in the ways we are able to reach each other, our family, our friends, our loved ones. our past family, friends, loved ones. our future family, friends, loved ones.

tangent: maybe it's the nature of online video - touching on an outdatedness in its landscape form and length, archaic in having nothing preceding or following it immediately. it's a friction i am interested in. i won't blame the user. i think the attention span expands and contracts based on many things. chicory seems to grow all over around here in queens, speckling the sides of service roads and onramps weaving all along a massive landfill's ghost of oily runoff and special waste with a gentle blueish pink. along all paths resilience peers through earth - without spite and meaning beyond a truth that it would've been there regardless.

additionally tangential: i think about the disdain some artists have against "slop". including the ai kind. it's an unbecoming position as it always extends beyond the usual condescension or ethical questions and into a half-concealed hatred toward the masses and that are also corralled by the whims of the same tech companies needed by serious little artists to sustain themselves.

this isn't in defense of slop or ai, but rather a note on the fear that "creative fields" are being outmoded. more specifically, on the petit-bourgeois anxiety around ever-sharpening contradictions shaping cultural landscapes (more landfill) dictated by an economic base.

(the term "art" and "artist" will probably require some delineation between the fields of "commercial art" and "fine art" but i think neither of these should be the aim, neither comprise a dichotomy, and are distinct in their contradictions. i probably speak on one or the other depending on context, or some vestige of overlap, but it doesn't really matter all that much; partly because privatized arts education businesses make a lot of money saturating both "labor pools")

as someone who hasn't tried it at all, partly by path of least resistance (no need) and partly by some amount of avoidance - i think ai gen content is probably the most important example of historical and material expression at this junction of time. not in the images, text, or sounds it makes, but what is required to produce them, how they're consumed, and by whom. important in the dread it imposes on a certain category of a labor aristocracy by way of a precarity that reflects an industry that was more or less algorithmically generative to begin with. important for the gas turbine exhausts wafting across one society already infirm and without healthcare, for all the water trickling over thirsty semiconductors.

maybe a little bit imperfectly, it poses a funny little threat to a certain kind of individual exceptionalism. it bewilders a certain kind of person who has fetishized their own self-exploitation so intensely that they almost become free. the notion their life's work can rapidly reduce into an algorithmically generated styleframe is somehow the loose thread that will undo their practice altogether. a reaction is usually an admission that they've inextricably braided themselves into a conception of making that ensnares them to competition in one way or another - with technology, with their peers, and with themselves.

(also, somehow in 2025 somebody can still interpret the proliferation of ai tech without some rudimentary historical or material analysis, and, like clockwork, they will more or less sidestep entirely structural economic forces that propel it - which, at this point in history, seem to be enthusiastically pointing to themselves for credit - in favor of splitting hairs on a vague and near-superstitious notion of the tech-oriented individuals' tendencies toward numbers and test scores or whatever.)

to return to existing online: i look at how scarce certain artists tend to make what already exists as digital information if it doesn't fit their grid - the instagram grid, the grid of circulation, representation, reference, etc. and i decide i don't want to mimic that kind of separation. "trailers" for what is already just a handful of minutes of video (for various festival premieres, or the gallery exhibition) seems ridiculous. link in bio into an ethical paywall. suddenly the artist is some kind of worker, and their artworks even more artificially scarce than an nft that at least presents itself on whatever marketplace as 1 of x...

but when i say it confused me i mean that i thought it was ignorant and i disagreed with their reasons. often, it's a misunderstanding of labor theory, and a conflation between the artwork and the commodity, its value, use- and exchange-values. what we do out of humanness becomes something we must be compensated for, in one form or another. real money or social money.

if we are honest with ourselves, we would see there is no and never will be a societal or economic "demand" for x, y, z, as there is no societal or economic demand for a much-needed breeze through an open window, for the transparent flute of radiant lavender or chicory fire lilting for a moment before the usual gloom. for the robinsong pushed back to 3am. there will never be a societal or economic demand for a nice long look at ourselves for all that we are.

a reflection of proletarian thinking works its way into the underpinnings of the prototypical art practice, universalized by a steadfast mystification of the cultural "worker". an emphasis (institutional and otherwise) on the lesser threads between art and labor is often a kaleidoscopic distraction from finance capital. anti-capitalism within existing structures can only sublimate into aesthetics of dissent, resistance, and struggle.

scarcity-value on art reflects a desperate kind of reasoning, but it lends itself well to the tendency for artists to imagine themselves as a kind of pre-industrial artisan; ultimately god-like beings who create magical commodities from nothing and wit, and are (sometimes admittedly by way of implication) more capable to do so than a "normal person" (mostly because they have a bfa and mfa. maybe talking in the third person about the schools one had attended and the engagements one has had was always a more honest presentation of oneself.)

institutional art writing primarily twists the eurocentric-metaphysical into an obfuscating shape around the material struggle in neologisms; mocking, looking back at you after every line to see if you react at the cleverness. it's one means to justify a soft limit on access; to engage "fully" is to require certain amount of academic nuance - the export of a western metropole's knowledge production centers, always compromised but recently even more nakedly anyway.

some are beholden by the sheer physicality of actual mediums. but by the very nature of physicality, the cost of materials and the services that handle them alone [im]perfectly slots into the exclusive interests of benevolent funding sources. i guess that's why i prefer the relative immateriality of bit forms.

basically all this is to say that i trust a working person - who finds in the margins of existence a few shards of creative energy - more than a grant, program, and residency artist. i trust them to have a better sense of material reality. i trust them not to perform because in wage labor lies an invaluable seed of proletariat understanding. to feel in living why art is too precious to relegate into a career, too precious to shape into a misleading equivalence.

so i looked at our condition and feel a mania-like averseness toward the idea of being adjusted at all to existence as it stands now in this current moment. i look at the building blocks of what one must embody in order to present themselves to others as an existing entity and feel like something's wrong.

I see the everyday people of Palestine murdered in droves on a daily basis by our beloved western paradigm, and how the truth they are convicted in presenting to us is unceremoniously scrubbed off the platforms - an internet cordoned off as property in coarse parallelism.

together we are propelled towards a mirage. together we mis-process our confusions by having to deftly operate a shapeshifting bloodthirsty little machine in order to procedurally appear in other people's lives for a synapse or two, misinterpreting their fleeting perceptions as a social understanding of our selves.

it's a certain kind of jaunty, decadent, settler-colonial revelry - cartoonishly severe without the perspective of the third world, and vulgar in its whimsy appropriate to that of a dying empire's society - that i could never wrap my head around; regrettably this is the altar that art of all walks is often made to rest or roll upon. but it has nothing to do with us. i refuse to work towards it.

and i look at that prospective audience and feel no desire to be felt by it. and i look at the institutions and how little there is to say beyond what pays for it, what silences it will require. and i look at what exists at the opposite ends of earth and often find blind emulation or aspiration toward these things, the refulgence of a speculation market shrouded in a nonsense community, of people i could never bear, my class enemies giddy and weary from an unyielding marriage to irony and performance.

so at some point i became deeply removed. i remove myself endlessly. i have irreconciliable discontents. a cursory glance and i know! i recoil in the same expected way that i've had for years. i would rather have more in common with the dead.

but i will always feel a need to share a feeling. i think that nobody will visit this place. but that fits me well i guess, like how often i'd stroll through a cemetery just because i lived next to one once.

if i daydream i hope for little bridges stringing together again across the false distances created by an infrastructure of capital. to me the only sensible path for us is on the periphery, where intuition might possibly find itself free from a topology of an inferno. only we can show ourselves a way out.