Subscribe to sten
Receive new entries directly to your inbox.
Record of a twice-weekly cocoon
May 11th, 2023
In November 2022, computer art studio Mathcastles announced an experimental course for artists and coders. Six months later, final projects were completed, and group art crits concluded. What happened in between was transformative. Below is a personal record. Other records exist in 100s of sketches, in the projects minted immutably as NFTs, and, more mutably, in the projects germinating, in the strengthened chats and networks, in the changed texture of ideas about technology and art. For an experience which was ephemeral by design (artist and facilitator 113 in the first class: if anyone records these lessons I will end it immediately), there are a lot of records, a lot of threads woven and marks made.
Computer art self help guide
January 2nd, 2023
Some people will literally learn p5.js rather than go to therapy. Four creative coding psychology hacks they don’t want you to know about.
NFT 2022 in 4 seasons
November 18th, 2022
I made a JPG.SPACE 2022 WRAPPED gallery. For fun, to flex my favourite jpgs, and to take it seriously and write about seasons.
The labyrinth
October 23rd, 2022
The labyrinth model is done in museum theory, but it offers a couple of useful ways of thinking about the digital gallery that release it from static folio or uncanny physical derivative, and that help link some art-archive-ownership-community vectors:
Structure and fluid
March 22nd, 2022
1 Art?
#genuary
February 4th, 2022
Genuary was scorching and humid this year in Melbourne. I spent the month, happily, at the extreme far left edge of the curve of all the graphs - eg. the midwit graph, the Dunning Krueger. Hanging in the ‘you don’t even know that you know nothing’ zone is not an achievement, but it is an open space for play. In this short piece I draw some dots between creation and ownership in this open play zone, revealed in the digital art via NFT landscape.
Unfolding NUXUI
January 8th, 2022
I began describing Nuxui, but ended up writing about Nic Hamilton’s other work.
Clouds on chains
December 20th, 2021
This is what density and lightness look like in artist Case Simmons’ 2021 Clouds on Chains series:
Housing-and-ageing for architects: Beyond design
November 14th, 2021
Architects design buildings, but it is fair to talk about (and expect) their participation in shaping housing-and-ageing outside of architecture. After all, these are professionals who have never self-excluded from graphic design, branding, copywriting, sculpture, social science, economics and philosophy. Architects also engage in shaping housing-and-ageing beyond design in the same way that every person does – by talking about hopes, fears, differences, assumptions, beliefs. Further, their direct role in developing housing outcomes and narratives is an inescapable participation in reproducing the social and economic norms of society and the communally-created imaginaries of what a ‘good’ life and ‘good’ old age is.